R: "A well-frog cannot imagine the ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar understand the Tao? He is restricted by his own learning." - Chuang-tse
This passage is particularly upsetting to me because it makes me feel like I am the scholar that can never be a part of the Tao. I keep reading this novel and all I want to do is be able to relate to the Tao and live that way but I can't. He makes it seem like we have to make ourselves more simple-minded and more able to let things slide off our sleeves without letting them worry us but I just can't seem to do that. I just wonder how other people manage. I'd like to be a Taoist but there is so much school work, extracurriculars, blah, blah, blah that are set in front of us to get into college. It's like society, the structure of human life is anti-taoist. I can't sit here and just not do something and see how it goes because if I do that I'm likely to fail not only at the task at hand but life in general. He talks about how the intelligent scholar is simply intelligent for the sake of being intelligent, or as he puts it they attain "Knowledge for the sake of Knowledge". He says that they only learn from books and never really know what they are talking about because they haven't gone out and experienced it themselves. Book smarts is an important thing to though right? I mean, I wish I had the option and go out to learn about the world through experience but no one is expecting that of high school students. right now life is about Knowledge for the sake of Knowledge and again I wish it wasn't but we have to learn this stuff at some point.. This passage along with others is making myself feel kinda bad about myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment