Taoism, Daoism, Tao, Dao, Lao Tzu's Tap Te Ching, Vol. 1 Tao: The three treasures, Chapter 2: Ordinariness, Question 4

The fourth question:

Question 4

YOU TALKED ABOUT THE HARMONY OF THE OPPOSITES. I FEEL THAT HATE KILLS LOVE AND ANGER KILLS COMPASSION. THE EXTREMES ARE FIGHTING INSIDE ME. HOW CAN I FIND THE HARMONY?

YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG. If hate kills love and anger kills compassion then there is no possibility -- there is no possibility of there ever being love or ever being compassion. Then you are caught, then you cannot get out of it. You have lived with hate for millions of lives -- it must have killed love already. You have lived with anger for millions of lives -- it must have murdered compassion already. But look... love is still there. Hate comes and goes; love survives. Anger comes and goes; compassion survives. Hate has not been able to kill love; night has not been able to kill the day and darkness has not been able to murder light. No, they still survive.

So the first thing to understand is: they have not been killed. That is one thing. And the second thing will be possible only later on, when you really love. You have not really loved; that is the trouble, not hate. Hate is not the trouble -- you have not really loved. Darkness is not the trouble -- you don't have light. If light is there, darkness disappears. You have not loved. You fantasize, you imagine, you dream -- but you have not loved.

Love. But I'm not saying that just by loving hate will immediately disappear -- no. Hate will fight. Everybody wants to survive. Hate will struggle. The more you love, the stronger hate will come. But you will be surprised: hate comes and goes. It doesn't kill love; rather, it makes love stronger. Love can absorb hate also. If you love a person, in some moments you can hate. But that doesn't destroy love; rather, it gives a richness to love.

What is hate in fact? -- it is a tendency to go away. What is love? -- a tendency to come closer. Hate is a tendency to separate, a tendency to divorce. Love is a tendency to marry, to come near, to become closer, to become one. Hate is to become two, independent. Love is to become one, interdependent. Whenever you hate, you go away from your lover, from your beloved. But in ordinary life going away is needed to come back again. It is just like when you eat: you are hungry so you eat, then hunger goes because you have eaten. When you love a person it is like food. Love is food -- very subtle, spiritual, but it is food: it nourishes. When you love a person the hunger subsides; you feel satiated, then suddenly the movement to go away starts and you separate. But then you will feel hungry again; you would like to come nearer, closer, to love, to fall into each other. You eat, then for four, five, six hours, you forget about food; you don't go on sitting in the kitchen, you don't go on sitting in the mess. You go away; after six hours suddenly you start coming back -- hunger is coming.

Love has two faces to it: hunger and satiety. You misunderstand love for hunger. Once you understand that there is no hate but only a situation to create hunger, then hate becomes part of love. Then it enriches love. Then anger becomes part of compassion, it enriches compassion. A compassion without any possibility of anger will be impotent, it will have no energy in it. A compassion with the possibility of anger has strength, stamina. A love without the possibility of hate will become stale. Then the marriage will look like an imprisonment, you cannot go away. A love with hate has a freedom in it -- it never becomes stale.

In my mathematics of life divorces happen because every day you go on postponing them. Then divorce goes on accumulating and one day the marriage is completely killed by it, destroyed by it. If you understand me, I would suggest to you not to wait: every day divorce and remarry. It should be a rhythm just like day and night, hunger and satiety, summer and winter, life and death. It should be like that. In the morning you love, in the afternoon you hate. When you love you really love, you totally love; when you hate you really hate, you totally hate. And suddenly you will find the beauty of it: the beauty is in totality.

A total hate is also beautiful, as beautiful as total love; a total anger is also beautiful, as beautiful as total compassion. The beauty is in totality. Anger alone becomes ugly, hate alone becomes ugly -- it is just the valley without the hill, without the peak. But with the peak the valley becomes a beautiful scene -- from the peak the valley becomes lovely, from the valley the peak becomes lovely.

