Chapter 5 Chapter 5 The world is inhumane

The sky and the earth don't talk about benevolence. They treat everything as a mustard-a grassy sacrificial dog, and let it live and die.The great people—those who have morality and deeds don’t talk about benevolence. They treat the common people like nothing—a grassy dog, and let them live and die. Between heaven and earth, isn’t it like a 橐龠 (sound camel moon)—a sheepskin bellows bag?Empty but not exhausted, the more you manipulate it, the more wind will come out of it. If you talk too much, it's easy to be incapable of reasoning. It's better to be conservative and maintain an appropriate degree.

I don't know how Lao Tzu wrote the first two sentences of Chapter Five.Every time I read this, I am shocked and my heart thumps.How cruel I feel!Heaven and earth are cruel!Saints are not benevolent!This is more like Dou E's drama of crying out for injustice: But why can't you tell if the sky and the earth are turbid? But why is the world turned upside down in black and white? Ask the heavens why they indulge the evil and bully the good, Ask why the earth has been so wronged, Land, land, good or bad, what are you? Oh my god, you are in vain, you are a god! Inhumanity is a heavy derogatory term, isn't it?If we talk about someone who is "benevolent for the rich", isn't it like criticizing the bully landlord Huang Shiren?

However, what Lao Tzu said is a truth, at least a part of the truth.It is right that the world is not benevolent, at least it has a certain amount of truth.This is a fact that many people dare not face up to for many years.Lao Tzu understands best that the other side of benevolence is disgust and disgust. Without benevolence, there will be no disgust, no disgust, no bias, and no emotion.For heaven and earth, don't be too sentimental.Just like Wang Xiaobo's famous saying, don't be romantic.Heaven and earth created all things, nurtured all things, created all things, delighted all things, inspired all things, destroyed all things, tested all things, and tormented all things.Heaven and earth have prepared feasts and poisoned wine for all things, prepared celebrations and also prepared funerals, prepared vigor and desertedness, prepared justice and righteousness but also prepared injustice at the bottom of the sea, prepared kindness and emotion but also prepared brutality and cruelty.The amorousness of heaven and earth is actually a manifestation of ruthlessness, which may be affectionate or ruthless, may be dear or may be evil.If you are passionate, you will be annoyed by ruthlessness. Stop crying to the sky and pretending to be passionate.

In fact, similar thinking did not start with Lao Tzu, who said the words of Confucius: "What does the sky say? The four seasons move, and all things come into being, so what does the sky say?" There is also "The Book of Songs Daya King Wen" said: "The record of heaven , soundless and odorless." "Book of Rites · Sorrow "Gongwen" said: "Inaction makes things come into being, which is the way of heaven." "Chunqiu Fanlu·Shen Jianming" said: "Heaven does not speak, but makes people express their thoughts; if they do nothing, people act in it." All these words , It is intended to show that tomorrow does not have will, love and hate, what to do or not to do on purpose.

But Lao Tzu is the most thorough.His words of inhumanity gave you a heartbreak!So, you see through: Heaven and earth don't care about your love, humanity, compassion, suffering, redemption... so many inseparable things. Heaven and earth are inhumane, and saints are inhumane. These are two bombs of great destruction. How many middle-class, petty bourgeoisie, white-collar workers, young people, and poetic rose-colored soft parties (read pia) wish blindly romantic worlds are blown up by it! Besides, the sage is not benevolent, it is even more complicated and sensitive. The first meaning is that a sage is a person with Taoism, and what he masters is the Dao, which is the Taoism that governs without doing anything and teaches without words.He does not need the benevolence of mothers-in-law and women, let alone interfere in the name of benevolence, hinder the cognition of the truth, and interfere with the normal and natural life of the people.The sage does nothing but does everything, and he teaches himself without saying anything.His inhumanity is the greatest benevolence, and his ruthlessness is the greatest emotion: it is beneficial rather than harmful to the people's life and happiness.

The second meaning is that Confucius worked so hard to talk about benevolence, but did he talk about a lot of artificiality, hypocrisy, rules and regulations, competing to flaunt, blaming each other, wasting people and money, and talking too much?It's better to say less false empty words and let the common people live their lives more naturally. The third meaning is that a sage is a big man, and what a big man does is to cultivate oneself, regulate the family, govern the country and the world, rather than emotional matters such as I love you, I sympathize with you, I feel sorry for you, and I am your brother and sister.In the process of doing great things, it is not that the saints do not know that there is a price to pay, that there is sacrifice in struggle, and that death often happens, but if because of this, they become soft-hearted and lingering, and do not act when they should, what kind of saint is they?It can only be regarded as waste.The benevolence of a sage lies in great benevolence: this is the explanation of the great benevolence of the inhumane.

