Today's Daily Tao is:
Experience
Experience is a riverbed,
Its source hidden, forever flowing:
Its entrance, the root of the world,
The Way moves within it:
Draw upon it; it will not run dry.
What does it mean? Well, the riverbed contains the river, channels it as it progresses. The Way moves within the river. However, if experience is the bed that contains both the river (life?) and the Way, then …..
Right, now I'm a little annoyed. I've been doing a bit of research on the net, trying to make sense of this bullshite, and I've discovered 'Tao Te Ching Commentary'. In here, I find that the chapters I've been reading up until now are completely fracked up in their translations! Here's the chapter according to this new site:
The spirit of the valley never dies.
This is called the mysterious female.
The gateway of the mysterious female is called the root of heaven and earth.
Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there, yet use will never drain it.
As you can probably see, as well as I, the translations offer completely different possibilities!
After reading the interpretation on this new site, I'm at a complete loss how they came up with their interpetation.
I've got a lot to learn. I'm going to give up on these Daily Tao chapters. They don't make any sense to me at this stage, and it's particularly discouraging to find that different sites and people have different translations of the Tao Te Ching. Different translations change the meaning entirely. How the frack can you understand Taoism when it seems that everyone that tries to understand it, understands it differently to everyone else!
And where the frack is one single definitive source of the real Tao Te Ching? Frack me!
The End. Of chapters of Taoism in here. If you've come here via a search engine looking for stuff on Taoism, here's something meaningful for you:
Tao is everywhere, and yet it is nowhere. When you look for it, you can't find it. When you try to understand it, you understand nothing. When you stop searching, you find the Way.
Bloody hell, where'd that come from? I started with some bullshite quote I pulled out of my arse and end up with that small gem of wisdom. Or something like that.
I'm going to go meditate about it on the toilet. Back later.
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