Chapter 52第52章

The world had a beginning which we may call the Mother of the world. Having found the mother, you thereby know the children. Knowing the children, return and hold fast to the mother — then to the end of your days you will be free from danger. Block the openings, shut the doors, and to the end of life you will not be exhausted. Open the openings, meddle in affairs, and to the end of life you cannot be saved. Seeing the small is called clarity. Keeping to the yielding is called strength. Use the outer light to return to the inner radiance, and you will not be left exposed to harm. This is called inheriting the eternal.

The world has a beginning — call it the mother of the world. Having attained the mother, thereby know the children. Knowing the children, return and keep the mother — to the end of your life you will not be in danger. Block the openings, close the gates — your whole life you will not toil. Open the openings, meddle in affairs — your whole life you cannot be saved. This is the perennial instruction of the mystical traditions: turn inward. The mother is the source — the unmanifest ground. The children are the phenomena — the ten thousand things. Know the phenomena but KEEP the source. Don't get lost in the display. Close the sensory gates, not to deny experience, but to maintain contact with what generates experience. Use the light of the manifest world to return to the luminosity of the source. This is called practicing the eternal.

Wang Bi’s commentary is all about the relationship between mother and child, root and branch. The 'mother' is the beginning of all under heaven. Once you have found the mother, you can understand the children — that is, the myriad things. Once you understand the children, you return to guarding the mother, and then you will not be endangered for the rest of your life. 'Block the openings, close the gates, and you will not toil your whole life through' — this means shutting the doorways through which desire enters. But if you open those channels, if you busily multiply your affairs, then though you may work your entire life, you cannot be saved. Seeing the small is called clarity; keeping to the soft is called strength. This is the governance of the inner life: the real work is not in grand external undertakings but in the subtle, ongoing attention to what is already close at hand.

Wang Bi’s commentary here is structured around the mother-child metaphor as an epistemological principle. The 'mother' is the origin, the source. Once you have attained the mother — the root principle — you can know the children, which is to say the myriad manifestations. Once you know the children, you return to guard the mother, 'and to the end of your life you will not be endangered.' Then the practical instruction: 'Block the openings, close the gates' — shut the channels through which desire enters — and you will not labor your whole life. But 'open the openings, multiply affairs' and 'though you toil your whole life, you cannot be rescued.' Wang Bi is describing two fundamentally different orientations to existence: root-ward and branch-ward. Root-ward: close the sensory channels, guard the source, effortless endurance. Branch-ward: open the channels, chase proliferating affairs, irreversible exhaustion. 'Seeing the small is clarity; keeping to the soft is strength.' The real power is in the subtle, the interior, the barely-perceptible. This is the Taoist inversion of every value the extroverted, acquisitive, sensation-seeking culture holds dear.