Chuang Tzu mash-up
Great knowledge sees all in one.
Small knowledge breaks down into the many.
Great speech blazes brilliantly;
Small speech is mere garrulousness.
In sleep, men's spirits go visiting; in waking hours, their bodies hustle. With everything they meet they become entangled. Each day involves them in mental strife. They become indecisive, dissembling, secretive.
Small fears disturb them;
Great fears swallow them whole.
Arrows shot at a target: hit and miss, right and wrong.
That is what men call judgement, decision.
Their pronouncements are as final
As treaties between emperors.
O, they make their point!
Yet their arguments fall faster and feebler
Than dead leaves in autumn and winter.
Their talk flows out like piss,
Never to be recovered.
They stand at last, blocked, bound, and gagged,
Choked up like old drain pipes.
The mind fails. It shall not see light again.
Joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, fickleness, inflexibility, modesty, willfullness, candor, insolence --
All are sounds from the same flute,
All mushrooms from the same wet mould.
Day and night they alternate within us, but no one knows whence they arise. Enough! Enough! Early and late we meet the "that" from which "these" all grow. If there were no 'other,' there would be no 'I'. If there were no 'I,' there would be nothing to apprehend the 'other'. This is near the mark, but I do not know what causes it to be so. One may well suppose the True Governor to be behind it all, and yet I find no trace of him. He can act -- that is certain. Yet I cannot see his form. He acts, but has no form.
[This is a mash-up of translations of the same passage of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton, Victor H. Mair, and Burton Watson. To show how these things vary, Watson has it, "In sleep, men's spirits go visiting; in waking hours, their bodies hustle." Mair has it, "When people sleep, their souls are confused; when they awake, their bodies feel all out of joint." Merton has it, "When the body sleeps, the soul is enfolded in One. When the body wakes, the openings begin to function." The differences and similarities create an uneasy triangulation. Another possibility would have been to go with, "When people sleep, their souls are confused; in waking hours, their bodies hustle." I like the double meaning of "their souls are confused," with the second sense being that we become confused about which soul is ours. Merton's take of all souls becoming One is similar, although more transcendant.]