The Tao Te Ching Chapter You Cannot Understand until You Are 50

One Tao Te Ching chapter only makes sense after 50. It is Lao Tzu's chapter 41, and at 30 it reads like a list of contradictions, and at 50 it reads like your own life. You are standing in a kiln yard at first light in early spring, and the small pots are out on their boards in rows, drying in the sun. Under the lintu in the shade stands one great jar, chest high half built, a damp cloth over its unfinished rim. By the autumn firing, the small pots will be stacked, boxed, and sold, and the jar will still be in the shade, and that is the whole of the chapter. It says five things that sound wrong. The bright way seems dim. The way forward seems to go back. The smooth way seems rough. The greatest square has no corners, and the great vessel is finished late. At thirty you read that list and you laugh, and Lao Tzu says that if you did not laugh, it would not be the way. Most people read chapter 41 once at 30 and spend the second half of life calling themselves late. Tonight I read the five lines in order, each against the decade when it stopped being a riddle. Not five things to put down. One chapter slowly. The fifth is the one almost nobody believes until the kiln is lit. The first line is the one you argued with hardest at 30 and lost. What were you praised for that year? The potter is an old woman and she is at the wheel by seven. You watch her throw a bowl in the time it takes you to tie a shoe. People stop at the gate for those. They point. A child is lifted up to see the wheel go round. Nobody points at the jar. Under the lean to it is a gray shape with a cloth over its head. Once a morning she walks past it, presses her thumb into the shoulder of it, and goes back to the wheel without doing anything else. That is the first line of chapter 41 already paid before the due is off the boards. The bright way seems dim. The way that is bright, Lao Tzu says, looks dull, and the rest of tonight is only finding out why you believed the yard. Now you're thirties. Think of what you were praised for in that decade, and be honest, because it was real praise, and you earned it. You were fast. You were the one who had the answer before the question was finished. You were available at seven in the morning and at nine at night. People said so, warmly in rooms where it counted. You could finish anyone's work by Friday. You were the small pot that came off the wheel shining, and the yard pointed at you, and you took the title at 35 that proved the yard was right. And there was another thing you did in those years, and nobody praised it, because nobody could see it. The slow thing. The thing you did with the door shut on a Sunday morning before the house woke. The instrument or the sketchbook or the language or the telescope you carried out on clear nights to a field behind the house. The way you listened to the whole of a problem while the fast ones were already answering. That was a gray shape under a cloth. It looked like nothing. You were a little ashamed of how much time it took. Before the decade was out, you had put it down because the bright thing needed you. Praise is a lamp held by other people. It lights what they can see, and they could see the small pots. What they could not see was not dark. It was in the shade, which is a different thing, and at thirty you could not tell the two apart. The bright way seemed dim because nobody was pointing at it. That is the whole of the first line, and you cannot understand it until you are old enough to look back and see which of the two things is still with you. Zhuangzi in his sixth chapter tells of a teacher who knew about the Her name was Nu Yu, and she was very old and her face was like a child's. A man came to her and asked how that could be, and she told him she had heard the way. Could he learn it then? She looked at him a while and told him he was not the man for it. Then she told him about one who nearly was. There had been a man called Bu Liang Yi who had the talent of a sage but not the way of a sage. And she, Nu Yu, had the way but not the talent. So she kept him and taught him to see whether the talent and the way might meet in one man. She kept it him for three days and after three days he could put the world outside himself. There were seven days after that and nine after those and I will give them to you when they come because they took longer and that is the point of them. Hold on to the first half of what she said. The talent of a sage but not the way. That was you at 30 and it is most people at 30 and it is the the small pots. Talent is the thing that comes off the wheel shining. Talent is what gets praised, because talent is what can be seen from the gate. The way is the slow thing in the shade, and the old woman could tell the difference, and the yard could not, and neither could you. Three days to put the world outside himself. The world in this story is the yard, the gate, the people pointing, the grade. It is the first thing he set down, and it is the first thing Chapter 41 asks you to see through, and you could not do it at 30 because the praise was warm and it was real. The old woman does not blame him for the three days. She only counts them. So the bright way seems dim. The thing you were praised for in your 30s was the thing people could see. The bright thing was in the shade, and you walked past it once a morning, and pressed your thumb