This semester I am doing a tutorial on ancient Chinese philosophy.  For the next two weeks a dozen students and I will be reading and thinking about the Tao Te Ching.  Of course, I read and think about the Tao Te Ching all the time, but it nice to have my main intellectual pursuit and my daily teaching responsibilities overlap so neatly.

    In any event, while reading through the text last night yet again I found myself contemplating passage 4:

Way is empty.
Use it: it never needs filling.
An abyss so deep
it seems the ancestor to the ten thousand things,

it blunts edges
loosens tangles,
softens glare,
mingles dust.

A clarity so clear it only seems real,

whose child could it be?  Apparently
it precedes gods and creators.

     It is that idea of Way being empty that struck me.  Way is, as mentioned below, vast.  It is, in its most cosmic expression, something like the unfolding of all things, being and nonbeing, altogether now.  It is meant to encompass all.  As such, it is full of everything; it is everything in all fullness and richness and complexity.  If it is the expression of all things together in all fullness, how then can it be empty?

      Two ideas come to mind here.  One is at the cosmic level.  In contemporary physics the notion of universe is meant to include everything that physically exists, in which all galaxies fit as well as antimatter.  It is, in other words, full.  Yet at the same time, due to its vast expanse, the experience of the universe is emptiness.  There is an extraordinary amount of space between and around the observable things.  Maybe that is close to what the Tao Te Ching means when it asserts that Way is simultaneously and continuously both empty and vast.

     Another idea put forward by Robert Henricks, in his book Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching, gets at the emptiness of Way.  I will quote it at length here (pp. xx-xxi):

There is an analogy that works well in helping us see exactly what kind of thing the Tao is and how it works.  In that analogy the Tao resembles an untended and uncared-for ("uncultivated") field, and the varieties of wildflowers that grow in such a field represent the ten thousand things.  Were you to go to such a field in the winer, you would see only brown soil or white snow.  The field appears to be one in essence, undifferentiated, and "empty" of all forms of life.  Nonetheless, should you return to that field in May or June, you would discover that a marvelous transformation had occurred, the field now being filled with all kinds of wildflowers.  There are, as it were, "ten thousand" different varieties of flowers, with each species (dandelion, nightshade, chickory, etc.) and each individual in each of the species being somehow unique in color and shape.  And you now know that what had appeared to be devoid of life in the winter was in fact a very fecund womb, containing within itself in its oneness the seeds and roots of all different things. 

Moreover, the work of the field does not end with springtime creation.  For the field continues throughout the summer to care for and nourish each of its "children," supplying them with the water and nutriments that are vital for life.  And in this nurturing work, the field cares for all of the flowers without discrimination, and it takes no credit for all that it does.  The brown soil is always  in the background and "unseen," our eyes being dazzled by the colors and forms of the flowers.  Finally, the field accomplishes all that it does "without taking any action" (wu-wei): that is to say, we never see the soil actively doing anything; all that happens seems to happen on its own "by nature."…

      We could also say that the underlying field, Way, never really loses its quality of emptiness, even when it is full of flowers.  Beneath the beauty of the flowers it retains its nature and, in the fall when the flowers return to Way, that emptiness again expresses itself more directly and obviously.  The point, however, is that even in fullness it continues to be empty.   It is both at the same time.  Any notion of contradiction between the two qualities of emptiness and fullness is simply a function of our human logic, which is incapable of apprehending the completeness of Way.

      Or maybe this analogy speaks to me because I live in a rural setting with many open fields which are, at this time of year, alternating between the brown of the plain earth and the white of the cold snow.   The emptiness all around me now will soon explode into the fullness of Spring.  And the new life will dazzle and delight me.  But if I really appreciated Way, I would look with the same wonder and happiness at the apparently bleak winter fields.  They seem empty and lifeless but they are, in fact, full and vital, which Way will reveal to us in due course.