On Strength

The pre­view for the new Jet Li movie quotes Lao Tsu as writ­ing, “know­ing oth­ers gives you strength, know­ing your­self makes you fear­less.” That caught my atten­tion, because I’d nev­er seen a trans­la­tion of chap­ter that put it that way. My friend Peter Shark says there is no such thing as an accu­rate trans­la­tion of the Tao Te Ching, and I tend to agree with him, but I hope that by study­ing mul­ti­ple trans­la­tions and ask­ing that I might learn some­thing worthwhile.

My favorite trans­la­tion (which has got­ten some praise from my old teacher Taigen Dan Leighton who has dis­tin­guished him­self with some excel­lent trans­la­tions from ancient Japan­ese and Chi­nese texts) is Stephen Addiss and Stan­ley Lom­bar­do’s (Hard­cov­er and Paper­back) which trans­lates those lines from Chap­ter 33 as:

Know­ing oth­ers is intelligent.
Know­ing your­self is enlightened.

Con­quer­ing oth­ers takes force.
Con­quer­ing your­self is true strength.

Oth­er trans­la­tions I have var­i­ous­ly use “wis­dom” and “enlight­en­ment” for the first pair. Stephen Mitchel­l’s pop­u­lar (and I believe deeply flawed) edi­tion revers­es both Addiss/Lombardo and Feng/English’s choice and calls con­quer­ing oth­ers “strength” and con­quer­ing self “pow­er.” This may pan­der to Mitchel­l’s touchy-feely new-age audi­ence who sees strength as sin in any con­text, but I believe that strength is unques­tion­ably a virtue. It is only the appli­ca­tion of strength into pow­er or force that has the capac­i­ty for destruction.

Today one of the largest spi­ders I’ve seen appeared in my show­er. I have a habit learned from my father, one of the rea­sons I am grate­ful to be my father’s son, not to kill bugs when a cap­ture-and-release method is avail­able and equal­ly effec­tive. The method is sim­ple: turn a drink­ing glass over on the spi­der, then slide a piece of paper or thin card­board under the rim of the glass, trap­ping your cap­tor. The glass can then be emp­tied on the ground out­side. I’ve per­formed this cap­ture-and-release many times, some­times over the objec­tion of girl­friends who want­ed the crit­ter killed.

It is usu­al­ly my first instinct to kill a spi­der. I don’t know enough about them to know how to tell a poi­so­nous spi­der from a harm­less vari­ety, and it seems that the safest and eas­i­est thing is to crush it with a fist or a shoe. Per­haps this is why Lao Tsu refers to con­quer­ing the self. The first instinct must be sup­pressed before I can act with com­pas­sion and exer­cise my strength in a non-lethal manner.

Of course if there were an actu­al threat to myself or some­one else posed by a spi­der, I’d kill it with­out hes­i­ta­tion. But what a bet­ter world to live in where there is a choice to be made instead of blind­ly killing. It’s a small thing and per­haps not all that sig­nif­i­cant, but thanks Dad. I’m glad to have learned this habit.

Besides, when left alive spi­ders kill the oth­er bugs.