This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Complexity of Simplicity ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Diana Clark at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome, welcome everybody. It’s nice to see you all. I’ll just say, those of you sitting in the back on the floor, you’re perfectly welcome to stay there, but you’re also welcome to come up here if it’s a little bit easier to not be behind chairs. So you can do whatever you please.
I’d like to begin tonight by just telling a little story that’s captured in the early Buddhist literature. It’s the story of a king who had decided—maybe I’ll back up and say, kings, sometimes we can think of them as laypeople. They’re not monastics, and they have a lot of power, of course, they do, and they have a lot of wealth. So they just represent, at least in my mind, those individuals who have power and wealth.
So there’s this king who decided to renounce being a king, and he was going to be a monastic underneath the Buddha. And he took the name Bhaddiya.1 So he would do what monastics do at this time of the Buddha; they spend time meditating. They would be like a group of people practicing together, and they could hear him saying something while he was meditating. If they listened, they could hear he would be saying, “Oh, what happiness! Oh, what bliss!”
It didn’t matter where Bhaddiya, this former king, now a monk, was; he was often doing this. Whether he was out underneath a tree, whether he was in some hut, or just in different places, he was saying this, “What happiness, what bliss, oh!” while he was meditating.
So the other monks were saying, “You know, this guy, Bhaddiya, clearly he’s just not really meditating. He’s just remembering his former life. He must remember how it was so great to have all this power and all this wealth. That clearly must be what he’s doing.” And they went to talk to the Buddha and said, “There’s this guy, Bhaddiya, who keeps on saying, ‘what sukha.’”2 I’ll just say that word in Pali3 is sukha. It’s the opposite of dukkha.4 Dukkha is, you know, suffering, and I’m going like this with my arms because it encapsulates such a wide range of things. And sukha also does a wide range. It gets translated as happiness; I’m doing it as happiness and bliss here. We could say joy, some people could say pleasure. You know, sukha gets a, you know, that family of things, family of words.
So they go tell the Buddha, and then the Buddha says, “Well, ask him to come talk to me.” So Bhaddiya goes to talk to the Buddha, and the Buddha says, “Is it true, Bhaddiya, that even in the wilderness, or at the foot of a tree, or in an empty dwelling, you frequently express, you’re frequently saying, ‘Oh, what happiness! Oh, what bliss!’” Bhaddiya says, “Yes.” And then the Buddha says, “But why do you say this?”
And Bhaddiya, the former king, says, “Formerly, as the king ruling the land, my guard was well organized within and without the royal compound—without meaning like on the outside and on the inside—on the inside and outside of the royal compound, it was well guarded. It was well guarded on the inside and the outside of the city, and on the inside and the outside of the country. It was well guarded. But although I was guarded and defended in this way, I remained fearful, scared, suspicious, and nervous. But these days, even when I’m alone in the wilderness meditating, or at the foot of the tree, or in an empty dwelling, I’m not fearful. I’m not scared. I’m not suspicious. I’m not nervous. I have relaxed. I live now unruffled, and my heart free as a wild deer. It is for this reason that even when I might be in the wilderness, foot of the tree, or an empty hut, when I’m meditating, I’m frequently saying, ‘Oh, what happiness! Oh, what bliss!’”
There’s a lot that we could unpack in this story. There’s a lot of things there, but I want to emphasize that it’s this movement towards—right, he had a pretty simple life—going from having all this wealth and power that he had to protect and was feeling anxious. Right? Somebody’s going to take it, or maybe I have to prove that I deserve this kingship and, you know, fix these problems there, or, you know, do something so people don’t revolt or whatever it might be. I don’t really know what kings do, but I’m sure it’s something very important.
So we could say that he just drastically simplified his life and realized, “Oh, this is where the ease is.” And often we’re not noticing how much tension there is, and this kind of protecting in so many different ways. And so we could say that we could maybe simplify some of the teachings in this tradition as pointing into the value of simplicity. This is not a movement towards, you know, getting more and more and more, not like acquiring more stuff or not making things more and more complicated or, you know, getting more and more experiences. It’s not about that.
