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THE TAO TEH KING
(LIBER CLVII)
A New Translation By
KO YUEN
(ALEISTER CROWLEY)
THE EQUINOX (Volume III, No. VIII.)
INTRODUCTION
I bound myself to devote my life to Magick at Easter 1898, and received my
first initiation on November 18 of that year.
My friend and climbing companion, Oscar Eckenstein, gave me my first
instructions in learning the control of the mind early in 1901 in Mexico City.
Shri Parananda, Solicitor General of Ceylon and an eminent writer upon and
teacher of Yoga from the orthodox Shaivite standpoint, and Bhikkhu Ananda
Metteya, the great English Adept, who was one of my earliest instructors in
Magick and joined the Sangha in Burma in 1902, gave me my first groundings in
mystical theory and practice. I spent some months of 1901 in Kandy, Ceylon,
with the latter until success crowned my work.
I also studied all varieties of Asiatic philosophy, especially with regard to
the practical question of spiritual development, the Sufi doctrines, the
Upanishads, the Sankhya, Vedanta, the Bagavad Gita and Purana, the Dhammapada,
and many other classics, together with numerous writings on the Tantra and Yoga
of such men as Patanjali, Vivekananda, etc. etc. Not a few of these teachings
are as yet wholly unknown to scholars. I made the scope of {1} my studies as
comprehensive as possible, omitting no school of thought however unimportant or
repugnant.
I made a critical examination of all these teachers in the light of my
practical experiences. The physiological and psychological uniformity of
mankind guaranteed that the diversity of expression concealed a unity of
significance. This discovery, furthermore, was confirmed by reference to
Jewish, Greek and Celtic traditions. One quintessential truth was common to all
cults, from the Hebrides to the Yellow Sea, and even the main branches proved
essentially identical. It was only the foliage that exhibited incompatibility.
When I walked across China in 1905-6, I was fully armed and accoutred by the
above qualifications to attack the till-then-insoluble problem of the Chinese
conception of religious truth. Practical studies of the psychology of such
Mongolians as I had met in my travels, had already suggested to me that their
acentric conception of the universe might represent the correspondence in
consciousness of their actual psychological characteristics. I was therefore
prepared to examine the doctrines of their religious and {2} philosophical
Masters without prejudice such as had always rendered nugatory the efforts of
missionary sinologists and indeed all oriental scholars with the single
exception of Rhys Davids. Until his time translators had invariably assumed,
with absurd naivite, or more often arrogant bigotry, that a Chinese writer must
either be putting forth a more or less distorted and degraded variation of some
Christian conception, or utterly puerile absurdities. Even so great a man as
Max Muller in his introduction to the Upanishads seems only half inclined to
admit that the apparent triviality and folly of many passages in these
so-called sacred writings might owe their appearance to our ignorance of the
historical and religious circumstances, a knowledge of which would render them
intelligible.
During my solitary wanderings among the mountainous wastes of Yun Nan, the
spiritual atmosphere of China penetrated my consciousness, thanks to the
absence of any intellectual impertinences from the organ of knowledge. The TAO
TEH KING revealed its simplicity and sublimity to my soul, little by little, as
the conditions of my physical life, no less than of my spiritual, penetrated
the {3} sanctuaries of my spirit. The philosophy of Lao Tze communicated itself
to me, in despite of the persistent efforts of my mind to compel it to conform
with my preconceived notions of what the text must mean. This process, having
thus taken root in my innermost intuition during those tremendous months of
wandering across Yun Nan, grew continually throughout succeeding years.
Whenever I found myself able once more to withdraw myself from the dissipations
and distractions which contact with civilisation forces upon one, no matter how
vigorously he may struggle against their insolence, to the sacred solitude of
the desert, whether among the sierras of Spain, or the sands of the Sahara, I
found that the philosophy of Lao Tze resumed its sway upon my soul, subtler and
stronger on each successive occasion. But neither Europe nor Africa can show
such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of
deserted Spain; the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest
oases, these are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their
worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an
instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the {4} most charming
and cultured people. It was therefore during my exile in America that the
doctrines of Lao Tze developed most rapidly in my soul, even forcing their way
outwards until I felt it imperious, nay inevitable, to express them in terms of
conscious thought.
No sooner had this resolve taken possession of me than I realized that the task
approximated to impossibility. His very simplest ideas, the primitive elements
of his thought, had no true correspondences in any European terminology. The
very first word 'Tao' presented a completely insoluble problem. It had been
translated 'Reason,' the 'Way,' 'TO ON.' None of these covey the faintest
conception of the Tao.
The Tao is 'Reason' in this sense, that the substance of things may be in part
apprehended as being that necessary relation between the elements of thought
which determines the laws of reason. In other words, the only reality is that
which compels us to connect the various forms of illusion as we do. It is thus
evidently unknowable, and expressible neither by speech nor by silence. All
that we can know about it is that there is inherent in it a {5} power (which,
however, is not itself) by virtue whereof all beings appear in forms congruous
with the nature of necessity.
