Good luck and bad luck create each other and it is difficult to foresee their change.
You probably know this this ancient Chinese parable of the old man and his horse.
A righteous man lived near the border.
For no reason, his horse ran off into barbarian territory.
The recent changes in all our lives have caused material losses to many of us. I think of those who lost family members due to pandemic, or their jobs, because their companies were not able to adapt to the new market rules quickly enough. Home office impossition, material shortage due to logistic and energy related issues. New competitors from the electronic and IT sector, producing in adaptive, virtual and networked processes deconstructing the industrial paradigm of the economy of scale.
Everyone felt sorry for him.
But, His father spoke to him:
"Who knows if that won't bring you good luck?"
In our readers club, a suspicitious high numbre of books address the challenges of success, or better said, the motivation to strive for success and the obstacles on the way towards it. But foremost, they write about the frustration when achieving success and remaining empty. And more recently, voices are heard that challenge the very idea of sucess as something that can be strived for.
Governments have still school failure and school abandonment high on their lists of priority. But how shall young people, and not so young people approach their career when realizing that could grades, even goods schools are not a key to professional success, not to speak of personal success. We were all equiped with good advices how to triumph out in this world by academic achievements, hard work and good behaviour.
Liu Ann commented this short narrative included in the Huainanzi while the Chu state was already under the rule of the Western Han and his nephew was Emperor of Wudi and king of Huainan.
In ancient China, poetry was a state affaire, and it had to give answers to practical issues in politics. As such, we can understand this poem as exlanation of the I-Ching in a more understandable way for the common man or to make the point clearer to a busy Emperor.
The narrative goes on like this.
Several months later his horse came back with a group of good, noble barbarian horses.
Finally, the horse came back and multiplied by this the wealth of the protagonist. But it took a while, several monthes. How many were this, three or four, twenty-four? The story will not tell us. It sounds like an investment. If we have courage to let our horses go, they will return with benefit. However, that is the opposite idea. We can read this in self-help books about facing crises. "Just let things go", and then everything will come to good end. This is about the epoché, the suspension of judgment. Those who think that the return with benefit is something good might be wrong. At least, this we can read in the next lines.
人皆賀之. 其父曰: „此何遽不能為禍乎?“
Everyone congratulated him.
But, His father spoke to him:
"Who knows if that won't bring you good luck?"
The story on explaining how the apparent achievement of riches turned into a bad luck. With a few simple thoughts, we might reckon that their is no direct causality between having morer horses, or horses at all and accidents that lead to invalidity. Yet, I invite you to read the next sentences of our parable again:
A rich house has good horses and the son loved riding.
He fell and broke his leg.
Liu Ann is speaking to an Emperor, and perhaps it requires the experience of true wealth in order to understand the full dimension of this paragraph. Still, I believe, helped by all those movies about the complex embroilments in the life of the upperclass, that have become populare in those days, give a slight idea of where do i want to go. The very circumstances in which one finds herself when becoming wealthy bare a burden and danger that can make us fall. Again, the common man feels compulsary sory. But with good reasons?
Everyone felt sorry for him.
But, His father spoke to him:
"Who knows if that won't bring you good luck?"
Well, well here comes the wise father again. We should withhold our assent, keep any assumptions back. And of course, he tells why. The bad luck turns into good luck, just one year later.
One year later the barbarians invaded across the border.
Adult men strung up their bows and went into battle.
Nine out of ten soldiers were killed, except for the son because he could not go fighting due to his broken leg.
Father and son both survived.
Apparently, the story finds here a happy ending, and there is a certain temptation to oversee the last sentence. The story has actually no ending, it will go on like this forewer. And if we paid attention, according to the tellings in the Huainanzi, there is no fault or any action that actually suggests a clear causal relation in the Western sence, or any proposition on how to avoid these changes. It is in the way things are that makes them change.
Hence: Bad luck brings good luck and good luck brings bad luck.
This happens without end and nobody can estimate it.
Thus, now we can reckon how to take the right decisions, if things change all the time, and, especially, if a decision that leads to some sort of "sucess" includes already a promis of failure. According to general interpretation this is an introduction to the Dáo and the wu wei (無為), better known in Europe undert the French term "contenance".
Several centuries earlier Laozi expressed it in these words:
Misery is what happiness rests upon. Happiness is what misery lurks beneath. Who knows where it ends?
(Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 58)
Shakespear explained this principle to us in his Hamlet with the words:
Hamlet in conversation with Rosenkranz:
..., for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
(William Shakespeare Hamlet, 2. scene, 2. curtain)
The secret lies not only in withholding our prejudice about good and bad events, but to change our attitude towards sucess all over. Life is not a career, for there are only to options: to die or to transcend. Death will happen anyway, and transcendence can be achieved in any moment. The questions is, what makes us find meaning in our lives and make them meaningful to others.
Some might think now, that new technologies will extend our lives or even "cure" us from death. This is not the place here to discuss why meaning is still relevant, even if we lived a thousand years or forever. Actually, I believe, then it would be even much more clear why it is so central.
My point here is another. This is a nice story that is usually taught to people in some distress, facing traumatic experience or in depression.
Liu Ann was comenting it for an Emperor. And this brings me back to the wu wei (無為). The idea that a governor would not act, or just let things go seems irresponsible. Even thoug, I am aware that in recent times some oversimplified Western interpretations of Chinese philosophy, indeed lead to the idea that doing nothing could be a good recomendation for politicians and business leaders.
To understand wu wei, we should return to the first Koan, the Mu-kōan of the Buddha-Nature of a dog and read it from the beginning.
I shall reproduce here the sentences from the Book of Equanimity, in Chinese the Hóngzhì Chánshī Guǎnglù (宏智禪師廣錄):
A monk asked Master Zhao Zhou, "Does a dog have Buddha Nature?"
Zhao Zhou replied, "Yes."
And then the monk said, "Since it has, how did it get into that bag of skin?"
Zhao Zhou said, "Because knowingly, he purposefully offends."
A monk asked, "Does a dog have a Buddha-nature or not?"
The master said, "Not [Mu]!"
The monk said, "Above to all the Buddhas, below to the crawling bugs, all have Buddha-nature. Why is it that the dog has not?"
The master said, "Because he has the nature of karmic delusions"(Wick, G.S. (2005). The Book of Equanimity: illuminating classic Zen koans).
The second word wèi (為) is usually translated as action. Anybody who ever studied action theory in Western philosphy knows how challenging the signification of this word is. To take for granted that there is such a straight forward meaning in Chinese philosophy is a true oversimplification at its best. The word wei means actually to act with a purpose, directed to someone or to something (wèile) or with cause (yīnwèi).
In connection with the story above, now it becomes more understandable what proposition of Liu Ann might be. It is meaningless to act towards sucess. Usually, this is explained with the reason that the achievement of success through our purposeful actions is impossible due to the complexity of the world. I disagree with this interpretation and insist on the statement that it is not possible but meaningless. I shall explain the difference elsewhere. In any case, the idea is not to act out of a strategic and goal oriented thinking, but from an ethical attitude directed towards the creation of meaning.
Read in this way, we can now understand fully, why it is probably the best advice one give to a leader in times of great uncertainty. When circumstances constantly change, it can become almost impossible to make predictions, at this results only too often in apathy and irrational behaviour. But if a leader can ground her actions on an inner ethical principle that gives orientation, she or he can not only take actions, but in create new structures that help to fin out of chaos.