It turns out that there’s these basics that we refer to again and again. They get spoken about in a number of different ways. And you know, there’s some complications, right? If you want to, you can dig down into the suttas5 and learn Pali or something like this. But for those of you who don’t know, Pali is the language that the early Buddhist literature is preserved in.
So there’s these basics with this practice. And we could say one, being present for what’s actually happening now, not what the mind is saying and making up and fantasizing or remembering or something like this, but what’s actually happening right now turns out to be pretty powerful. Something that’s simple turns out, when we start to pay attention, we notice how much we’re not actually here, but we’re elsewhere. So we could say that’s one thing, that it’s a simple pointing to simplicity. We might even say Bhaddiya, this king, when he was thinking, “Oh, what happiness, what bliss,” that he was just feeling into like, “Oh yeah, right now I just have to be here experiencing this moment. I don’t have to be worried about whether the kingdom next door is going to try to throw me over, throw this kingdom over or something like that.”
And then we might say a second thing. First is maybe just to be present here. And a second basic, simple thing that we return to again and again in these teachings is: notice what’s leading to more freedom and what’s leading to less freedom. What’s leading to dukkha and what’s leading to sukha? What’s leading to—what words were here?—fearful, scared, suspicious, nervous. Like, what kind of leads to that direction, and what leads to well-being and ease, peace, freedom, awakening? And so part of the practice is to just be sensitive and notice this. And then this gets fleshed out in so many different ways, but we could kind of boil it down to just this simpleness. We don’t have to adopt some beliefs. Instead, there’s this invitation like, “Oh, go figure this out for yourself. Go experience it for yourself. Don’t take my word or a Dharma teacher’s word for what’s being said here.” But maybe what gets said here, what you hear, whether it’s in Dharma talks, Dharma books, Dharma friends, test it out for yourself by being present and noticing what leads to more ease and what leads to less ease.
So you could say that this practice so much is about letting go of what’s extra, letting go of, you know, some of these complications, quote-unquote, that we like to do. And maybe an example could be something, maybe you are attending a potluck, I’m just using this example. And let’s say that you show up and you forgot to bring something. Not that this person actually ever did that. No, I have. I have showed up like, “Oh, whoops, shoot, I was supposed to bring… I left it back at home.” So let’s say you show up and like, “Oh no, I forgot this dish that I was going to bring and I was going to share with others.”
And then the mind, we could do something like, “Oh, I can’t believe I forgot it. I’m forgetting so many things. Maybe dementia is setting in. And yeah, because I forgot where my keys were the other day. And like, maybe what am I going to do about this? Maybe I should go talk to my friend, she knows a lot of medical stuff, she would know. Yeah, but the last time I talked to her, she kind of looked at me a little bit weird, and now I’m not sure that I want to reach out to her. And okay, well, maybe I should go have therapy because clearly I’m so messed up.” And right, the mind just can go, just can go. We make stories. There is not a lot of freedom when we get stuck in those stories. I don’t want to demonize them and say it’s wrong. It’s a human tendency to do this. And this practice is how we just recognize like, “Oh yeah, this is the mind’s habit. We don’t have to believe everything it’s saying. We don’t have to go off and let it push us around and do things that it’s trying to tell us that we have to do precisely then.”
But maybe an alternative, when you realize that you forgot something to bring to a potluck, is just recognize, “Oh yeah, this feels uncomfortable. Yeah, I really wanted to share this with others. Now I can’t share it. Yeah. And now I’m going to be here and maybe everybody else brought something and I didn’t, and I’m going to feel a little bit uncomfortable there. It’s going to be a little bit awkward. I don’t like to feel awkward. It feels awkward to imagine I’m going to feel awkward.”
And then maybe there’s this way that, “Oh yeah, I can…” Maybe when you notice this, you could like, “Oh yeah, my mind wants to make me into a terrible person because I forgot, but you know, people forget things, and I forgot things. I forgot this. Can that be okay?” And then maybe, depends on the event, go to the host and say, “I apologize. You know, I really wanted to bring this. I was looking forward to sharing this with others, and now I’m showing up empty-handed. I hope that’s okay.” And if it’s not okay, the host is going to tell you, “Nope, sorry.” And if it is okay, they’re going to say, “Oh, don’t worry about it. There’s always so much food here. We’re just happy you’re here.” And there, you’re done. Right? It’s not a big complicated thing. It doesn’t have to be worrying about our mental health or what things that we should do or something like this.