The fourth meaning is that common people cannot count on the pity of heaven and earth, the pity of saints, and they cannot expect to be kind, rewarded, warm, and helped.Ordinary people must be prepared for everything, endure hardships and hardships, endure humiliation and bear heavy burdens, so that they can do things for themselves, help themselves, liberate themselves, and develop themselves. Do not rely on heaven and earth, do not rely on saints, this is the beginning of self-liberation. Many of Lao Tzu's words teach weakness (at least on the surface) rather than strength.However, after the killing and baptism of the "unkindness" of heaven and earth and saints, you will become more mature and stronger objectively.

People who read "Lao Tzu" carefully, although they may not be strong and majestic because of Lao Tzu, they will not be so weak because of Lao Tzu.Here is the reason. Heaven and earth are not benevolent and saints are not benevolent, these two sentences are quite cruel.However, looking at Lao Tzu, he is not vicious. When it comes to the art of war, he has a heart of benevolence and righteousness.Then the "cruelty" to him, I call the cruelty of wisdom.This is not the same thing as cruelty in human nature. Lao Tzu personally has never done anything cruel, but he has seen through the ugliness in human nature, the weakness of benevolence, righteousness and morality,

Seeing through too many words can only count the poor, no matter how many flowers and clouds you tell.He also saw the lack of power of the common people, the impossibility of the sages being too kind, the indifference of the heaven and the earth, and sometimes the benevolence is useless.He saw that, as Hegel said, if you want to enter this house, you can only end up entering that different house.He sees that many good fantasies are but wishful thinking.His wisdom may have impacted kindness, impacted beliefs (for heaven, earth and saints), and destroyed warmth and romance.He saw that many people's desire for goodness is just driving them to do some stupid things that go against the grain, go in the opposite direction, are futile and counterproductive.He saw how many people took stupid things for great things, good things, smart things, and must-do things, and they did it with pride and enthusiasm.He clearly knows that self-defeating people often think that they are self-righteous and carry the cross; whimsical people think that they are turning things around;People who think of going to heaven in one step can only roll into the mud, that is, as Western philosophers say: because of a certain desire to go to heaven, they push themselves into hell.

Wisdom is sometimes cruel to the common people.This sense of cruelty is expressed in many of Lu Xun's writings: When Haoge is frenzied, he suffers from cold; in the sky, he sees the abyss.To see nothing in all eyes; to be saved in hope of nothing. ?? A wandering soul turned into a long snake with poisonous fangs in its mouth.Don't gnaw people, but gnaw your own body, and end up perishing... (From "Wild Grass Tombstone") We know a saying called the pain of wisdom, and now we experience the severity and cruelty of wisdom. Truth can be harsh and somewhat grim at times.We can give another more shocking example: the revolutionary mentor emphasized the inevitability of violent revolution, which was not because of the violent tendency of the mentor himself.The mentor himself has no record of violence, he just told the people the bitter truth.When we clearly see inhumanity, violence, and stupidity, should we tell people that this is inhumanity, this is violence, this is stupidity, and then we can call it kindness, or should we conceal all this and use beautiful nursery rhymes and imaginary nursery rhymes to replace our observation of the world? And thinking is kindness?

