When I try to understand an ethics within Taoism, I encounter at every turn the call to compassion.  The Tao Te Ching chapter 67 is the great source:

Now the Self has three treasures, to which it clings as to inseparables—the first is compassion, the second, self-restraint, the third, nowhere venturing to claim precedence.

Compassionate—therefore irresistible! […]

As regards compassion, rely on it when you would contend, and you will overcome; rely on it when you would protect, and you will succeed.  Heaven is ever ready to deliver because of the protection compassion brings. (Medhurst translation)*

In all the other Taoist literature I’ve studied compassion stands out as the primary good of human interactions.  The enlightened person is enjoined again and again to show compassion to the unenlightened person; compassion is urged among fellow students on their path to wisdom.  Sometimes compassion devolves into principles of mere conduct: kindness, gentleness, respect, and so on.  But if there is a human good that seems to survive Taoism’s relentless refusal of dualism, it is the obligation of compassion towards others.

I am not gifted with an instinct of compassion.  With an Old Testament upbringing and, now and then, an Old Testament father, my reflexes twitch towards judgment: of others, but even more harshly of myself.  I am surely drawn to the Tao in part because of this alternative ideal of the human and the universal good of compassion, though I practise it far too little.

In today’s meditation, a new angle on all these readings presented itself.  For in those moments when I felt a little closer to understanding, to glimpsing—well, to accepting—the Tao (illusory as those may be), I suddenly felt the compassion of the Tao towards me.  I am the profoundly unenlightened one, the one who walks clumsily beside an adept and fails to rise to his instructions; the one full of faulty attachments and shallow understandings who needs the gentle cultivation of some other if he is to rise at all towards wisdom. 

Is the Tao, among all its other manifestations, the very principle of an unfolding compassion embracing all things in the world?  I know it is the creative impulse behind all things, the harmony within all discord, the realm in which strife and peace and desire and detachment are one; and I know that the Tao is not a consciousness, a being—so how could I feel its compassion towards me?  And yet it felt today as if I was in contact with some power that understood and tolerated me, gently hoped to correct me.

The compassion demanded of enlightened persons must be a universal good because that good is asked of us at the highest level of our understanding and of our aspiration.  And that is also where the Tao moves and rests, expands and withdraws, eternally.  So yes, I am prepared to say now, “the Tao is compassion,” among all the other descriptors we may use of it.  Perhaps meditation is our way of receiving it most fully.

* To understand my persistent use of this well outdated translation, see “Translations of the Tao Te Ching”.

30 November, 2024.