So this idea, can we just be with what’s happening, including feeling the uncomfortableness of when we forget to bring something, when we don’t do something we say we’re going to do? It’s human nature to forget things. It’s also human nature to not want to feel uncomfortable, but we do. We do feel uncomfortable. Maybe we could say part of this practice is to feel comfortable with not feeling comfortable, with being uncomfortable.
So maybe I can point out that there’s this way of pointing to simplicity, of just being with what’s actually happening in this moment, and then this other moment, just returning again. Planning will happen, taking care of things will happen, thinking that we have to figure things out, it’s going to happen. But can we just be present with feeling the pressure of the chair or the cushion against the body, hearing of this voice this moment, feeling your feet on the ground? This is always available. This is always available, the simplicity of what’s happening here. Don’t worry, you will take care of the things that need to be taken care of. There’s a part of us that thinks like, “Oh no, no, no, I have to go figure this out.” And a lot of the figuring it out is just a distraction from feeling uncomfortable.
So this idea of just simplifying, just simplifying, because simplifying really supports a sense of contentment and a sense of well-being. And it’s not that this practice is only about chasing contentment and well-being or chasing good feelings, but there’s this way in which if we have a certain amount of ease, it’s much easier to not get… it’s much easier for the wisest version of ourselves to show up and to maybe like see the bigger picture and not get caught up on small things that are happening that maybe aren’t so helpful, that turn out to be extra.
All of us probably have this sense of relief if there’s a, let’s say for example, there’s a drawer in the house. A lot of households have like the junk drawer. You open it up, if you can open it up, like sometimes there’s just so much stuff in there. You open it up and there’s like this mess in there. And then for whatever reason, you feel like, “Okay, you know what, something needs to be done with this.” And you just clean it up and organize and throw things out and like, “Oh wow, here’s this, I hadn’t seen this for a while,” you know, this kind of stuff. And then you organize it, maybe you donate some of it, maybe you fix the thing that was broken that got shoved in there. Whatever it is, there’s a sense of like, “Ah, that feels good.” Right? Kind of like when there’s a little bit of a, when a mess gets some semblance of organization to it, when it gets kind of simplified in some kind of way, we all have this experience of what a good feeling it is, this relief when things that seem messy get simplified.
So this movement towards making things simpler, simpler, whether it’s our actual experience, we make them simpler by just being with the experience of the moment, which I’m pointing to the body, the usually the bodily experiences. Or the simplification is, it’s usually the mind that is making things more complicated. Or maybe there’s this way in which we just find ourselves being busy a lot, doing one thing after another. It’s not uncommon for it to feel like, you know, being busy is a badge of honor, a semblance of how important we are and how people need us or something like this, to be busy.
So this pointing towards simplicity, this movement towards simplicity, because it supports well-being and ease. But there’s also an unhelpful side of simplicity. There’s this way in which it can be really helpful with tremendous support, and then there’s a way in which there’s a certain type, a certain way in which we might do simplicity that turns out to not be helpful at all. In fact, it can kind of take us away from greater peace and ease. And that is when we bring this idea of simplicity or this wish to make things less complicated in some way, and that supports us, kind of propels us into having this dichotomous thinking, or this way in which we have this bifurcated thinking. Okay, there’s good and bad. There’s only two things. And if it’s not in the good, it’s in the bad. Or if it’s in the bad, it’s certainly not anything good about it.
