In an episode of the animated TV series King of the Hill, 13 year old Bobby Hill takes up the art of growing roses. His father, Hank, initially disapproves as it has nothing to do with sports, but at the urging of his wife to use this hobby as an opportunity to connect with his son, the two eventually enter one of Bobby’s roses in a flower competition. Bobby has to this point fallen under the philosophical spell of Lao Tzu as espoused by two potheads whose somewhat shady business Bobby and his father have mistaken for a flower shop. The two have urged Bobby to follow the teaching of the Tao Te Ching: "The wise stay behind and go ahead. They want nothing and have everything.” Bobby has learned and accepted that the fundamental premise of Taoism is directly oppositional to American ideology: “competing against others is not the way to happiness.
Hank has failed to understand the vitality and necessity of the twofold aspect of everything. According to the precepts the Tao philosophy, the best way to assure a loss is to put all of one’s efforts into the drive to win. The most inviolate tenet outlined in the Tao Te Ching is the assumption that one has the power to affect the natural course of the universe. Any attempt to remove the yin from the yang (or the yang from the yin) and the consequence of attempting not just what is impossible, but what is futile, is a disappointment directly tied directly to refusing to accept with serenity the existence and fundamental nature of this duality.
The twofold aspect of everything that is the foundation of Tao Te Ching mandates disappointment in competition. The nature of competition is the imposition of human will upon the natural course of nature. The consequences of competition, however, is the result of that natural course. In any competition there has to be a winner and loser; the loser will inevitably react with disappointment while the victory celebrates when in fact neither should be celebrating or disappointment. Humans can only attempt imposition of their will, but can never actually do so. The result of any competition is the natural result of the playing out of these attempts at imposition. A celebration of victory is really only a celebration of the way things were meant to be. Likewise, a loss is the way things were meant to be. It makes as little sense to be disappointed over the outcome as it does to celebrate it.
The duality represented by the symbol of the yin and the yang is fundamental to the few aspects of Taoism that can be irrefutably claimed. The entire premise of Taoism is constructed upon such a profoundly spiritual preoccupation with the concept represented by the yin and the yang that it allows those principles to enter into the realm of official religion in a way that its precursor Confucianism cannot. The yin and the yang is represented symbolically by the familiar circle curved in half with a dark side dotted with a white spot and a white side dotted with a black spot. This duality which is dependent upon each other to create wholeness and balance is as integral to Taoist philosophy as the resurrection of Jesus is to Christianity. The comparison in terms of being organized as a religion hardly ends there. Many people may believe that Taoism is a loosely organized set of mystical assertions impossible to prove and sometimes almost impossible to comprehend. That is not even close to being the case. In fact, Taoism’s divergence from Confucianism (which does more closely resemble that misconception) is the ways it evolved into a highly organized religious system to which has been added a perhaps shockingly large canon of scripture. Taoism may being with the Tao Te Ching, but it hardly ends there and is today a religion constructed upon ritual not terribly unlike Christianity or Judaism.
The essential and of elusive lesson to learn from reading the Tao Te Ching for those raised in a society which places such great value upon competition is inextricably linked to its assertion that the universe must have a black to balance out the white, a darkness to balance out the light, a bad to balance out the good and even and losers to balance out the winners. That dispensation for the bad without which the good could not be recognized is at the heart of Taoist belief. The real takeaway is that humans cannot exert any rational change in the course of nature because no matter what one would attempt to do, nature would have revealed itself.