to it and went back to the wheel. By June the boards are empty and the small pots have gone, and the jar has grown a hand's width since April, and one morning you come through the gate and she is holding a knife against it. She is cutting the top off. Why would anyone take a knife to a thing that took all spring? She has the knife flat against the wall, and she is taking the rim off, a hand's width all the way round, and setting the wet strip of clay in a bucket. You watch her unbuild a month. The empty boards lie out in the June sun and nobody stops at the gate for a jar that is getting shorter. When she is done, the jar is lower than it was in April and she wets the new edge and lays the cloth back over it and goes to the wheel. And you stand there with the question on your face. She answers it without looking up. The sun got round the lean-to in June and the rim dried faster than the body and a crack had started at the lip, fine as a hair. Fire a crack like that And it runs to the floor. So she took the rim back to where the clay was still honest, and tomorrow she will build it again. By the end of the day the jar is lower and nearer to being finished than it was this morning. That is the second line of the chapter. The way forward seems to go back. Now you're forties. Somewhere in that decade you took the step that everyone called a retreat. You know the one. You left the big firm for the small one. You turned down the move. You took the lesser title so that So that you could be home by 6. You went back to study at 44, in a room full of people half your age. You moved back to the town you had left at 22, which you had sworn never to do. Whichever it was, it was down on every map anyone had ever shown you, and they told you so, kindly, with their heads tilted. Are you sure? It seems like a step back. The kind ones asked whether everything was all right at home. The others said nothing, and you heard that too. It was a step back. Be honest about that, because the chapter is honest about it. The way that his forward Lao Tzu says, seems to lead backward, and he does not stop it seems. In the chapter before, the 40th, he puts it as plainly as he puts anything. Turning back is how the way moves, and the weak is what it works with. Not the strong. Not the forward march up the map. The turn and the weakness and the lower rim. Think of the knife. A rim that is still soft enough to cut, is weak, and because it is weak it can be taken back and built again. A rim that has dried hard cannot be taken back. It can only crack. Think about what the step cost you at the time, and what it bought you that you could not see. The lesser title bought you the evenings in which the slow thing could have come out of the shade, and did, a little, in your late forties, if you were lucky. The small firm bought you the whole of a problem instead of a slice of one. The town you swore never to return to bought you the ten people who had known you before you were fast. The room full of twenty-year-olds bought you a beginner's hands. And a beginner's hands are the only hands that learn anything. And none of that was visible from the map. From the map it was a lower jar. From inside the yard it was a rim taken back to where the clay was still honest. Honest is her word for it, not mine. Zhuangzi's old woman had the same count. After the three days when Bu Liang Yi had put the world outside himself, she kept it him for seven days more, and after the seven he could put things outside himself. Things. The title, the house with the extra room, the car that said what you were, the number that was supposed to be reached by forty. Seven days, more than twice the three, and she did not hurry him. that is how long things take to set down and she had the way and the way knows how long things take notice that she does not say he lost anything in the seven days she says he put things outside himself they did not vanish they were set down where he could see them outside and he was inside with his hands free that is what the step back did for you in your 40s the things you were climbing toward did not vanish They went outside you, where you could look at them, and you were left inside with your hands free, and a lower rim and a cloth over it, and a long summer still to go. The chapter's word for this is not kind and not unkind. The way forward seems to go back. Seems. To the gate it is going back. To the one holding the knife it is the only way forward there is, and she has done it before, and she will do it again before the autumn, and she has never once called it a loss. By July the yard is hot and the June firing is out of the kiln. The small pots come out of it glossy and smooth as glass in matched sets and they are sold by noon on Saturday. The jars wall, where she has been working it, is rough as bark. Why would she leave the one she cares about rough? Midsummer. The boards of small pots that went into the June firing have come out shining. You can see the sky in them. They are matched in sets of six, and people buy them in sets, and the table by the gate is empty by noon on Saturday every week of July. Under the lean-to, the jar has been built up again past where the knife took it, and she has been going over the wall with a toothed blade, and it looks terrible. Ridged, scored, rough as the bark of an old tree. You ask her why the pots that sell are smooth and the one she cares about is rough, and she