There’s this way in which we can have this polarized thing, like things are either, you know, at the ends of, if we wanted to say a spectrum, there’s nothing in the middle. There’s no nuances or gradation. It’s just good or bad, right or wrong, yes or no. You know, these ways we do this. This is a simplification, and often humans, we like to do this when sometimes when we’re feeling uncomfortable, like, “Oh, that’s bad. They are bad. And this over here is good, and we are good.” This terrible thing that can happen when we do this, this way in which there’s like, yeah, we know what’s right, and all those knuckleheads over there, I don’t know, they clearly don’t know what’s right. Yeah, we got it all figured out, and you guys, I don’t know, you have some problems, clearly. Right? It’s this sense. And then as soon as that starts to show up, an “us versus them,” “me versus the world,” “me versus you,” then this is where nervousness and anxiousness and fear and scared comes in. In a subtle way, in some ways we like to have this self-righteous feeling like, “Yeah, we know what it is,” but it also requires, in a subtle way that we’re not paying attention to… there’s so much data about this, how humans, they will just ignore information that doesn’t support the sense that they are the good guys and everybody else is the bad guys. They will just completely ignore and forget it, or they’ll make up some twisted logic to explain away something that doesn’t quite work.
This simplification is not the way forward. It’s never quite like this, that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. How could it be? Humans, we are, we have complexities, we have ranges of things in our life. And so earlier I was talking about dukkha versus sukha, like leading to well-being and not leading to well-being. This also is kind of, you could say, is a dichotomy and a bifurcation, but this is pointing to like what leads to greater freedom and ease and what doesn’t. That’s different than, “This person is a good person, that person is a bad person.” This, what leads to greater ease, is for all of us to discover. There doesn’t have to be a value judgment on an individual or a group of individuals. But when we start to have these binary perspectives about ourselves and others, it’s a way in which there’s this, we kind of let go of any idea that there things could be nuanced, the nuance of things, or we let go of things that are not extremes. And there’s somebody on YouTube that sometimes says, “Yeah, I’m the alt-middle.” Like this feeling, right? You know, just the fact to be in the middle is to be an alternative instead of on these ends of these political spectrums.
And there’s something that happened to me a number of years ago that had a really big impact on me regarding this, and I want to share this little story. When I was in graduate school, it’s common in the sciences and probably in other fields too, that we would get together and discuss the latest literature, you know, the latest findings. And every week, the students and the professors would get together and we would choose one paper and we would evaluate the experiments that were done and the data and how they interpreted the data and stuff like this, right? Just to keep abreast of the field and to learn about what other laboratories are doing.
So this had such a big impact on me that I remember this, that we were looking at the paper that was discussing prions. Some of you might remember there was mad cow disease. This was in the early ’90s, and I remember in the UK they had to kill all their cattle or something like this. It was a really big deal, and people were dying, humans were dying, and the cattle were dying, and people didn’t understand. And we were looking at this paper that was talking about prions, which is like a novel infectious agent that has this novel mechanism of action, not a virus, not a bacteria, nothing like this. It was something completely new that we had never heard of before. But all of us, I remember us reading this paper that was published in the most prestigious journal, we were making fun of them. We were laughing at them. “Oh my gosh, they did this experiment, but they interpreted it this way. Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. Clearly this data really points to that.” We just couldn’t get our minds around that something new was happening. And right, we were all scientists that had dedicated our lives to trying to help cure human diseases, smart people that were just, you know, trying to work things, think about things and work with it. But we had this bias that here’s something new that we hadn’t thought of before, we hadn’t seen before, and it clearly was wrong. And we were mean. I remember in this, we were, the people that weren’t in the room, but we were like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how did they get this published,” blah, blah, blah.
The person won the Nobel Prize a few years later for this. Right? But we were so sure of ourselves because of just something different. And so this made me really realize all these times in which I think like, “Okay, I clearly know, and all my friends clearly know too, we’re all in the same…” Maybe we don’t. Maybe we don’t know. Maybe we’re not so sure. So when we get into this dichotomous thinking like, “Okay, we’re the good guys and those are the bad guys,” maybe not. Maybe it’s not so clear. Maybe there’s something that we don’t know yet, or maybe, yeah, we just don’t know. And it’s not the way forward. It’s not the way forward. Instead, in order to help us support that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, this kind of gross simplification, we have to start attributing all kinds of terrible stuff to whenever they do something good and helpful. We have to dismiss it or say, “Oh, they only did that because their motives must have been something terrible,” or something like this. And we have to dismiss when our motives turn out to be not very good or something like this.
