Dao De Jing

happines

"When Chuang Tzú was at the edge of the death, its disciples began planning a splendid funeral. But he said: ' I will take the sky and the ground as a coffin; the Sun and the Moon will be the symbols of jade that they hang along with me; the planets and the constellations will shine like jewels around me, and all the beings will be present like funeral covey in my wake. What more needs? Everything is sufficiently ready!'. But they said: ' We are afraid that the crows and kites devour our Teacher'.

'Well', said Chuang Tzú, 'on the ground I will be devoured by crows and kites, under her by ants and worms. In any case, I will be devoured. Why so much bias against the birds?'".

According to Thomas Merton, the "way" of Chuang Tzú, that is to say: the election of the silence, the simplicity and the denial to take seriously the aggressiveness, the propulsion and the dominance that one supposes that one must exhibit to work in society, it maintains an absolute validity. The way of Chuang Tzú – continuing the Tao Te Ching – prefers not to come nowhere in the world, not even in the field of any supposedly spiritual achievement. And there concludes Merton: "Chuang Tzú would have agreed with Saint John of the Cross in which one enters this type of way when all the ways give in and, in certain way, one gets lost". A disturbing and beautiful life proposal.

For the way of Chuang Tzú, somehow the last synthesis, the praised thought of Thomas Merton, is one of these touching books in literal sense, but not like the spiritual earthquakes that they produce in the adolescence and youth Dostoievski, Camus or Nietzsche. Merton-Chuang Tzú needs to have lived a little more. We have said it: one approaches these texts – poems, brief stories, almost pleasantries – as if it was going to take water. They have no contraindications. "The rooster of fight", "Means and ends", "The useless thing", "The three of the morning", "The importance of having no teeth"... can bring in him on any part.