Subtracting Daily
The Teaching
In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done until non-action is achieved. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.
Commentary
This chapter reverses the entire assumption of Western achievement culture and most conventional religion. Spiritual growth is not accumulation, more knowledge, more practices, more certainty, but subtraction. The ego is stripped away layer by layer.
'When nothing is done, nothing is left undone', Wu Wei at its most paradoxical. The Gita teaches the same: action performed without the ego claiming it becomes perfectly efficient. The Sikh teaching on Hukam: when you stop insisting on being the doer, the divine does through you what effort alone could never accomplish.
This is the mystical logic of kenosis, the self-emptying Eckhart made the center of his teaching. 'God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.'