Chapter Fourteen

Chapter 14

Look, and it can't be seen.

Listen, and it can't be heard.

Reach, and it can't be grasped.

Above, it isn't bright.

Below, it isn't dark.

Seamless, unnamable,it returns to the realm of nothing.

Form that includes all forms,image without an image,subtle, beyond all conception.

Approach it and there is no beginning;follow it and there is no end.

You can't know it, but you can be it,at ease in your own life.

Just realize where you come from:this is the essence of wisdom.

Here is an enchantingly beautiful poem presenting the mysterious riddle of Life. It's first clue is the soon-to-be familiar concept of "Doing without trying". (We will explore it more in length as we digest other chapters.) It's the art of oneness. Letting your movements and consciousness become so grafted into something that it literally becomes a part of you so that you don't have to "try" (make a strenuous concerted effort) you just are. Part of the answer to the riddle of Life is simply Being. You know that adage from religious philosophy: "I'm a human being not a human doing."? Well I think Lu is pretty much saying the same thing here in the words: "Look, and it can't be seen.Listen, and it can't be heard.Reach, and it can't be grasped." In other, other words he is admonishing us not to try too hard to live life. It's our natural existence and really doesn't require too forceful a skill to do it right. It's something you savour; something you are routinely humbled by and awed by. It's something you already are one with, in fact. Thus any efforts to "do it right" would be overexertion. Any effort to make it a verb as in the phrase "to live" would be - according to Lu -preposterous. Because you already are living. That is why it is futile to try so hard to see it, to try so hard to hear it, or try so hard to grasp it. It is yours, young master. You already hold it fast inside you. You were born that way. You can't see it because you are deep inside it. That is why it can't be seen. You can't hear it silly, because YOU are it. You need not reach for it, young master because it is simultaneously filling and encompassing you.

You can't grasp the ocean but you can sail it to your heart's content. That is what life is like in essence. So I think he is saying that if one understands this they will be able to really live for they will not always be caught up in the overexertion of their own futile efforts to do the undoable.