Read verse 1 of the
Tao Te Ching and you will find wordings such as:
‘The tao that can be
told
is not the eternal
Tao
The name that can be
named
is not the eternal
Name.’
-or-
‘The Reason that can
be reasoned is not the eternal Reason. The name that can be named is not the
eternal Name. The Unnamable is of heaven and earth the beginning. The Namable
becomes of the ten thousand things the mother.’
Such translations can
be confounding and simply wind up sounding like esoteric mumbo-jumbo. We give
names to things to simplify. The Dao is not the Dao any more than a chair is a
chair or red is red. But it would be a great deal harder if we gave nothing these 'names.' Whenever we try to intellectualize something, we usually
wind up making it more complicated than it needs to be and in some cases it
becomes a distortion of the truth. Keep all things as simple as they can be.
The Dao really is not that complicated, it’s just that we do not understand it.
It is our failure to comprehend the simple that spawns such convoluted ideas.
