Taoist Wisdom
A great brightness seems like darkness; a great square has no corners; a great ability takes a long time to perfect; a great sound is hard to hear; a great form has no shape. It also said that a great perfection seems flawed; a great fullness seems empty; a great straightness seems crooked; a great skill seems clumsy and a great eloquence seems stammering.
~Wise words from Taoism, Religion of China






























































Thank you very much Rinpoche for this quote and all the posts you make, which must take hours out of your day.
Thank you Rinpoche for these great words of wisdom.
These words seem ‘to go against’ the way our mind is habituated to work. We tend to see perfection and imperfection, black and white as two absolute and opposite concepts and we lull ourselves into believing what we see.
Unfortunately, the truth or reality is contained in these words of wisdom, not in what we perceive it to be.There is no absolute perfection and there is no absolute imperfection, no absolute squareness nor roundness, no complete darkness nor light.There is no total goodness nor total evil.These are concepts of our dualistic mind.
This is a world of imperfections. Yet we try to work towards perfection. Buddhists, for instance, have taken the vow of not killing. We try to consciously not kill wherever we can. We go Vegetarian so as not to kill or be implicated in the killing of animals by taking meat.But this is is Samsara. We cannot be perfect in the keeping of this vow. We cannot totally avoid killing, like being implicated in the killing of insects through pesticides used on the vegetables we take.We also ‘kill’ insects or other forms of life in the earth when we tread on the ground.Yet being aware and accepting this, we make conscious choices to avoid killing when we can. In this case, we opt to be Vegetarian.(But maybe one of the reasons we need to strife to be fully enlightened with Bodhicitta in our mindstream is so that we can bless these mother beings who are inadvertently killed or have to be killed, for good rebirths).