The Tao is also the Way -- in the following sense. Nothing exists except as a
relation with other similarly postulated ideas. Nothing can be known in itself,
but only as one of the participants in a series of events. Reality is therefore
in the motion, not in the things moved. We cannot apprehend anything except as
one postulated element of an observed impression of change. We may express this
in other terms as follows. Our knowledge of anything is in reality the sum of
our observations of its successive movements, that is to say, of its path from
event to event. In this sense the Tao may be translated as the Way. It is not a
thing in itself in the sense of being an object susceptible of apprehension by
sense or mind. It is not the cause of any thing, but the category underlying
all existence or event, and therefore true and real as they are illusory, being
merely landmarks invented for convenience in describing our experiences. The
Tao possesses no power to cause anything to exist or to take place. Yet our
experience when analyzed tells {6} us that the only reality of which we may be
sure is this path or Way which resumes the whole of our knowledge.
As for TO ON, which superficially might seem the best translation of Tao as
described in the text, it is the most misleading of the three. For TO ON
possesses an extensive connotation implying a whole system of Platonic concepts
than which nothing can be more alien to the essential quality of the Tao. Tao
is neither being nor not-being in any sense which Europe could understand. It
is neither existence nor a condition or form of existence. At the same time, TO
MH ON gives no idea of Tao. Tao is altogether alien to all that class of
thought. From its connection with 'that principle which necessarily underlies
the fact that events occur' one might suppose that the 'Becoming' of Heraclitus
might assist us to describe the Tao. But the Tao is not a principle at all of
that kind. To understand it requires an altogether different state of mind to
any with which European thinkers in general are familiar. It is necessary to
pursue unflinchingly the path of spiritual development on the lines indicated
by the Sufis, the Hindus and the Buddhists; {7} and having reached the Trance
called Nerodha-Sammapati, in which are destroyed all forms soever of
consciousness, there appears in that abyss of annihilation the germ of an
entirely new type of idea, whose principal characteristic is this: that the
entire concatention of one's previous experiences and conceptions could not
have happened at all, save by virtue of this indescribable necessity.
I am only too painfully aware that the above exposition is faulty in every
respect. In particular it presupposes in the reader considerable familiarity
with the substance, thus practically begging the question. It must also prove
almost wholly unintelligible to the average reader, him in fact whom I
especially aim to interest. For his sake I will try to elucidate the matter by
an analogy. Consider electricity. It would be absurd to say that electricity is
any of the phenomena by which we know it. We take refuge in the petitio
principii of saying that electricity is that form of energy which is the
principle cause of such and such phenomena. Suppose now that we eliminate this
idea as evidently illogical. What remains? We must not hastily answer, 'Nothing
{8} remains.' There is some thing inherent in the nature of consciousness,
reason, perception, sensation, and of the universe of which they inform us,
which is responsible for the fact that we observe these phenomena and not
others; that we reflect upon them as we do, and not otherwise. But even deeper
than this, part of the reality of the inscrutable energy which determines the
form of our experience, consists in determining that experience should take
place at all. It should be clear that this has nothing to do with any of the
Platonic conceptions of the nature of things.
The least abject asset in the intellectual bankruptcy of European thought is
the Hebrew Qabalah. Properly understood it is a system of symbolism infinitely
elastic, assuming no axioms, postulating no principles, asserting no theorems,
and therefore adaptable, if managed adroitly, to describe any conceivable
doctrine. It has been my continual study since 1898, and I have found it of
infinite value in the study of the Tao Teh King. By its aid I was able to
attribute the ideas of Lao Tze to an order with which I was exceedingly
familiar, and whose practical worth I had repeatedly proved by using {9} it as
the basis of the analysis and classification of all Aryan and Semitic religions
and philosophies. Despite the essential difficulty of correlating the ideas of
Lao Tze with any others, the persistent application of the Qabalistic keys
eventually unlocked his treasure-house. I was able to explain to myself his
teachings in terms of familiar systems.
This achievement broke the back of my Sphinx. Having once reduce Lao Tze to
Qabalistic form, it was easy to translate the result into the language of
philosophy. I had already done much to create a new language based on English
with the assistance of a few technical terms borrowed from Asia, and above all
by the use of a novel conception of the idea of Number and algebraic and
arithmetical proceedings, to convey the results of spiritual experience to
intelligent students. It is therefore not altogether without confidence that I
present this translation of the Tao Teh King to the public. I hope and believe
that careful study of the text, as elucidated by my commentary, will enable
serious aspirants to the hidden wisdom to understand with fair accuracy what
Lao Tze taught. It must however be laid to {10} heart that the essence of his
system will inevitably elude intellectual apprehension unless it be illuminated
from above by actual living experience of the truth. Such experience is only to
be attained by unswerving application to the practices which he advocates. Nor
must the aspirant content himself with the mere attainment of spiritual
enlightenment, however sublime. All such achievements are barren unless they be
regarded as the means rather than the end of spiritual progress, and allowed to
infiltrate every detail of the life, not only of the spirit, but of the senses.
The Tao can never be known until it interpret the most trivial actions of
everyday routine. It is a fatal mistake to discriminate between the spiritual
importance of meditation and playing golf. To do so is to create an internal
conflict. 'Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing and
any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt.'((WEH NOTE: Quote from AL I,22
corrected slightly.)) He who knows the Tao knows it to be the source of all
things soever; the most exalted spiritual ecstasy and the most trivial internal
impression are from our point of view equally illusions, worthless masks, which
hide, with grotesque painted pasteboard false and lifeless, {11} the living
face of truth. Yet, from another point of view, they are equally expressions of
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