Message from the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (PaCET) for Sunday Meeting 15th September 2024

Dear Friends,

About two-and-a-half thousand years ago, a Chinese philosopher called Laozi, tiring of life at the corrupt Qin court, travelled to the western frontier of the kingdom. He wanted to live as a hermit in the wilderness beyond, but the gatekeeper recognised him and asked him to record his wisdom before he would allow him to leave the country. The text Laozi wrote became known as the Tao Te Ching, or ‘the book of the way’.

Having read this extraordinary work, the gatekeeper joined the sage, and the two travelled on together, arriving in India, where Laozi became a teacher of Siddhartha Gautama, commonly referred to as the Buddha.

Sadly, most of this story is entirely fictional. Modern scholars believe that the Tao Te Ching had multiple authors, Laozi didn’t exist, and Taoism and Buddhism developed quite separately.

Still, I love the Tao Te Ching, with its 81 short and cryptic texts about the Tao – the principle or force which underpins all of existence and cannot be explained. In many of these passages, the powerful simplicity of the Tao is contrasted with all the stuff which clutters up our lives and our minds – the ‘needless things’ that we’re cautioned against in Quaker Faith & Practice 19.41.

In my edition of the Tao Te Ching (translated by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo), this stuff of life is described as the ‘ten thousand things’:

‘Nameless: the origin of heaven and earth.
Naming: the mother of ten thousand things.’ (Section One)

‘Heaven and Earth are not kind:
The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.’ (Section Five)

‘Attain complete emptiness,
Hold fast to stillness.

The ten thousand things stir about;
I only watch for their going back.’ (Section 16)

These ten thousand things seem to include both our material possessions and the other attachments – ideas, words, logic – that can get in the way of our experience of being alive, of being part of the universe.

This is quite a challenge for me, as I really am very attached to ideas, words and logic. Even in writing this message, I’m trying to use words to express ideas in a logical way. But the Tao, through its use of riddles and enigmas, tells us that language will ultimately fail in the face of reality. That like the mythical Laozi, we will leave our words behind us when we cross the pass into the wilderness beyond.

‘Good travellers leave no tracks.
Good words leave no trace.’ (Section 26)

Taoism and Quakerism are both interested in silence and simplicity. In both, we find the language of ‘the way’, and an absence of doctrine and dogma. And in both, we’re encouraged to take on the weird but wonderful task of thinking and not-thinking at the same time – of trying to penetrate the mysteries of life whilst emptying our minds.

Maybe Laozi did exist, and maybe he did cross the mountains into India. Maybe he continued travelling for another two millennia, and wound up in England in the 1640s, where he had a quiet chat with the young George Fox. Maybe this is just a story. Maybe it isn’t. Taoism wants us to embrace the ambiguity, the unknowing, as the way to a deeper truth.

Jonathan Heawood

on behalf of the Pastoral Care and Eldership Team (David Hitchin, Chris Lawson, Tim Pitt-Payne, Caroline Pybus, Theresa Samms and Nancy Wall)