溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Do I Have Trouble Because I Have a Body?
If having a body brings hunger, sickness, and the fear of death — is the body the root of trouble, and yet also my very ground?
The reason I have great trouble is that I have a body. If I had no body, what trouble would I have?
Laozi's question — that trouble comes because we have a body — sits within the lineage of whether to see the body as a burden. Daoism took excessive clinging to the body as the root of trouble, yet did not hate the body itself. Buddhism pressed further, holding that grasping (upadana) at the body is the very source of suffering. The Stoics too placed the body beyond our control to lessen attachment. But on the other side was a lineage making the body's safety and comfort the ground of life — Hobbes made the fear of death and self-preservation the starting point of politics, and modernity took bodily health and longer life for progress. Is the body an attachment to lessen, or a ground to guard? The lineage split.
In an age where bodily safety and health as easily become the highest value as their anxiety eats away at life, the question "is the body trouble or ground?" asks after balance.
Laozi finds the root of trouble in the body.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Laozi finds the root of trouble in the body. That we start at favor and disgrace, and tremble at fortune and misfortune, is because we have a body to protect; if we had no body, he asks, what trouble would there be? Yet he does not bid us discard the body — rather, he says the world may be entrusted to one who cares for it as for their own body. I read this question as gazing at once at clinging to the body and caring for it. Having a body, I worry; yet having that body, I feel and love the world. I stand between the body as trouble and as ground, before this question.
✍️Your Answer
The lineage of the ancients ends here. Now it is your turn before the question. There is no right answer — only how you, today, would answer.
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