Daodejing, Verse 16

Daodejing - Other Voices

Sweet Sixteen
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind rest at peace.

This pretty much chimes with what I have recently been reading about time management – the secret is to get everything out of your head and onto a trusted source. Well, I guess that sources don’t come much more trusted than The Source to a taoist. Perhaps my next move should be the Tao of Time Management?

But for now we’re stuck with the tao of teaching.

And in particular, we’re stuck with a verse of the TTC that seems to be about death and dying. In short, the taoist wisdom of Verse 16 offers us this advice, “Look, you’re gonna die, OK? Deal with it.” Put next to Psalm 23, Verse 16 pretty much blows chunks. One is put in mind of the soon-to-be-deceased asking fearfully in the hospital room, “What’s gonna happen after I die?” Now, depending on whether the Catholic chaplain can move his chubby little legs faster than the taoist monk, he either hears, “You will be led through pastures green, by clear waters; you will live eternity in goodness and fear will be banished from your mind forever,” OR “Everything is pretty much going to stay the same. But without you.”

But this is the tao of teaching!!! What does Verse 16 have to offer us? Let’s try it out:

“Master Lao, before I go and teach my very first class, what have you to say that can help me to calm down?”

“Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind rest at peace. “

“You are joking, aren’t you? I need to go in with a plan, a syllabus, a scheme of work, a record of work, a class register, a CD, a CD player, board pens, a board wipe, a class file, a text book, a teacher’s book, a workbook, some photocopies…”

Yes. Taoism uses the phrase “the ten thousand things” to talk about the entirety of things in this world. It really is possible that this phrase was coined ≠by Lao after he watched an EFL teacher scuttling into an imperial classroom with approximately this number of pedagogical accoutrements tucked in and around his person.

Lao tells us that we should empty ourselves of everything and “return to the source”. What is the source? It is “the way of nature”, which according to the Old Boy, is unchanging. It got the job of being the way of nature when it demonstrated its capacity for vastness, constancy and by being way Way beyond the ability of humans to comprehend. Actually, it was the only applicant for the job.

The Tao will never be tamed, labelled or fixed. Once you’ve got your head around that, why, then everything else just falls into place! And Tao is nature and is part of nature and is natural and is everything that is natural. And what could be more natural for human beings than language? So what does it mean to say that if we empty ourselves of everything, we will be able to return to the source? I’m going to suggest that this can be interpreted as saying that if we want to be at peace when we are learning/teaching a language, this is best done by leaving the crap at the door and going in ready to errr…use the language...
~ from Tao Te(a)Ching, original post date: 1/3/10 ~

This post is part of a series. For an introduction, go here.