Sublime

enters the liver and kidney channels.

Soybean (yellow)

Dis-ease is yin; it sometimes comes along to help you see how to balance the yang of life. People mostly get sick from burning their vital power through too much activity, and yang.

form. As Zen master Dogen says, “Flowers fall with our attachment, and weeds spring up with our aversion.”

five dharmas: appearance, name, projection, correct knowledge, and suchness; the three modes of reality: imagined, dependent, and perfected; the eight forms of consciousness: one

WU CH’ENG says, “The sage seeks without seeking and studies without studying. For the truth of all things lies not in acting but in doing what is natural. By not acting, the sage shares in the naturalness of all things.

Although the ch’iang-hsing (striving hard) of line six seems at odds with Lao-tzu’s dictum of wu-wei, “doing nothing/effortlessness,” commentators are agreed that here it refers to inner cultivation and not to the pursuit of worldly goals.

Fig

Lao-tzu’s essential teaching of wu-wei, on the other hand, illustrates the futility of our attempts to control life. He emphasizes that it is only when you give up forcing or controlling anything that you begin to get the kind of control you always wanted, but never knew existed.