Straw Dogs and Two Impostors
By: Congressman Art Yap
The Tao Te Ching was written by Lao Tzu more than two thousand years ago. Tradition says he was a keeper of archives at the royal court of the Zhou dynasty, and that he wrote its eighty-one short chapters at a frontier pass before leaving China and disappearing. His little book has become one of the most translated works in the world.
Chapter 5 contains one of its hardest lines: Heaven and earth are not kind. They treat all things as straw dogs.
Straw dogs were ritual offerings in ancient China. Before a ceremony they were handled with great reverence. Afterward they were thrown away and trampled. Nothing personal. The ceremony was simply over.
Lao Tzu does not mean the universe is cruel. He means it is impartial. The sun does not shine brighter on a kind man, and a typhoon does not spare the house of a generous man. Heaven hands out neither rewards nor punishments; things simply happen. The chapter closes with simple advice: better to hold to the center. I take this to mean that everything must be met and done in moderation. Stay in the middle. We cannot be too extreme in how we analyze problems or carry out plans. We must always keep the capacity to pause, reflect, and think about what confronts us.
I confess I used to think otherwise. In public service it is easy to keep a ledger without meaning to. It is easy to think that if one works sincerely and conscientiously, then every election is rewarded with victory. When it did not, it felt like betrayal. Re-reading the Tao recently, I was reminded that the ledger exists only in my head. Much of the hurt we carry was not proof that we have not been treated unfairly. It came from expecting the universe to keep a promise it never made.
Centuries later and half a world away, Rudyard Kipling arrived at the same truth. In his poem “If—,” written as advice to his son, he wrote:
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same”
Those lines hang above the players’ entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon, where victory and defeat are decided every summer. Kipling’s promise to the one who can do this: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”
Triumph and Disaster are impostors because both pretend to be a verdict on us, and neither is. Like the sun and the storm, they simply arrive. And it did not surprise me that an ancient Chinese teaching echoes through Western literature because the truth it carries belongs to no single culture.
This is not a call to indifference. Lao Tzu does not ask us to stop doing good. He asks us to stop treating our goodness as a down payment. Once we stop grading the universe, we can stay humble and turn our attention outward, to the people around us and the work in front of us. It is not about us. It is about the world around us.
I share this thought because it gives me peace. May it give you peace today.