LAO TZU

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If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are going.

TAO YUANMING

“Returning to Live on the Farm I”

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Since my youth, what was popular didn't suit me;
my basic character was love of hills and mountains.
Mistakenly, I fell into the dusty net,
and trapped, I lost all of thirty years.
A caged bird years for the ancient forest;
a fish kept in a pond will miss old waters.
I'll clear the wasteland at the southern border,
I'll stay honest and pure, and keep to the fields.

Elms and willows shade my back eaves,
peach and plum are heaped in the front hall.
The nearest hamlet is dim in the distance;
its smoke seems reluctant to leave the village.
Dogs bark from deep within the lanes;
chickens squawk through the tops of mulberry trees.
No dust swirls through my courtyard door;
empty rooms offer abundant leisure.
For so long I've felt I lived in a prison.
I am restored, content to return to nature.


Translation by Deng Ming-Dao

T'AO CH'IEN

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Unsettled, a bird lost from the flock –
Keeps flying by itself in the dusk.
Back and forth, it has no resting place,
Night after night, more anguished its cries.
Its shrill sound yearns for the pure and distant –
Coming from afar, how anxiously it flutters!

It chances to find a pine tree growing all apart;
Folding its wings, it has come home at last.
In the gusty wind there is no dense growth;
This canopy alone does not decay.
Having found a perch to roost on,
In a thousand years it will not depart.

LAO TZU

Beauty and ugliness have one origin.
Name beauty, and ugliness is.
Recognizing virtue recognizes evil.

Is and is not produce one another.
The difficult is born in the easy,
long is defined by short, the high by the low.
Instrument and voice achieve one harmony.
Before and after have places.

That is why the sage can act without effort
and teach without words,
nurture things without possessing them,
and accomplish things without expecting merit:

only one who makes no attempt to possess it
cannot lose it.

SUN BU'ER

The beginning of the sustenance of life
Is all in yin and yang.
The limitless can open up
The light of the great limit.
Diligently polished, the mirror of the mind
Is bright as the moon;
The universe in a grain
May rise, or it may hide.

SUN BU'ER

Spirit and energy should be clear as the night air;
In the soundless is the ultimate pleasure all along.
Where there’s reality in illusion
Is illusion in reality,
For the while playing with magical birth
In the silver bowl.