It Gets Cold Outside of the Castle

Buddhist monastery among shacks, Sichuan, China      (copyright KB 2007)

                                  

不出户，知天下                                               [bú chῡ hὺ， zhῑ tiᾱn xiὰ]

不窥牖，见天道                                               [bú kuῑ yo᷃u，jὶan tiᾱn dὰo]

其出弥远，其知弥少                                       [qί chῡ mί yua᷃n，qί zhῑ mί sha᷃o]

是以圣人不行而知，                                       [shὶ yῐ shѐng rén bú xὶng ér zhῑ]

不见而名，无为而成                                       [bú jὶan ér mίng, wú wѐi ér chéng]

               
                                      -老子，道德经47章 [lăo zĭ  dὰo dé jīng 47 zhᾱng]

Not leaving the home, know all under heaven

Not looking out the window, meet the way of heaven

Those who travel far know less

The holy person doesn't walk yet arrives,

Doesn't look yet sees, doesn't act yet accomplishes

                                 -Lao Zi, Dao De Jing [The Way] part 47

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I usually sum up this passage simply by saying, "the more you travel, the less you know", which quite often is met with scoffs and smirks of disgust.  People hardly like to think of their travels as the path to less knowledge. However, is it not true that the larger your world becomes, the less you will understand about it?
 

Boiled down, the claim is basically made on the terms of relativity.  It's not that traveling leaves you with less quantitative knowledge, but certainly with less relative knowledge.  Lao Zi should be considered the Einstein of 500 B.C., because much of his thought -such as this one - teeters on the absolutes of physics and relativity. 

I have driven people absolutely crazy because at one point the only thing I could ever utter was, "Nobody really knows anything at all".  Those people considered it very cynical and dark; I happen to consider it realistic.  Who's preference is it to pretend that they know everything, and deny the mystery that indisputably surrounds them?   I've traveled a fair share, and I have come to this "sad" reality that the world is still large and still mostly misunderstood.  I find it sad that many people reach a certain age after schooling and decide they can't be taught anymore and they know everything they'll ever need to know.  Any information they come across which they've previously encountered they are quick to compartmentalize and classify.  Anything outside of their experience is ignored, criticized or even ridiculed.  Bigots, racists and neoconservatives are born from this lot.  The rest of us allow ourselves the privilege of humility, which often precedes big, open gates to further and deeper knowledge. 

Lao Zi speaks of not opening the door, and not peering out the window, and not acting.  In fact, he tells us that a holy person resists such temptation, and knows the ways of heaven as a consequence.  Really?  Locking ourselves in a small room without the temptation to peer outside is a path to heaven?  Relativity strikes again.  What is your definition of heaven?   What is your definition of a holy person, or sage, or saint?   The last three terms are all common translations of Lao Zi's word, shѐng rén.   Aren't the true monks of all faiths just lock-up hermits who indulge in their own little world of gospel and gnosticism?  Do they not honestly believe that they are on the highway to heaven?  Furthermore, does Lao Zi consider himself one, or is he just giving us a matter-of-fact discernment between the holy and those who peer through windows, bust through doors, and make love on rooftops?  Judging from his knowledge of both sides, I'd bet that Lao Zi was a real party animal. 

An apt illustration for this chapter 47 of the Dao De Jing is our common understanding of the second law of thermodynamics.  You might recall this law as entropy, or basically the fact that warm air molecules are continuously searching outward and expanding through cold space to warmify all air to an eventuality known as universal "heat death". 

The classic example of this law is drawn here: 

Here we have two rooms isolated from each other by a closed gate.  Room A contains cold air molecules and Room B contains hot air molecules.  Notice how heat molecules are much more active than cold ones.

Opening the gate causes the heat molecules to rush into Room A, creating a mixture throughout both rooms.  The second law of thermodynamics states that this process is permanent and irreversible.  It is "entropy". 

In both the above physics experiment and Lao Zi's passage, the "gate" is the instrumental piece.  Once the door is opened, there is no going back, not even by act of god.   Once you mix airs, once you walk outside, you will forever lack the purity you had previously mastered.  Consider it the fall of Eden, virgin sex, or Ernest Hemingway's first drop of alcohol.  

A Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell, the author of the previous thought experiment, asserted in 1867 that the only way to re-separate the mixture into hot and cold compartments would be to have a little man, or "demon" operating the door, letting hot air molecules travel back into room B and preventing cold air molecules from leaving room A.  However, he went on to describe that if a cold air molecule happened to dress up as a busty, blonde madame, the demon might incidentally allow her into his "B" room.

You know, Adolf Hitler attempted to be something like the physical manifestation of Maxwell's Demon?   He was terrified of a "gray race", a mixture of bloods.  And so he tried to isolate the races, re-separate them into separate rooms.   He made a great effort, but failed, obviously.    If he had studied some physics, he may have realized the futility of his plight.  All racists are equally as ignorant.  Quite obviously, humanity is ultimately one, and no mustache is gonna break us down.

Lao Zi makes no mention of a mad dictator who decides what passes through the gate and what does not.  He only mentions the holy person, who shuts the door, hides the key, and lives out his days in constant battle with the little demon that constantly pushes him to take just a little peekity peek-peek into the other side.

Further examples of this allegory are everywhere around us.   Have you ever heard the Hans Christian Andersen story about the king who goes outside his castle to find a "real" peasant wife?  Well, all the women thrown at him in the castle are drab, fake and basically a harem of suck-ups.   What does he do?  He opens the gate, he exits his little court of "perfection" to find an honest and flawed peasant wife.  The only way he's able to do so is to dress up like a peasant himself,  gain some poor, unknowing girl's trust, and then take her back to the castle where he reveals his true self and completely crushes everything the girl had ever known about him, therefore losing her trust forever.  Can anybody spell Cassanova?  

 Adam & Eve not thrilled to go

Once you open those gates, there's no going back, my friend.  The more you travel, the less you know.  Voltaire's Candide and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas both preside on this theme as well.  Take the Buddha himself, who in a mid-life crisis exited princely life (divorced the wife) to see beyond the castle walls and stalk the endless plains in search of truth.  Much of America's rich are sitting around in Act I of this parable - most are unlikely to ever see Act II  - fattening up their mansions with pools and minibars and Nintendo Wiis.  And no, going to Honolulu, Hong Kong or Dubai where you stay in the Hilton does not qualify as passing through the gates. 
                                                                                                                       
Ladies and gentlemen, who of the above are you?   The monk or ascetic locked up with their obsessions, forever entertaining a self-righteous claim (or fear) that there is nothing worthy of them outside of their own trappings?  Sickly and pathological masters of their own domain?  Or are you the untreatable searcher, who makes it their obsession to open doors and acquire knowledge and experience despite whether it is readily understood or not?  A sage who seeks to touch all yet continues to know nothing, striving through that constant downpour of humiliation?  Perhaps you belong to the scariest bunch of all, the middlemen, the spectators, the ineffectual and asexual pods?  Neither here nor there, neither going nor staying.  Your plodding indifference encourages mustached demons to draw lines, divide us all and bomb the other side with hot projectiles.  Never condemning wrong, never championing right, yet taking credit and reward for both.  

The human condition, still horse-playing around in its own hypnotic immaturity, asks this question of us now.  Shall we shut out the unseen, reject the unknown and ridicule the misunderstood, or give up our delusions as to accept defeat and throw ourselves fearlessly into a godless nature that will without a doubt stupefy us all?    

KB