Your Treasure, Your Peace

There is no greater disaster
Than enemy-making
For then you lose your treasure,
your peace.

Tao Te Ching, 69

The Tao Te Ching fascinates me. I have four translations of it in my library. Each of them takes today’s text into a different place. One mentions peace by name—the anonymous translation above. The others focus on enemy-making.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word enemy derives from Latin. The prefix in- means not, and amicus means friend. An enemy is a not friend.

Stephen Mitchell’s take on this verse: the disaster of enemy-making is to “become an enemy yourself.”

When you become an enemy yourself, surely you are a not friend to yourself and to others.

Jonathan Star’s “definitive edition” says:

There is no greater misfortune than feeling
“I have an enemy”
For when “I” and “enemy” exist together
there is no room left for my treasure.

If you jumble all the translations together, the sense I get is that it’s impossible to recognize another as an enemy unless there is an enemy within one’s self. Conversely, being an enemy myself is the only way I can see others as enemies. This is the internal cause of the greater disaster.

We cannot afford to have enemies within! Enemies of any kind, if we want to participate in the creation of peace on our planet. Sometimes it helps to know why I’m working toward whatever I’m working toward. Namely, what I treasure. Peace is my greatest treasure. What’s yours?

Jonathan Star nails it:

Thus, when two opponents meet
the one without an enemy
will surely triumph.

May we all be “without an enemy” as soon as humanly possible so that we may let a divine treasure—peace—have its day of triumph.