(The entry below depicts the farm I grew up on as a dream when I was young. We left the farm when I was ten. It left a lasting impression. The story is also depicted later in a book published in China in 2006).
We all carry something else; something we hold within our heart and mind. However, we can’t reveal everything from within as our memories are sometimes too vague. Whenever I want to see my true authentic self, I think of being Dantzu and again the idea that everything flows. The word Tzu means sage in Chinese history and those who live to seek their highest self or attributes and are striving to go there. For myself, it means the interplay with the idea that all things are always changing, or cyclic as though in a never-ending circle. As I’ve referred to in the I Ching and Tao manifesting as the interplay of yin and yang.
In the past, I’ve explored various aspects of dualism, a term we rarely use but one that reflects how we live. It’s like the contrast between how we behave when we’re alone versus how we act in the presence of others. It becomes how we perceive ourselves when gazing into eternity’s mirror. I’ve often thought that the root of both anger and joy lies in how we see ourselves. Both appearing when we cannot… or don’t live up to the expectations we have for us. Philosophers throughout history, particularly in ancient Greece and China, have suggested that all opposites are both polar and interconnected, ultimately being one and the same. They believed that true change occurs when complementary opposites of any issue come together in unity.
That change cannot be forced but occurs naturally and spontaneously. We sometimes get confused over the idea of non-action or doing nothing. It means as Chuang Tzu told us “Non-action does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature is satisfied”. The key or important way of looking at it is that we are to refrain from acting contrary to nature, or as Joseph Needham tells us in Science and Civilization in China, that when we stop going against the grain of things, one is in harmony with the Tao, and our actions will be successful. Living in harmony with nature is central to the teachings of both Confucius and Taoism.
That Confucianism and Taoism represent this idea of dualism is illustrated in that Confucius is seen as being rational, masculine, active and dominating. While Taoism is seen as emphasizing all that is intuitive, feminine, mystical, and yielding. It was Lao Tzu that said, “Not knowing that one knows is best and that the sage carries on his business without action and gives his teachings without words.” The idea of giving our teachings without actions and words is an idea I am still working on.
The Taoists believed that by displaying the feminine, yielding qualities of human nature, it was easier to lead a perfectly balanced life in harmony with the Tao. This is best described as a kind of Taoist paradise as described by Chuang Tzu’s Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson, in Chapter eighteen. “That the highest happiness has no happiness and the highest praise has no praise. That the inaction of Heaven is its purity, the inaction of earth is its peace. So the two inactions combine, and all things are transformed and brought to birth. Wonderfully, mysteriously, there is no place that they come out of. Mysteriously, wonderfully, they have no sign. Each thing minds its business, and all grow up out of inaction. So, I say, Heaven and earth do nothing and there is nothing that is not done. Among men, who can get hold of this inaction?”
It is not easy to discuss the teachings of Lieh Tzu and Taoism, without the interplay of his contemporaries Chuang Tzu and Confucius trying to put in their own two cents. The four of them are so intertwined. Even Confucius played an integral and pivotal role in Taoism’s philosophical understanding over the centuries. What stands out is the importance of questioning the path you think you’re on, as Lao Tzu reminds us with the idea that “Not knowing that one knows is best.” A closed mind is like a closed door—it might block us from discovering what we truly need for the journey ahead.
My travels with Lieh Tzu / Interpolations along the Way
Chapter Four – Confucius
67. Dan Tzu
I had a dream of going back to Lamar. Back to the place of my father and grandmother.
That somehow this would bring me closer to a place to call home. A place and time where comfort in all things would be but a forgone conclusion. That I would call this special place Dan Tzu.
That I would establish a thriving farm and business with orchards of apples, peaches, pears, and plums. With pumpkins, strawberries and Christmas trees people could come to pick and choose from. That there would be gardens full of beautiful flowers with greenhouses full of trays of tomatoes, peppers, petunias, and impatiens. Herbs such as basil, thyme, rosemary, and lavender. That this would be a place of love and harmony for family and friends to come and go at their leisure. To work without knowing it is work and to know joy and sadness and taking all as it may come from one day to the next.
To be back with the nature that I came in with. An innocence that could know no pain or suffering. To fish at the pond once again. To spend time enjoying the satisfaction found on the banks of the lake behind Grandma’s again, just fishing. Just passing time.
Suddenly awake, I discover that I am just dreaming. But could the dream 
be that different than if it had all really happened? As if this place known as Dan Tzu really existed.
That everything imagined in the dream had in fact occurred. After the fact, looking back, could there really have been a difference?
Could being lost in time and place make any difference in the journey that must be made in the end? Having dreamed it hasn’t it occurred? Could time spent filling in the details have made any difference? Just as where you are now in remembering it, could it have mattered if it were only just a dream? 3/26/95
(I wrote the above while still living in Massachusetts in March 1995 before moving to Florida where I lived for twenty years until 2015 when we returned to Springfield and about fifty miles as the crow flies from the farm in Lamar…)
Number sixty-seven of one hundred fifty-eight entries.
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