13      Fear

Praise and disgrace cause fear.

Honor and great distress are like the body.

What does it mean that praise and disgrace cause fear?

Praise leads to weakness. Getting it causes fear, losing it causes fear. This is why praise and disgrace cause fear.

What does it mean that honor and great distress are like the body?

The reason for great distress is the body. Without it, what distress could there be?

Therefore, he who treasures his body as much as the world can be entrusted with the world. He who loves his body as much as the world can be entrusted with the world.

Fear

Is there any driving force in man surpassing that of fear? We struggle all our lives to master it, and to avoid anything that brings it about. Fear rules our existence to the extent that there are few things we do without it being one of our reasons, maybe more often than not the most important one.

            We worry about not getting what we want, and dread losing what we have. We lock our houses, we arm ourselves, we choose our friends carefully and scrutinize them constantly, we keep strangers off, we fill our everyday lives with numerous precautions, and still we worry about what the future might bring. Safety first, we say, making our controlled environment a rigidly enclosed area that may keep danger out, but definitely also locks ourselves in. Fleeing from our fear we make our lives more and more of an imprisonment.

            What we guard with such mania are our own lives, although death is the inevitable end, and it doesn’t wait for an invitation. The ultimate fear is that of death. It lies inside every other fear.

            The death we fear is that of the body. We know nothing else for sure. Our bodies will seize to function, and decay. What happens next is a mystery to us. So, maybe the fear that clings to us through all our lives not that of death, but of what it will lead to. We want to keep it off, as long as we can, because we don’t want to change something known with what’s totally unknown. At the moment of death, what replaces our bodily existence, if anything?

            So we guard this mortal coil with desperation. Our bodies become our obsessions. Their demands make us dependent, and their fragility makes us fearful. If our bodies were not so precious to us, we would have nothing to protect. There would be few things we would fear losing, because only things of the body can be stripped away from it. Neither praise nor disgrace stick to us, if we don’t value the body, the physical person they are connected to. Certainly, the same is true for honor as well as distress.

            The body is vulnerable. The more important it is to us, the more vulnerable we will be.

            Still, Lao Tzu doesn’t condemn our dependence on our bodies. We need to know that it is so, but then it can be a fortunate circumstance – especially in the case of rulers. The one who rules his realm with the same care he shows his own body will not hasten to take risks with it. He will be hesitant in his rule and consider everything very carefully before taking action. He will tend to inflict on his realm as little as possible, and this is exactly how Lao Tzu prefers a ruler to be.

            Because he worries about the world around him as he does about his own body, such a ruler will be cautious. Then he will not do much harm.

            Not only a ruler should live by this code, but everyone of whatever circumstance and means. If we treat our surroundings with the same care and love we have for our own bodies, then we are unlikely to cause trouble or damage.

            So, Lao Tzu regards the fear we have as reasonable, as long as we are aware of its cause, and act accordingly. We should aim to preserve the world, as we do our bodies. In that way, fear is a good thing. It keeps us alert and cautious, and it helps us set things in their right perspectives.

            Just by one simple question, we can stop ourselves from numerous follies that we might otherwise indulge in without thinking: Is this worth dying for?

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