Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Baggage Cart

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Baggage Cart

The chapter states a pair of relations and then illustrates them with one image. The heavy is the root of the light. Stillness is the ruler of restlessness. Then: the sage travels all day without leaving the baggage cart.

The image is military and administrative rather than contemplative. A column on the march has a baggage train, slow and heavy, carrying everything the column needs to still be an army when it arrives. The temptation, always, is to leave it behind and move faster. The chapter says the sage does not, and the point is not patience but dependence: speed that outruns its supply is not speed, it is the beginning of a rout.

The next line adds a second temptation. Though there are splendid sights, he stays calm and detached. Having established that the heavy is the root of the light, the chapter names the two things that separate a person from their root, which are haste and attraction, and neither is a vice in the moral sense. Both are simply ways of being pulled off the base you are standing on.

The whole chapter is built on a single relation, that a light thing is only stable if a heavy thing is under it, and everything else in it is application. Chapter forty-five states the companion rule about temperature, that moving about overcomes cold and keeping still overcomes heat, and concludes in almost the same words that clear stillness is the standard of the world.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.