Tao Te Ching

-12-

Favor and criticism attacks your serenity

and high status robs you of your dignity.

Favor and criticism goes hand in hand.

Once favored by someone for something,

quick is the mind to try to find a worthy cause to criticize. 

Once favored, those with a high status

often criticize what is not worth criticizing

and favor what is not worth adoring.

Once criticized, those with a high status

favor themselves over favoring and criticizing no one. 

Why do you want to have a high status?

Is it because you think there is

a self to favor or criticize?

All troubles stem from a belief

in a self or in a number of selves.

If there is no self, then what troubles do exist?

Those who are noble in the Tao

and utilize such a quality

to serve the world draw every good quality

that is inherit in the world to them.

Those who are loving in the Tao

and utilize such a quality

to serve the world are fully worthy

of receiving the trust of harmony.

-13-

What is not seen when seen is unobtrusive.

What is not heard when heard is rarefied. 

What is not felt when felt is subtle.

Merging into one, what is above us

is not luminous and what is below us 

is not unclarified.

Recurring within recurrences

and unnameable among nameable objects,

everything that was you becomes similar to nothingness.

Beyond all states, while being in one state,

an image of nothingness gives rise to

an infinite amount of abstracted phenomena.

Whether facing the Tao

or following the Tao,

the Tao remains as invisible as it was

before it or you existed.

The basis of the Tao

is what is in the ancient and far past.

Directing the mind to the present,

the ancient is as ancient

as the present 

and the present is as present as the ancient.

Copyright - The Blue Cross And Shining Sunset Academy