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Lao Tzu & Sexual Politics

By Jack Nichols

ao Tzu, if he truly ever existed, has long been one of the three foremost figures in my personal pantheon of literary heroes. But even if he didn’t exist, the short work of wisdom that’s attributed to him, the Tao Te Ching, remains sufficient for my purposes. Set side by side with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Gibran’s The Prophet, Lao Tzu’s is one in this trio of amazing books that make, I say, for an excellent modern-style bible. The work of poet sages.

Witter Bynner, whose superior translation of the Tao Te Ching is titled The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu said that:

"Twenty five centuries before Whitman, he (Lao Tzu) knew the value of loafing and inviting one’s soul; and the American poet, whether or not consciously, has been in many ways one of the Chinese poet’s more eminent Western disciples, as Thoreau has been also..."

But Bynner points out that Whitman and Thoreau loved written words, whereas Lao Tzu felt that "written words by defining, by limiting, could have dubious effects."

Because Lao Tzu very much wanted to avoid being dogmatic, he was reluctant to set down his thoughts for fear that they might become a center appealing to external and ritualized processes "rather than an inner and natural faith," or "an outside authority rather than intuition."

Bynner writes of Lao Tzu:
"He laid down no rigid laws for behavior: men’s conduct should depend on their instinct and conscience. His last wish would have been to create other men in his own image; but he gently continued in life, by example presumably and by spoken word, suggesting to his neighbors and his emperor how natural, easy and happy a condition it is for men to be members of one another."

Lao Tzu says:
How do I know this integrity?
Because it could all begin in me.

The legend of Lao Tzu tells how he felt saddened by the political skullduggery of his time (he’d been reportedly born in 604 B.C.) and how he wandered into the desert by himself on the back of a water buffalo. When he came to the city gate, he was stopped by a guard who’d dreamed of the sage’s arrival. The guard insisted—before Lao Tzu was allowed to cross the boundary between civilization and the wilderness—that the sage leave a record of his philosophy. The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu is composed of 81 short chapters.

At the start, Lao Tzu rejects the power of wordage to define existence. "Terms may be used," he notes, "but none of them absolute." Next he thumbs his nose at the laws delivered through "revealed" religion. He says:
The sanest man
Sets up no deed,
Lays down no law,
Takes everything that happens as it comes,
As something to animate, not to appropriate,
To earn, not to own,
To accept naturally without self-importance:
If you never assume importance
You never lose it.

What should excite students of gender politics is that Lao Tzu provides a general mindset that’s anything but macho. He supplants machismo with a far more common sense awareness by citing those qualities of mind best suited to creating genuine strengths, whether in citizens or in a society.

Lao Tzu speaks from the heart of androgynous politics. In mind and body he is both male and female, here active, there passive, but never is he hampered by socially-ingrained taboos forbidding active assertion or passive receptivity.

One gets the impression while reading The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu, that the 162-year old sage must have been a good listener. Being a character who walked out of the mists of early time, or whose origins may have been entirely legendary, the inner power of which Lao Tzu was cognizant remains accessible, nevertheless, even if he, the sage perceiver, no longer does. Somehow, this circumstance seems quaintly as it should be.

Listening is considered a passive activity. Talking is considered active. That’s why many "revealed" religious traditions insist that women remain silent in houses of worship. Talking in important locales is supposedly a man’s job.

The male in macho culture has always been very much of a know-it-all. Knowing seems a prerequisite to dominating and controlling situations. But Lao Tzu warns:
A man who knows how little he knows is well,
A man who knows how much he knows is sick.
If, when you see the symptoms, you can tell,
Your cure is quick.
A sound man knows that sickness makes him sick.
And before he catches it his cure is quick.

Lao Tzu fully understood that the strengths boasted of by macho warlords were, in the long run, hollow. He laughed:
Those who would take over the earth
And shape it to their will
Never, I notice, succeed.

And he advised generals:
Let life ripen and then fall,
Force is not the way at all:
Deny the way of life and you are dead.

Lao Tzu punctures the shellac of macho egoism:
He who feels punctured
Must once have been a bubble.

The advice Lao Tzu dispenses for the realization of a truer humanity among men, it seems to me, is incontrovertible:
A man of sure fitness, without making a point of his fitness,
Stays fit;
A man of unsure fitness, assuming an appearance of fitness,
Becomes unfit.
A man of sure fitness never makes an act of it
Nor considers what it may profit him;
The man of unsure fitness makes an act of it
And considers what it may profit him.

Though Lao Tzu spoke 2,500 years ago, he still speaks to fundamentalists, whether governing from Beijing or the Vatican. The message that he hoped ‘authorities’ would take to heart?
If I keep from meddling with people, they take care of themselves,
If I keep from commanding people, they behave themselves,
If I keep from preaching at people, they improve themselves,
If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.

Local democracy lived as an ideal long before the birth of Christ. Lao Tzu hailed a state of mind in which people might revel, aspiring to live at least decent lives in a world fast becoming one region:
Can you hold the door of your tent
Wide to the firmament?
Can you, with the simple stature
of a child, breathing nature,
Become, notwithstanding,
A Man?
Can you continue befriending
With no prejudice, no ban?
Can you, mating with heaven,
Serve as the female part?
Can your learned head taken leaven
From the wisdom of your heart?
If you can bare issue and nourish its growing,
If you can guide without claim or strife,
If you can stay in the lead of men without their
knowing,
You are at the core of life.

Some think that Lao Tzu was a quietest, that he opposed action. Translator Bynner dispenses with this myth:
"His choice, however, was not, as has been widely assumed, vacant inaction or passive contemplation. It was creative quietism. Though he realized the fact that action can be emptier than inaction, he was no more than Walt Whitman a believer in abstention from deed. He knew that a man can be a doer without being an actor and by no means banned being of use when he said that: The way to do is to be."

READ JACK'S COLUMN FROM LAST WEEK

 Jack Nichols is Senior Editor at GayToday www.gaytoday.badpuppy.com. Jack Nichols is also the author of Men's Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin); Welcome to Fire Island: Visions of Cherry Grove & the Pines (St. Martin's Press); and is co-author with Lige Clarke of I Have More Fun With You Than Anybody (St. Martin's Press); and Roommates Can't Always Be Lovers: An Intimate Guide to Male/Male Relationships (St. Martin's Press)

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