puts her hand flat on the wall and tells you. A thick wall left smooth dries as a skin, she says. The outside tightens and shines and looks finished, and underneath the skin the clay is as wet as the day it was built. And a pot like that keeps its secret all summer. It keeps it until the fire. A scraped wall has no skin. It dries the same all the way through, slowly, honestly, and it looks like nothing while it does it. The small pots can be smooth because they are thin. The jar cannot afford to be. So the third line. The smooth way seems rough. The way that is even Lao Tzu says looks rough and the way that looks smooth is only a skin. Now the easy years. Every life has them, and most of them fall between 35 and 50 and you know which ones yours were. The years the salary came in on the same day of every month. The years the diary was full and no one asked you a hard question. The years you were asked to take on more and said yes because yes was smooth and no was not. The years the evenings had the television in them, and that was fine, and the weekends had the errands in them, and that was fine. The thing you had put down in your 30s stayed down for now because things would calm down soon. Those were the smooth years. You even had a phrase for them. Things are good. You said it at every gathering for 12 years, and it was true. And it was the sound of a skin tightening. They shone. Nobody looking at your life from the gate in those years would have seen anything wrong, and neither would you. Now add up what they cost. Not in money. In the thing under the skin, the instrument in its case in the spare room, the sketchbook with 11 pages used, the language you could order a meal in and nothing more, the telescope in its case under the stairs, and the notebook with nine clear nights You closed the case in the smooth years, because the smooth years did not require it. Things did calm down. You did not pick it up. That is the bill of the easy years, and you cannot read it until you are old enough to see what did not happen in them. And now think of the rough years. The year the money went. The year you started again at 46 with nothing on the shelf. The year of the long illness in the house, when the diary emptied and the errands stopped, and everything you thought you were was scraped back to the wall. Those years had no skin on them. Everyone could see they were rough, and they were. And they are the years you grew. Not because suffering is good for a person. The chapter never says that, and neither will I. But because in those years nothing dried as a skin. Whatever dried in you in the rough years dried all the way through, and in September you will find out what that is worth. So the third line is the hardest of the first three to hear. Because it tells you that the years you are proudest of having got through quietly were the expensive ones. The smooth way seemed rough because you were on it in the rough years and could not see the shape of it. The rough way seemed smooth because it shone. You could see the sky in it. That was the problem. A skin always shines. That is what a skin is for. Lao Tzu puts three more lines beside this one in Chapter 41, and they are the same thought turned over in the hand. The highest virtue looks like a valley. The purest white looks stained. Ample virtue looks like it is missing something. In the yard you would say it differently. The one she cares about looks worse all summer than the ones she sells. Before the fourth line, tell me in the comments which of the first three you only understood after 50. Just the number. Because the fourth is the one that sounded like nonsense at 30. A square with no corners. And it is about the shape your life has quietly taken while nobody was measuring it. What are you still measuring yourself against? Late August and evening the yard cooling. On the table by the gate, the last small pots of the summer stand in their sets, and you notice for the first time how she makes them. Each one is measured against a stick as it comes off the wheel, the same height, the same mouth, so that the lids fit any of them and six of them go into a box with corners. They are a set. Each one is right because it matches the others. Under the lean to the jar is finished to the rim at last and it matches nothing. There is no stick for it. There is no box. You ask her what size it will be, and she says it will be the size it is when it is dry. It is one of one. Nothing in the yard lines up against it, and so nothing about it can be out of line. That is the fourth line of chapter 41, the one that sounded like nonsense at 30. The greatest square has no corners. At 30, your life was a set. You were thrown on the same day as a hundred others, your year, your intake, the people who started when you did. You were measured against the stick with them every year, and you knew where you stood in the row. And they knew where you stood. Everything had corners. The age by which. The number. The title. The house by 40. A corner is a place where you can be caught, and a life measured against a set is nothing but corners. And the fear of being caught at one of them is what most people call ambition in their 30s. Now think of where the set is. Some of them sold early and well and sit on a shelf somewhere, some cracked, some are still being measured against the stick at 55, and you can see it in their faces when you meet them, and one