chapter 49. LEAVING THE OLD BEHIND #2
Kristofer Schipper: 'religion is nowhere and everywere'
The text of this post has been translated from Dutch to English with DeepL. It will be manually edited and streamlined later.
THE IMAGE of two trigrams: below is the Fire, above is the Lake. The natural movement of water is downwards, that of fire upwards. The two therefore meet in the middle. The water of the lake can extinguish the fire. And the fire can vaporise the water of the Lake. It is an image of transformation, an image of change.
Every transformation is a movement from the old to the new. New takes the place of old. But what to do when the old doesn't want to give way, is stuck, is too familiar? Learning something new is one thing, what is essential is to first unlearn something else - that which has been learnt before and which may now be in the way. Chapter 49 - Leaving the Old Behind and chapter 50 The New Embracing cannot but be read in conjunction. The new learning is un-learning.
The renowned Dutch sinologist Kristofer Schipper (1934-2011) translated the Tao Teh Ching and the Zhuang Zi, among others, into Dutch. Below, he tells how in China religion was never lived separately from everyday life. And that despite, due to events in recent history, most of the visible manifestations of religion have disappeared, religion continued to live in the capillaries of everyday society.
舊的不去，新的不來
Jiu de bu qu, xin de bu lai
If the old doesn’t disappear, the new will not come either.