The second chapter in “My travels with Lieh Tzu” is entitled, The Yellow Emperor.
I like the saying that goes “life is simple we just make in complicated”. Living the Tao and possessing the Way is both the ability and capacity for dealing effortlessly with external things. The goal is freedom to express life from your center. The result is that the sage, the learned person, acts not from the need to control things, but to cease to be obstructed by them. When I talk about Lieh Tzu riding on the wind, it is meant to relay an image not of actually mastering the wind, but that we are to proceed through life to be free and that we should have unimpeded movement.
Much of early Taoist teaching centered on “Inward Training” and what was called “Techniques of the Mind”. Self-cultivation and how that developed into “the right way of rule a State” fed directly into what Lao Tzu said in what was known as the Tao Te Ching. And later contributed to Confucius telling an on-going story that was known in bit and pieces that he jelled into a cohesive avenue that took everything to the next step that became the practice of living your life to its fullest. Why appreciating the history that comes before us is so important beginning with The Yellow Emperor who is said to have lived in 2697 BC.
To show how Confucius was the compiler of what had come before him, five hundred years earlier was someone named Ji Dan who was to become known as China’s First Sage who created what was to be known as the Book of Rites. He also was from Qufu. Confucius updated what Ji Dan has done five hundred years later and gets most of the credit. There is a Temple/Park dedicated to Ji Dan just a few blocks from where I lived and taught school in Qufu.
It was as though there was a common thread spanning thousands of years and Confucius was there twenty-five hundred years ago and was to gain immortality as the one given credit. Lending Confucius name to philosophy and what was to happen afterwards gave credence to his impact. To this day when someone says, “Confucius Says”, We know universally that respect is to be conveyed with underlying attributes given reflecting both benevolence and virtue. Living under this umbrella in our daily activities today means that we acknowledge our place in the world and should play our part in making the world a better place. So that we may too be known as one who has become free to ride the wind.
My travels with Lieh Tzu / Interpolations along the Way
Chapter Two – The Yellow Emperor
26. Unlocking the doorway to Heaven
Walk under water and do not drown, on simmering coals and do not burn, or on the trembling earth and do not become rattled.
The ride of your life Shaanxi Museum Xian
Keeping to one’s internal power has nothing to do with skill or daring. For whatever has features, likeness, sound or color is a thing like that described earlier in ‘That Which Does Nothing‘. How can one put himself or itself ahead of it or another? Why should it matter? As everything remains merely form or color.
Come to know and understand the essence from which everything is created as the Tao dictates. Simply finding the comfort in one’s lot and not exceeding it. Staying behind without origin to find the beginning and ending of all things. Unifying nature and tending only to your own internal energies. Maintaining virtue as you travel full circle to where all is created again.
Finding the doorway to heaven inside you that will keep you safe and secure. As with the flawlessness found in the knowing sage. Cognizant that the keys are carried only by your inner self. Knowing this, how can other things come inside to disturb you?
Ride the wind as Lao Tzu taught you. As if a drunken man thrown from a cart. Though falling it does not harm him, he remains unharmed due to the integrity of his spirit. He rides and falls without knowing it. As life and death, astonishment and fear can find no entry into him, he shows no fear or remorse.
If the drunken man can be protected though he has drunk too much plum wine, how much more is possible for the one knowing the benefits of heaven lie solely within himself. 1/22/95
Number twenty-six of one hundred fifty-eight entries.
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