evening, perhaps this one, you notice that you have stopped looking for your place in the row, not because you won, because there is no row, the thing you have become does not match anything, nothing lines up against it, and so there is no corner left where you could be caught. That is what a life with nothing left to prove is. Not a mood. A shape. Lao Tzu says in the same chapter that the great image has no form and this is why. From inside it you cannot see your own edges because there are none to see. Let me set the argument down a moment because this is where it belongs. Being slow is not the same as being unwell. If the slowness has the weight of not wanting to get up week after week that is not this chapter and it deserves a person not a video. Tell someone who loves you, and let them help you find that person. The door stays open. The slowness I mean has a thumb pressed to its shoulder every morning and a long summer in it. It is drying. It is not sinking. But there is a fifth line, and everyone at fifty thinks they already understand it, because kind people have been saying it to them for years. The great vessel is finished late. You have heard it as a consolation. So what exactly was late? September. The yard is being cleared for the autumn firing. Split wood is stacked at the mouth of the kiln, a brick kiln the shape of a loaf with a chimney at the far end. The small pots of late summer stand ready on their boards, and the jar stands in the shade with no cloth on it for the first time since spring. You think you know what the fifth line means, because everyone has told you. It means wait. It means your turn comes. It means the ones who passed you at 30 will be surprised at 60. It means the world was slow to see you, that you were held back by the wrong boss, the wrong town, the wrong decade, and that Lao Tzu is putting a hand on your shoulder and saying, late but coming. People have said it to you with real kindness, and you have said it to yourself in the smooth years. Most people would tell you to take the comfort, and to be a little aggrieved with it. Hold the grievance gently like a stone in the pocket. You were kept waiting. Hold that a moment. The kiln was slow to get to you. Everyone knows that. The kiln was never late. The jar was not ready. Here is how you find out. All summer once a morning, she has wrapped the wall of the jar with her knuckle. And all summer it is answered with a thud, the dead sound of water still in the clay. This morning she wraps it and it rings. Faintly, far inside the wall a note so quiet you are not sure you heard it. She hears it and nods and says it will go in. Lao Tzu, in the very next line of chapter 41, says the great note is barely a sound. That is what you heard. Then she tells you what June would have done to it. The water in a thick wall turns to steam in the fire. A jar fired wet does not crack. It bursts and it takes the pots beside it. The small pots were ready in June because they were thin. The jar was not late. It was thick. Finished late is not a thing the world did to the vessel. It is the vessel. And here is the one line I will read to you directly tonight. In one rendering Lao's the great vessel takes long to complete. Not as kept waiting. Not as held back. Takes long. The long is in the vessel's own hands. Others render it as finished late, or as the slowest made, and they are true too, but Lao puts the time where it belongs. The vessel takes it. Nobody takes it from the vessel. Zhuangzi's old woman counted the same way. Three days to put the world outside. Seven more to put things outside, and nine more, the longest stretch of all, to put life itself outside himself, and only after the nine, she said, did the morning come up in him, and he saw the way a man sees at first light. The last stage is the slowest, and she did not hurry it, because she had the way, and the way knows what hurrying does in a kiln. So the years you called waiting were drying. The thing you put down at thirty did not stop. It stood in the shade with a cloth over it, and lost its water through a thick wall, slowly, honestly. Nobody held it back, and nobody was late with the fire. If they had fired you at thirty you would have burst. That is the fifth line, the one almost nobody believes until the kiln is lit. The great vessel is finished late because that is what great means in a vessel. So far I have shown you the side of this chapter that is easy to love. But the kiln yard keeps a bill in a pile behind the kiln. What happens to the ones that crack anyway? Now the shard pile. Every kiln yard has one behind the kiln where visitors do not go, and this one is knee-high. Thirty years of firings. Some of the pieces are small, and some were great jars, and the great ones hurt to look at, because you can see how far they got. So, first, some vessels crack in the kiln. Dry, slow, scraped, wrung with a knuckle, carried in with care, and they crack anyway. A stone in the clay that nobody saw. A cold draft across the yard at the wrong hour of the firing. A flaw in the wall that was there from the first coil. Late is not a guarantee. Chapter 41 says the great vessel is slow to finish. It does not say every vessel that is slow is great, and it does not promise that the long one comes out whole. Some people put a thing down at 30 and pick it up at 50, and it is not there anymore. This essay does not pretend otherwise. Second and harder. Some of