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.Wu-wei only calls forrecognition of the role that nothingness plays in any practicallife.Thirty spokes share one hub.Precisely because therein is nothing that you will have the use of the cart.Knead clay inorder to make a vessel.Precisely because therein is nothing thatyou will have the use of the vessel.Cut out doors and windowsin order to make a room.Precisely because therein is nothing that you will have the use of the room.9People usually assume that it is because there are walls that thereis a living space but fail to realize that a living space only becomeslivable when there is a huge empty space between the walls.Infact, the empty space has to be many times larger than the spaceoccupied by walls.That is, for every something (for example, awall), there has to be much more nothing (empty space) tomake that something useful.Building too many walls only rendersthe place uninhabitable.By the same token, imposing too manynorms only paralyzes life.The ideal ruler, according to Lao-tzu,knows the usefulness of nothingness and knows that a wholelot more can be accomplished by letting be. This understanding of Tao and its movement provides theincentive for rulers not to overwhelm the people with power andauthority.The same understanding also gives hope to theoppressed and dominated, and justifies their resistance.Since 30 TAOISMTao is in everything, its movement toward the opposite can beobserved within everything; this means that any power, ifpushed to the extreme, must be subverted.YIN-YANG AND THE FIVE ELEMENTSBesides the keen observation of the relation between opposites,which is connected to the Yin-Yang theory, Taoism is also wellknown for its Five-Element theory.The term Five Elements isone of the translations of the Chinese term Wu-hsing (Wuxing);it is also translated as Five Forces, Five Agents, Five Phases, andFive Stages.According to Chinese cosmology, in the naturalworld there are five basic elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal,and Water.Each of the five groups has its Yin and its Yang,corresponding to the Ultimate Yin and the Ultimate Yang.Yin, Yang, and the Five Elements together provide the Chinesepeople with a framework by which to understand and analyze allphenomena in the world.Yin and Yang represent any conceptual pair, such as high andlow, cold and hot, beautiful and ugly, weak and strong, femaleand male, life and death.The T ai-chi succinctly summarizes therelation between the two members of any conceptual pair:The circle in the top image on page C of the photo insert repre-sents T ai-chi or the cosmos as a whole.The whole is divided by acurve, with one part being bright and the other being dark.Thereis a small circle of darkness in the midst of the lighter section andtypically a small circle of brightness in the midst of the darkersection.The T ai-chi picture demonstrates that, when somethingreaches an extreme, the opposite will emerge, and it will emerge notonly from the outside but also from the inside.Also, if one draws astraight line going through the center of the circle, dividing thecircle into hemispheres, each hemisphere will necessarily containboth brightness and darkness; that is to say, no dichotomy accu-rately describes the reality.Brightness and darkness form a pair ofconcepts that may seem entirely incompatible with one another, andyet no moment of the day is completely bright and no momentof the night is completely dark.There is neither pure brightness Worldview 31nor pure darkness, neither pure good nor pure evil, neither pureYin nor pure Yang.Yin and Yang stand for the two opposites thatare contradicting each other and encroaching upon each other,and yet the two are also receding from each other and movingtoward each other, supplementing each other, balancing eachother, and also containing each other.Just as Yin and Yang exist in relation to one another, there arepositive and negative mutual relations among the Five Elements.The Five Elements work against one another: Wood weakensEarth, Earth weakens Water, Water weakens Fire, Fire weakensMetal, and Metal weakens Wood.They also benefit one another:Wood enhances Fire, Fire enhances Earth, Earth enhancesMetal, Metal enhances Water, and Water enhances Wood
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