What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honoured from generation to generation.
Cultivate Virtue in yourself,
And Virtue will be real.
Cultivate it in the family,
And Virtue will abound.
Cultivate it in the village,
And Virtue will grow.
Cultivate it in the nation,
And Virtue will be abundant.
Cultivate it in the universe,
And Virtue will be everywhere.
Therefore look at the body as body;
Look at the familyA as family;
Look at the village as village;
Look at the nation as nation;
Look at the universe as universe.
How do I know the universe is like this?
By looking!
***
Interpretation by Gabriel Raam:
What is virtues? The highest qualities and gifts and human abilities – which are possible to be reached in a human.
What is an example of a virtue?
Honesty, courage, compassion, generosity, fidelity, integrity, fairness, self-control, and prudence are all examples of the highest qualities which are possible to exist in a human…
Virtues” are attitudes, dispositions, or character traits that enable us to be and to act in ways that has developed in us the highest qualities of virtues. Virtues are the fruits of inner work.
The definition of virtues is: iron (good moral qualities) that were tram formed into stainless still (virtues). No one is born with virtues, they are reaches by a sort od a quantum leap of self-work.
Here is his fresh and unexpected view at how to have virtue: not by effort of copy or self-work or self-perfection, or good education, he offers an existential phonological view, the most difficult way of all, to observe without conditioning, not subjectively, not personally, not tinted by interest, this is the opposite way of obtaining virtues by self-enforcement and self-imposing. His original and quiet absurd claim is that if you approach life from the neutral vector only, than and only then, you could gather virtues to which he attaches the heights value and importance.
Why is that? Because only people who goes on in the world without personal claims or subjective egotistical interest’s, are the ones through neutrality can see life as it is with all its misery, response of the highest human virtues.
So only those who ménage to developed above booth the poles: the bad and good aspects of life: the Ying and the Yang of life, judging or feeling guilty – are going up the neutral vector from which they can have the observation of the difficulties of life as it is, difficult and full of suffering which must raise in them the highest virtues.
What is so touching in this book is that is give such importance to the human aspect, although it is a Tao book, it put the human virtue and humanity in the center.
For Lao Tzu to have virtues is to be a high level human being, without it the Tao will have no home in human beings.
Gabriel