Benevolence and inhumanity are all in one mind. Sometimes what seems to be inhumanity is actually great benevolence, but we must also be wary of blatantly denying all benevolence and love on the grounds of this.As a worldview, benevolence is not enough.As an ethical relationship between human beings, such as the five ethics spoken by the Chinese, of course, there is no love. Of course, Laozi’s conclusion is fundamentally different from that of Lu Xun and his revolutionary mentor. His conclusion is much more negative. His conclusion is a supplement to the positive outlook on life and values ​​of self-improvement; Talking with rhetoric is a necessary correction; it is far from enough for a society and a person's life. Such an assumption does not exist at all: I have only read one book, "Lao Tzu," and only written a book, "About Lao Tzu's Men."Or the reader can only read such a book.All the apprehensions, all the repugnances, all the impulses to argue about the idea of ​​having only one book, or reading only one book, are futile. There is another issue worth discussing here.Previously, Lao Tzu had been talking about the Tao, but here he talked about the heaven and the earth, and the Tao is much more abstract and general than the heaven and the earth.Heaven and earth are the hardware of Tao, I think so.Heaven and earth are hardware, so we must emphasize its non-will and non-benevolence, its vitality, and its naturalness.Lao Tzu's Tao has two meanings. From the hardware point of view, it is nature, heaven and earth, trance and chaos; from the software point of view, it is reason, law, law, procedure, definition, and the god of essence and concept. , King of concepts.At the same time, both of them imply infinity, and both are imaginative, ambiguous, and plausible. There is another big question here, what is the meaning of the humble dog?Professor Chen Kuying, a friend from Taiwan and an expert on Laozi, explained it as making all things grow on their own.This is too gentle, and this is obviously the projection of Teacher Chen's benevolent and kind heart onto Lao Tzu and the book.I humbly believe that the core meaning of dogs is their destruction or the end of being destroyed.Everything has birth, origin, decay, cessation, and finally cessation.The individuals of the common people will eventually die and die.Few philosophers in China have discussed the issue of destruction with such seriousness and ruthlessness (that is, inhumanity). However, destruction or annihilation exists in every moment, every minute and every second.It is closely connected with becoming, with life, with arising, forever.Without life, there would be no destruction, and conversely, without destruction, there would be no life.If your existence has only eternal life, only a state of eternal life and no end of death, then what is the comparison, proof, manifestation and significance of your life?Where does life come from when no one dies?For the immortal, what is the difference between living 10,000 years and not living a day?What is the difference between a year and a million years?What is the difference between happiness and misfortune? I have always admired the teachings of Hinduism: there are three main gods in the universe - Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.Brahma is the ancestor of creation and the god of creation; Vishnu is the maintainer of the universe, the god of protection, and can create and subdue the devil; Shiva is the god of destruction, and is said to be the third main god, and some It is said that he (she) is the biggest and most important main god.He is the destroyer of the world, symbolized by the phallic, unpredictable.This last description is quite humorous, but it turns out that humor is also a path to the truth, even if it is a winding path at the end, so it is said that "the winding path leads to the secluded".Quiet, deep, elegant, dark, ghostly and humorous.People who have no sense of humor at all show their own mental incompleteness and incomplete personality. Of course, they cannot accept the truth, discover the truth, and understand the truth well. Generation and destruction, birth and destruction, are the proper meaning of heaven and earth and saints, and they are all manifestations of the Dao.Everything can become a straw dog, and the people (individuals among the common people) can become a straw dog without crying.But the Dao is eternal, empty and unyielding, moving and getting better.This made us feel comforted and clear, calm and at ease after being splashed with cold water. It is unique to compare the world to a scorpion.This is thinking in images, and it is also mechanical.Lao Tzu was surprised that there was nothing in the bellows, but endless strong winds blew out, making the furnace blazing, raising the temperature, and turning rotten iron into steel into tools.He realized the great power of nothingness from it.In fact, there is not nothing there, but there is a lot of air.At that time, Lao Tzu had no knowledge of air. The ancients also used various metaphors for heaven and earth, most of which were houses and tents.As Su Shi said: Drunk wake up wake up drunk, Ping Jun will take this taste, and pour amber fragrant floating ants.When you feel sad, don't have a spring mood.The mat must be regarded as heaven and earth, dance before singing and sleep before flowers.From his abject Taotaoli.You Sheng wakes up and makes you haggard. Su Shi's world is full of spring, wine, sleepiness, talent.He is full of worries and drunks out of nothing. And in "Chile Song" it is sung like this: Chilechuan, under the Yin Mountain. The sky is like a dome, covering the whole field. The sky is gray, the wild is vast, and the wind blows the grass and the cattle and sheep are low. This is talking about existence against the background of nothingness, and it is because of the background of nothingness that there is such confusion. The famous Zhang Dayou chanted the heaven after the heavy snow and said: The sky and the earth are unified, and Inoue is a black hole.The yellow dog is white, and the white dog is swollen. The world is so general, but it feels like I accidentally bumped into Lao Tzu.Generality is close to chaos, close to trance, close to the great way. As for the comparison of heaven and earth to 橐龠, only Lao Tzu and his family.But in the three poems (cis), there is the flavor of "virtual but unyielding, moving and getting better".Woohoo heaven and earth, how many characters live and die with you, how many stories last with you, how much wisdom shines with you, and how many songs and tears move you with you!Of course you won’t give up, and you won’t let it go. If you bend and don’t let it go, what else will you have left? Knowing the truth, especially trying to get close to the ultimate truth, it is not enough to rely on logical deduction, experiment and calculation, and empirical synthesis. It also depends on image thinking, inspiration, perception, and hypothetical guessing. Hard talk.The metaphor of 橐龠 is interesting and connotative.Emptiness and unyielding, moving and getting out, creating something out of nothing (although the air is original, the wind is "coming out"), endless.Lao Tzu likes to observe such opposite and complementary cases, and likes to think about the white in the black, the existence in the nothing, the victory in the defeat, and the strong in the weak.He likes to think about Tao and reason from the opposite side. There is one more detail: In Ren Jiyu's "Laozi Yidu", it is mentioned that according to Wu Cheng's explanation, the ancient 橐辠 was made of leather bags.That's great, because at least in Xinjiang, rural blacksmiths still use bellows made of sheepskin pockets, and I've seen it many times with my own eyes.In the knowledge about Lao Tzu, there are not without details of life, not without the breath of life.