So there’s a poem that points to this that’s not by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, surprise! I’m often citing her poems. This poem that I found really powerful, really powerful. It’s by Yehuda Amichai.6 I think I’m pronouncing that correctly. And it’s translated by Byron Katie’s husband, Stephen Mitchell.7 It’s by Yehuda Amichai, and it’s called “The Place Where We Are Right.”
From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring.
The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.
I’ll read it again. “The Place Where We Are Right” by Yehuda Amichai.
From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring.
The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.
Right, in this place where we are right, implicit in that is there’s that other place where you are wrong. If we have, “we are right,” this place, then there’s that other place where they are wrong. And this creates the conditions for fear and hatred for those people that are wrong over there. This is not a world we want to live in that’s full of fear and hatred. And this is what happens when we’re making this, “they’re wrong over there.” I’m not saying that everything they’re doing is perfect. I’m saying the simplification of “we are right and you are wrong” is not the way forward.
I love that this line, “but doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.” So doubts, maybe there’s like this room for, “Hmm, I’m not so sure. It seems like this right now. This is what makes sense to me. I think this is my understanding. I can’t see any other way to interpret it but this way. This is my current hypothesis.” But this is very different, all these things I’m saying are alternatives to “I’m right.” You can say there’s, when there’s doubts, there’s this feeling, “You know, this makes sense to me,” but it’s leaving some room for like, “Well, maybe there’s some other data I’ll have or something else that I’ll learn that’ll make a difference.”
And the poet is saying, “like a mole.” So moles are quiet, underneath, unseen. Sometimes we think like, “Oh, these are pests,” and if you’re a gardener, you might think that they’re pests, but they also serve a really important function, right? They are underneath, breaking up the soil and aerating the soil. They’re important. They’re an important part of the ecosystem, but they were underneath, kind of invisible, breaking up the soil. And then there’s plows that are on the top of the soil, doing the same thing, like breaking them up. And this is very intentional. A farmer or somebody who wants to cultivate a particular plant, for example, intentionally goes in and has a plow, also from above.
So this way that that place that gets hard and trampled… you know, when I think the poem, the poem has this word, “the place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.” I’m thinking like schoolyards, prison yards, you know, this place where there’s a lot of people trampling, maybe behaving in so many different ways. But the ways that they get broken up and where the trampling doesn’t lead to hardness and stuckness is with things coming from below and things from coming above: moles and plows.
And it might be that some individuals, maybe in the world, out in the world, not just in their personal life, but out in the world, they want to, they feel like, “Yeah, there’s something that’s not right, and I want to make a difference.” Maybe they are people who will be like plows, who will in an obvious way break up the soil. They will make big changes. And then maybe there will be people who are in the greater world who are just quietly like the moles underneath, just breaking up the soil and aerating and allowing the soil to make room for flowers, where flowers, you know, something beautiful and, of course, an essential part of a plant’s life cycle. But maybe there’s some happiness or joy in flowers.
So whether we’re talking about, “we are right and they are wrong,” maybe there’s something that we feel like, “Oh, I don’t want to say that everybody’s right and everything is perfectly fine.” I just don’t want us to simplify things and just slap a label on them and then be dismissive of them. But if we feel like, “Oh, there’s something that could be better, that could be changed, that maybe needs something,” maybe it’s clear to us what is needed, then maybe there’s some obvious thing that we can do in the world. Or maybe we’re the type of person—I happen to be one of these type of people, I’m a little bit more quiet and introverted, and I’m a little bit more kind of underneath trying to plant seeds, breaking up soil. And I kind of view giving Dharma talks as this is my way of like, “Okay, maybe this is a way in which can help create the conditions in which new things can grow, which something new can happen so that the yard isn’t just hard and trampled in this place where we are right.”
Because there’s these awakening factors, these qualities that we all have that really support awakening. Investigation is one of them. Investigation, this looking into, getting curious about, engaging with. We need that. That’s different than “we are right, they are wrong.”
