Sublime

The Sage puts his own views behind so ends up ahead He stays a witness to life so he endures What could he grab for that he does not already have? What could he do for himself that the universe itself has not already done?

The xiāoyáo peng is grand because it’s free; it’s free because it’s beyond ambition.

Practice not-doing and everything will fall into place. —LAO-TZU, Tao Te Ching

Throughout the Tao Te Ching he ridicules such lofty human ideals as benevolence, piety, loyalty, and morality, condemning as wholesale artifice all social conventions and scoffing at the notion that people can be ruled by ideology. He points out that the very need for rule by law and threat of punishment indicates that society has already reached

To be content with what you have is to never be disgraced, And to know when to stop is how you avoid catastrophe. This is the only way to endure.