On Saturday night my summer students and I took in the Williamstown Theater Festival’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.  It was a very good show.  Performances across the board were strong, and the director effectively drew out the discomforting interweave of humor and pathos.  The reviews were a bit rough, but I guess it’s their job to be more critical than the average viewer like myself.

      Today we return to class and our reading of the Tao Te Ching.  So, it is quite natural, for me at least, to have a Taoist take on Chekhov running through my head this morning.  Here are some ideas.

      The central Moscow trope – the yearning to leave the cramped small town for the energy and excitement of the city – would elicit an immediate Taoist response: you don’t need to travel to find Way; you can be perfectly full and content in your Integrity precisely where you are with what you have and in what you are doing, whatever it is.   That’s the theme of passage 47 of the Tao Te Ching:

You can know all beneath heaven
though you never step out the door,
and you can see the Way of heaven
though you never look out the window.

The further you explore, the less you know.

So it is that a sage knows by going nowhere,
names by seeing nothing,
perfects by doing nothing.

     But no one in the play, except perhaps the elderly servant woman, thinks this way.  Each is chasing some desire or another, each is too busy obsessing over what might be instead of simply opening themselves to what is.  Much tragedy ensues.  And much philosophizing.   All of which is met by the refrain of the character Ivan Chebutykin, the drunken soldier-doctor: “What difference does it make?”  Now there’s a Taoist line.  Brings to mind this excerpt from passage 20:

If you give up learning, troubles end.

How much difference is there
between yes and no?
And is there a difference
between lovely and ugly?…

    Of course, Chebutykin is not a Taoist: that is why he can’t really accept his own insight and drinks himself numb instead.

     No, the single Taoist character, the one figure who escapes the suffering and angst by avoiding high and glamorous expectations is the elderly servant woman, Anfisa.  She is driven out of the house by the shrewish nouveau-riche sister-in-law., but lands on her feet with Olga and, at the end of the play as despair descends on all of the three sisters, she declares herself the happiest woman alive.  She is an embodiment of passage 43:

The weakest in all beneath heaven gallops through the strongest,
and vacant absence slips inside solid presence.

I know this by the value of nothing’s own doing.

The teaching without words,
the value of nothing’s own doing:
few indeed master such things.

     Few indeed: not the three sisters….