Tao Te Ching (1-12)

What called my attention, while reading these pages, was the ‘ten thousand things’. What are they? Should they exist, or are they just something of moral/thought? To avoid curiosity, it doesn’t help either, that that phrase has been our topic in class since last week or something.

Within the text I found two citations that have perhaps might answer these questions.

The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
(2)

First of all, it is ironic compared to the phrase before it; that talks about ‘doing nothing’. Now, here, these ten thousand things do, since they sometimes rise, and sometimes fall. I guess everything sometimes rises, and falls, in the sense that, if living, it can feel happy, and other times sad, though it can be literal, as the waved of the ocean. So all these types of ‘rising and falling’, classify under the ten thousand things, and ‘without cease’, because as time passes, things shall change, for the good or the bad.

Heaven and earth are impartial;
They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
(5)

To understand this, I shall say that we’d have to get what is the superiority that heaven and earth have above everything, so see whether what they ‘think’ about the ten thousand things is valid or not. If they are impartial, meaning neutral, means that they accept any culture. And it’s true; since the Earth is filled with millions of cultures, and different ‘kinds’ of people. Yet, they see the ten thousand things as ‘straw dogs’. What I could understand of that term, it that they see these ‘things’ as careless, ‘empty’ beings. Dogs, because they might be wild, improper, messy.

I’d say the ten thousand things is the world, again. Everything that composes it. And this number will vary and increase differently, depending on what are we referring too. Shall we include the atoms and cells? They do compose stuff, that, I guess, composed the universe. But it’s sure that the things are more than just ten thousand, whether we counted every plant, every fish in the ocean, every human.

There is some kind of superiority from heaven towards ‘things’. But why are they superior for? For being neutral? Aren’t plants and fish neutral too? Well, we can certainly say that, though, humans aren’t neutral, so therefore they are allowed to be under some superior level—in which ‘they’ are neutral. I say humans are not this way, because, each, depending on their culture, only care about theirs, and tend to think weird of other customs and beliefs.

I only could find humans to be not-neutral and act as ‘straw dogs’. But then again, if the ten thousand things contain not only the physical, but as well morality and other thoughts, then they would all be biased too—favouritism, discrimination, etc. Maybe, the ten thousand things don’t include nature at all, since it’s not likely to be a ‘straw dog’. Perhaps, it refers as the ten thousand things to be more likely, less physical, yet in the mind, therefore all of them (thoughts, feelings) classifying as not-neutral.