“The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.”
Learn the Dao
A quiet practice for learning the thing that can’t be known — committing the Tao Te Ching to memory, one line at a time.
Read a chapter. Recite the next line from memory. The app shows you, gently, what you missed — then brings each line back just before you’d forget it.
No streaks. No badges. No notifications. Eighty-one chapters, at the pace of a breath.
Now arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. Therefore they who have the Tao do not like to employ them. The superior man ordinarily considers the left hand the most honourable place, but in time of war the right hand. Those sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, and not the instruments of the superior man;--he uses them only on the compulsion of necessity. Calm and repose are what he prizes; victory (by force of arms) is to him undesirable. To consider this desirable would be to delight in the slaughter of men; and he who delights in the slaughter of men cannot get his will in the kingdom.
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