what you called taking long was not drying. It was avoidance. There were years when you said not yet and meant I am afraid, and the chapter does not excuse that, and neither does the yard. A jar left in the shade too long is not drying. It is sitting. She does something to that jar every day. A thumb, a knife, a toothed blade, a knuckle. The slow way is still a way, and it still has to be walked, and shade is not the same as sleep, and there is no villain in it. Not the people who bought the small pots, who wanted a bowl and paid for one. Not the ones who praised your fast hand in your thirties, who were praising what they could see. Not the ones who tilted their heads at the step back, who were counting the only way they knew. And not the thirty-year-old you, who threw small pots because the house had to be paid for, and who was right to. So do not turn on yourself for the years in the shade. Scold yourself for the slow years and you have not left the yard. You have only built a smaller kiln and you are trying to hurry yourself into it. The bill is real and some of it is yours. Pay that part and leave the rest on the pile and come back out into the yard. So what do you do with your hands this week? Now that you know what the shade was for. One small thing and a warning you should hear first. One thing then and only one. This week go back to the one thing you put down at 30 for 10 minutes. Not to finish it. Not to make up for the years. Only to see if it is still yours. Open the case. Turn to the twelfth page of the sketchbook. Say the ten words of the language you still have. Carry the telescope out one clear night and find the one thing in the sky you still know the name of and stop. Ten minutes and then put it down again gently. The way she lays the cloth back over the rim. You are not firing anything this week. You are wrapping the wall with a knuckle to hear what it says. And here is the warning. The first weeks feel worse. At first it will look exactly like going backward, because it is the thing you were doing at 30, and your hands are slower than they were then. Your head will say, see too late, and offer you the shard pile. That is not the sound of too late. It is the dead sound of a wall that has not been touched for 20 years, and it is what every wall sounds like the first time. The chapter told you in its second line what this would feel like. The way forward seems to go back. Seems. Then, one evening in the third week or the sixth, you may rap it and hear something ring, faintly, far inside. You will not be sure you heard it. Or you may hear only the thud, week after week, and then you will know that too, and knowing was what the ten minutes were for. If it rings, that is not a reward for patience. It is only what a thick wall sounds like when it has finally lost its water. It was always going to sound like that, and nothing in the world was late. So go back to the yard one more time. It is October now, the kiln is lit this morning, and for the first time since spring the jar has to leave the shade. Does it reach the fire? Come back to the kiln yard at first light, the same gate, the same lean-to. But it is October, and the boards are empty, and there is frost on the grass. Every other morning since spring you have come through this gate, and found the jar in the shade with a cloth over it, and the small pots in the sun being pointed at. This morning, two people lift the jar on a board and carry it across the yard. Slowly, the way you carry something that has taken a season and set it on the shelf in the mouth of the kiln. She bricks the door up behind it with her own hands. Then she lights the fire. The five lines go past you the way the first smoke goes up the chimney. The bright way in the shade all summer. The way forward cut back a hand's width in June. The smooth way scraped rough in July. The square with no corners matched against nothing, and the great vessel carried in last in its own time because it was thick. Lao Tzu said turning back is how the way moves and that the great vessel is finished late in its own time. You read chapter 41 at 30 and laughed as it said you would. You are not laughing this morning. You are standing in a cold yard with your hands in your pockets watching smoke. You understand every line of it because you have lived every line of In order. The firing takes three days and the cooling four more. So what is the fire doing in there that nobody can see? The jar is in the kiln and nobody can see it. For the first time since spring, nobody in this yard is pointing at anything. The small pots have all gone to other people's houses as they should, and the boards in the sun are empty. The one thing she cared about all year is behind a wall of brick with the fire on it, and that is as it should be too. You will not be here when the door comes down, nor will I. The great vessel is finished late, and finished means after the fire and the fire is still going. If you have not left your number yet, 1 to 5, leave it now. These are slow essays on the Tao, on Zen, and on the second half of a life from a channel called The Empty Boat. If this is the kind of quiet you came for, subscribe, so the next one finds you the next time the house goes quiet. Tonight the empty thing was a great jar, drying in the shade, and the kiln was never the thing that was late. Go gently. The great vessel does not hurry to the fire, and tonight neither do you.