Send us a text

Tao Te Ching Verse 13

translated by Chao-Hsiu Chen

Accept favour and disgrace as a threat that troubles the body like a disease.
What does it mean to accept favour and disgrace as a threat?
Everyone seeks to be favoured.
No one seeks to be disgraced.
When one receives it, it causes alarm.
When one loses it, it causes alarm.
Therefore favour and disgrace are both threatening.
What does it mean that the disease troubles one's body?
One suffers from the disease because one treasures one's body.
If one does not love one's body, one will no longer suffer from the disease.
Therefore
entrust the land under Heaven to the one who does not treasure his body,
sanction the land under Heaven to the one who does not love his body.
He who does not love even his own body will not treasure rulership, and so he will truly care for all things.

Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash

Agitation and Fear

I like how Lao Tzu introduces the contents of this verse in the first part.  In another of my favorite translations of this verse, Lao Tzu says success and failure are two spots on an unstable ladder, and hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. 

Agitation, he says, is caused by two things:  both success and failure.  

I feel excited and exhilarated when other people tell me I’m good enough, either with formal recognitions or awards, or informally, through telling me, ’good job,’ or ‘attaboy.’  Conversely, when I perceive that I’m not achieving a certain thing, I feel as if I’ve failed.  I haven’t measured up, I’m falling short of the mark, things like that.  And those too cause a stirring of my emotions.  So in both cases, each one of these things produces different sensations of agitation.

Still in the first part of the verse, Lao Tzu talks about fear in terms of the feeling we get when our bodies are threatened.  So yeah, fear of death.  We can push into this a little more and just examine this basic feeling of fear.  Fear of not being...enough...of anything.  And when we flip that coin, we see hope on the other side - hope of being alive, hope of life, hope of being...enough...for anything.  Just like the success and failure thing causing agitation, LT says that the body, or the self, is what causes us to be susceptible to fear and hope.  

Of course, there’s a larger implication at play, which we find out at the end of the verse, so this isn’t just a study in agitation and fear.  The end of this verse is like a gift that’s just sitting there, waiting to be opened once I can digest the fundamental aspects of these two things.  

Classic Lao-Tzu - always stretching my conceptions of the Tao.  However, it does seem important enough to examine these two things in the verse, so that’s what the next two parts of this section talk about.