You move; your life river moves between these two banks. And by and by, the more and more you understand the mathematics of life, you won't think that hate is against love: it is complementary. You won't think that anger is against compassion: it is complementary. Then you don't think that rest is against work: it is complementary -- or that night is against day: it is complementary. They make a perfect whole.

Because you have not loved, you are afraid of hate -- you are afraid because your love is not strong enough: hate could destroy it. You are not certain really whether you love or not, that's why you are afraid of hate and anger. You know that it may completely shatter the whole house. You are not certain whether the house really exists or is just imagination, an imaginary house. If it is imagination the hate will destroy it; if it is real the hate will make it stronger. After the storm a silence descends. After hate lovers are again fresh to fall into each other -- completely fresh, as if they are meeting for the first time again. Again and again they meet, again and again for the first time.

Lovers are always meeting for the first time. If you meet a second time, the love is already getting old, stale. It is getting boring. Lovers always fall in love every day, fresh, young. You look at your woman and you cannot even recognize that you have seen her before -- so new. You look at your man and he seems to be a stranger; you fall in love again.

Hate does not destroy love, it only destroys the staleness of it. It is a cleaning, and if you understand it you will be grateful to it. And if you can be grateful to hate also, you have understood; now nothing can destroy your love. Now you are for the first time really rooted; now you can absorb the storm and can be strengthened through it, can be enriched through it.

Don't look at life as a duality, don't look at life as a conflict -- it is not. I have known -- it is not. I have experienced -- it is not. It is one whole, one piece, and everything fits in it. You have just to find out how to let them fit, how to allow them to fit. Allow them to fit into each other. It is a beautiful whole.

And if you ask me, if there were a possibility of a world without hate I would not choose it; it would be absolutely dead and boring. It might be sweet, but too sweet -- you would hanker for salt. If a world were possible without anger I would not choose it, because just compassion without anger would have no life in it. The opposite gives the tension, the opposite gives the temper. When ordinary iron passes through fire it becomes steel; without fire it cannot become steel. And the higher the degree of temperature, the greater will be the temper, the strength, of the steel. If your compassion can pass through anger, the higher the temperature of the anger the greater will be the temper and the strength of the compassion.

Buddha is compassionate. He is a warrior. He comes from the kshatriya race, a samurai. He must have led a very angry life -- and then suddenly, compassion. Mahavir comes from a kshatriya clan. In fact, this looks absurd but it has a certain consistency to it: all the great teachers of non-violence have come from the kshatriya race. No Brahmin has preached nonviolence. We know of only one Brahmin, who is known as one of the avataras, Parusharam. He was the most violent man the world has ever known -- a Brahmin, the most violent! The twenty-four teerthankaras of the Jains are all kshatriyas, Buddha is a kshatriya. They talk about non-violence, compassion; they have lived violence, they know what violence is, they have passed through it. Even if a Brahmin tries to be nonviolent, his non-violence cannot be more than skin deep. Only a kshatriya, a warrior, who has lived through fire, has a strong compassion or the possibility for it.

So remember, if inside your heart extremes are fighting, don't choose. Allow them both to be there. Be a big house, have enough room inside. Don't say, "I will have only compassion, not anger; I will have only love, not hate." You will be impoverished.

Have a big room; let both be there. And there is no need to create a fight between them; there is no fight. The fight comes from your mind, from your teachings, upbringing, conditioning. The whole world goes on saying to you: Love. Don't hate. How can you love without hate? Jesus says, "Love your enemies." And I tell you, "Hate your lovers also" -- then it becomes a complete whole. Otherwise Jesus' saying is incomplete. He says, "Love your enemies." You hate only; he says love also. But the other part is missing. I tell you: Hate your friends also; hate your lovers also. And don't be afraid. Then by and by you will see there is no difference between the enemy and the friend, because you hate and love the enemy and you love and hate the friend. It will be only a question of the coin upside down or downside up. Then the friend is the enemy and the enemy is the friend. Then distinctions simply disappear.

Don't create a fight inside, allow them both to be there. They both will be needed -- both will give you two wings; only then can you fly.

Taoism - Daoism - Tao - Dao

VOL. 1, TAO: THE THREE TREASURES

Chapter-2

Ordinariness