Tao Te Now - Chapter 2

The Tao Te Now — Chapter 2

Chapter 2 follows immediately from where Chapter 1 left off, and it wastes no time.

The moment you decide what is beautiful, something else becomes ugly. The moment you decide what is good, something else becomes bad. Lao Tzu is not making a point about subjectivity. He is making a point about what judgment does — how the act of naming a standard simultaneously creates the gap between the standard and everything that does not meet it. And how that gap becomes the primary experience of the thing rather than the thing itself.

This chapter covers wu wei — probably the most misread idea in the entire tradition — and what it actually means for the action to arise from the situation rather than from the self managing toward an outcome. It covers having without possessing, acting without expecting, and succeeding without taking credit. And it addresses something listeners ask about regularly: why does Stephen Mitchell use she when referring to the sage, when the original Chinese text uses no gender at all.