And today, of course, is MLK Day. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he was in his way working with the ways that there was just terrible, terrible oppression of people, so, so many terrible things happening. And in his own way, he was trying to address this. Let’s not just say, “Okay, black people are this way and white people are that way,” or simplifying things in that way.
So as humans, we like to simplify things. It feels better. And sometimes it feels better in the short term to say like, “Oh, they’re wrong,” but it also kind of creates the conditions in which there’s this way in which then we have to be always supporting like, “they are wrong and I’m right.” And maybe like this king in the beginning of the story, he had this certain amount of anxiety. Or I’ll just say in my own experience, as soon as I make other people like they’re wrong, then I’m afraid of them. Like I feel like I have to get away from them. I don’t want to be near them. And then I stop listening or respecting or caring.
“Hatred never ends with hatred.” This is an ancient law in the Dhammapada.8 And Martin Luther King said a version of this: “Hatred never ends with hatred.” How could it?
So maybe the complexity of simplicity, it can be simple in terms of coming to what our experience is, not getting lost in what’s extra, noticing what’s extra, but not allowing ourselves to simplify things into where we are just slapping a label on people or ourselves and then just thinking that’s sufficient and not really being present for what’s happening or being nuanced, recognizing nuance and complexity that’s there with people.
Maybe I’ll read this poem one more time. “The Place Where We Are Right” by Yehuda Amichai.
From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring.
The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.
So I’ll end there and I’ll open it up to see if there are any questions or comments. Thank you.
Any comments or questions?
Questioner 1: Well, Diana, yes. Thank you for your talk. It reminded me, I used to have a poster in my office that said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Diana Clark: There you go.
Questioner 1: It’s by Albert Einstein.
Diana Clark: Nice. Okay, there you go. There you go. “But not simpler.” Yeah.
Questioner 2: I’m not sure I got the last line. In the meaning, is the ruined house the destroyed preconceptions?
Diana Clark: Yeah, this is such a… thank you, Jay, this is a good question. “And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.” You know, this is how I’m interpreting it. It’s… well, actually, I should ask you, do you have an interpretation?
Questioner 2: That’s where I went, meaning like once I give up all that, like all my preconceived notions, which is the bad house, if you want to think of it that way, then I’ll hear the true inner voice come through. And that’s the whisper that I’m hearing. You know, it’s always the true voice is hard to hear. So the whisper for me, I’m reading it that way. I don’t know if that’s…
Diana Clark: Yeah, yeah, I like it. I like it. I was also thinking that the shouting will have stopped, so then you can hear a whisper also. Right? You know, people… yeah, I was like, well, there’s a number of ways I could go with this. I don’t know if there’s some other ways too.
Questioner 2: Probably. Have you read his translation of the Tao Te Ching?9
Diana Clark: You know, I read that so many years ago, but it’s not in my head now.
Questioner 2: He has one of the best translations for the Tao Te Ching.
Diana Clark: Yeah, okay. Thank you. Stephen Mitchell translating the Tao Te Ching. And apparently he translates a number of different languages, so I didn’t know this. Any other comments?
Okay, so I’m wishing you all a wonderful evening. Thank you. And if you’d like, you’re welcome to come up here and talk to me. Otherwise, have a great week.
Bhaddiya: An arahant who was formerly a king of the Sakyan republic. The original transcript said “badia.” ↩
Sukha: A Pali word often translated as “happiness,” “pleasure,” “ease,” or “bliss.” ↩
Pali: An ancient Indo-Aryan language, which is the scriptural language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism. ↩
Suttas: Discourses or sermons of the Buddha. They are collected in the Sutta Pitaka, one of the three “baskets” of the Pali Canon. ↩
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000): An Israeli poet, considered by many to be one of Israel’s greatest modern poets. ↩
Stephen Mitchell (b. 1943): An American translator, scholar, and author, known for his translations of spiritual and classical texts. He is married to the author and speaker Byron Katie. ↩
Dhammapada: A collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best-known Buddhist scriptures. ↩
Tao Te Ching: A classic Chinese text written around 400 BC and traditionally credited to the sage Laozi. It is a fundamental text for both philosophical and religious Taoism. ↩