Great Rivers Lie Low #032

Daoist Wisdom

Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. We have been talking about the Dao a few times in the past. The Dao De Jing is this Chinese book of wisdom, the book of the Virtue and the Way. This is a Chinese classic that is sometimes a little difficult to comprehend, or sometimes very difficult to comprehend, but sometimes it also offers surprisingly good and surprisingly modern advice for our lives.

I want to read you one thing, this is paragraph 66: "That whereby the rivers and seas are able to receive the tribute of all the valley streams, it is their skill in being lower than they. It is thus that they are the kings of them all." So what it wants to say is, why is the biggest river the biggest one? Why is a bigger river bigger than a smaller river? Because it's lower. Because it receives the water from the higher river and thus it is stronger.

What it wants to do is something very similar to what the Bible says when Jesus talks about the meek who are going to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. And not those who are boastful and those who are strong, but the meek, the humble, the small ones, you know, the poor. These are going to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Dao has a very similar idea that those who are lower are going to inherit things just because being low is a kind of strength. Lying low is a kind of strength. You don't present a target as somebody who is high, but you receive everything that comes your way and you can utilize it without presenting a target.

And it continues, "So it is that the sage, the ruler wishing to be above man, puts himself by his words below them, and wishing to be before them, places his person behind them." That's the idea, right? You place yourself behind others because then you present less of a target, and then you can strive to do what you want.

In this way, the Dao says, "Though he has his place above them, men do not feel his weight; although he has his place before them, they do not feel an injury to them." And this is the secret of the successful man: not to boast, not to try to put yourself in front of others, because then everybody will want to get you away from there and get the position for themselves.

But the secret to success is to be quiet about it, to put yourself under others, and slowly to achieve the success you want without arousing these feelings of competition, of others wanting to take you down in order to take your place.

I don't know how much of this I really think about actually, because you could say this is only a trick, that's only a strategy, this is only a way to actually achieve what you want by manipulating others by making them think that you're humble although you're not, by making them think that you don't care although you do. And then it would not be a good thing, right?

But it could also be genuine. It could be that we actually try to be humble as a way of having a better life, out of the limelight, out of the restrictions of being famous, and being more genuine, being more ourselves, and accepting our failures or accepting our weaknesses.

So perhaps tell me what you think about this. I find this interesting but I'm not sure that I can actually really see if this is good advice or not. So hand me in the comments, tell me what you think about that, and how we can apply this in our everyday lives in a way that is not manipulative, that is genuine, and that actually brings about good results for our lives.

Thank you, see you next time. Bye-bye.