Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. If the way is made clear, it is not The Way. If you have insight, you use your inner eye, your inner ear, to pierce to the heart of things — and have no need of intellectual knowledge.
Your mind must become One. Do not try to understand with your ears, but with your heart. Indeed, not with your heart, but with your soul.
Heaven does nothing. Its non-doing is its serenity. Earth does nothing. Its non-doing is its rest. From the union of these two non-doings, all actions proceed — all things are made. How vast, how invisible… this coming to be!
All things come from nowhere, how vast, how invisible… no way to explain it. All beings in their perfection are born in their non-doing. Hence it is said, Heaven and Earth do nothing. Yet, their is nothing they do not do. Where is the person who can attain to this non-doing?
The portal of God is non-existence. All things sprang from non-existence. Existence could not make existence. It must have proceeded from non-existence. And non-existence and nothing are One. Herein is the abiding place of the sage…
Birth is not a beginning. Death is not an end. There is existence without limitation. There is continuity without a starting point. We are born from a quiet sleep; and we die to a calm awakening.
If one is true to one’s inner Self, and follows its wisdom, who is without a teacher?
The wise one knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream, than to be emperor of the whole world.
The saying goes, the sage rests, truly rests and is at ease. This manifests itself in calmness and detachment, so that worries and distress cannot affect them. Nothing unpleasant can disturb them. Their virtue is complete. And their spirit is not stirred up.