Trey Smith
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.One point that Scott, Ta-Wan and I have addressed on many occasions is the finger pointing at the moon phenomena. Too often, we fixate on specific names by treating them as ends unto themselves rather than a flimsy means of suggesting a possible end.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.
~ from Verse 1 of the Tao Te Ching ~
As I've pointed out before, the word Tao merely is a form of shorthand. It allows the person utilizing it to limit the amount of verbiage. If you really think about, that is the whole purpose of nouns (pronouns too).
Imagine if I wanted to tell you about a table I saw at an antique shop. It would be a real pain in the ass if, each time I wanted to refer to the table, I had to describe it instead! It might read something like this:
My wife and I are looking for a new article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface. While browsing at a local antique store, my wife motioned for me to look at an article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface. I said to her, "That's a very sturdy looking article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface!"While that looks bad enough in print, imagine how cumbersome spoken conversations would be! I'm guessing people would try to have very short conversations devoid of much substance.
The article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface looks like it may be more than 100 years old. While I thought the article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface might be in an American colonial style, my wife thought that the article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface was from a later period.
When we asked the store clerk how much the article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface cost, we decided that we really didn't need that article of furniture supported by one or more vertical legs and having a flat horizontal surface as much as we previously thought.
Of course, in describing the table, I utilized other nouns like article, furniture, one, legs and surface. Now imagine I needed to define those words each time too as part of my descriptive narrative. It would amount to a never-ending sentence as each thing -- ooh, another noun -- would necessitate an explanation as well!
One of the inherent problems with nouns is that, while there indeed are accepted general parameters that define them, how we experience them is a very subjective thing. Utilizing the word table, as an example, I bet each of us will have a different mental picture of what a standard table looks like.
This inherent problem is magnified when we use designated words (i.e., labels) to denote complex concepts. If I write a post about an aspect of Tao, every person reading it will envision something slightly different. So, it might behoove me to explain my conception of Tao to insure that the point I am trying to get across is received.
But if I spend too many words trying to quantify the unquantifiable and to define the undefinable, I run the risk of turning Tao into the moon, not the finger pointing at it.
Wittgenstein said it, perhaps more succintly:
ReplyDelete“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”