Chapter 35第35章

Hold to the great image — the great formless pattern — and the whole world will come to you. It will come and suffer no harm, finding instead peace and security. Music and fine food can make a passing traveler pause, but the Tao, when spoken of, seems utterly bland and flavorless. Look for it — you can't quite see it. Listen for it — you can't quite hear it. Use it — and you'll never use it up. This is the wonderful joke of it: the most powerful thing in the universe is the most imperceptible. It's like the silence between notes that makes music possible.

Hold fast to the great image and the whole world comes to you — unharmed, at peace. Music and fine food make the passing traveler stop, but the Tao, when put into words, is bland, without flavor. This is an extraordinary epistemological claim: the most real thing is the least perceptible to the ordinary senses. You look for it and cannot see enough to identify it. You listen and cannot hear enough to grasp it. You use it and it is never exhausted. What's being described is the inexhaustibility of the transcendent object — always at the edge of perception, always more than can be apprehended, always giving without depletion. Our culture is addicted to intensity — to the loud, the bright, the flavorful. The Tao operates in the domain of subtlety that our overstimulated senses have been trained to ignore.

Wang Bi says the 'great image' is the mother of heaven’s image — neither hot nor cold, neither cool nor warm, and therefore capable of embracing and governing all things. It has no form, no distinguishing mark; it is not biased, not conspicuous. All things can come to it without being harmed; it is wondrous without being injurious. Then he makes a marvelous comparison: the depth and breadth of the Tao delights the human heart far more than music or fine food, yet these are merely things that make a passing traveler stop. The Tao, when put into words, is bland and without flavor. You look and cannot see enough of it; you listen and cannot hear enough of it. But its use can never be exhausted. Music has sound, and sound creates division — a note that is gong cannot also be shang, and so no single tone can unify the whole. That is why what has sound is not the 'great music.' What has form has limits; what has limits cannot be all-encompassing. The truly great transcends all particular expression.

Wang Bi’s reading here is a masterpiece of aesthetic metaphysics. The 'great image' is defined as the mother of heaven’s image — neither hot nor cold, formless, without bias or conspicuousness. It can encompass all things precisely because it is none of them. Then the extraordinary epistemological argument: the Tao delights the heart more than music or food, but when spoken it is bland, tasteless. You look and cannot fully see it; listen and cannot fully hear it; use it and it is never depleted. And then Wang Bi delivers the theoretical knockout: 'where there is sound, there is differentiation; where there is differentiation, one note cannot unify the whole — therefore what has sound is not the great music.' 「有聲者非大音」. This is essentially the argument that every particular expression is a limitation, every sensory manifestation a reduction of the infinite. The great image, the great music, the great form — they all transcend their named categories precisely by being imperceptible to the ordinary senses. What’s really being described is the noumenon — Kant’s thing-in-itself, two thousand years before Kant.