<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" > Chapter 5:</h1>
The heavens and the earth are not kind, and all things are dogs.
(Heaven and earth are merciless, and all things are treated like dogs, leaving all things to fend for themselves.) ）
The righteous saint is unkind and regards the people as dogs.
(The saints, too, were unloving, and they also treated the people like dogs, leaving them to their own devices.) ）
Between heaven and earth, what is its decay?
(Isn't it like a bellows between heaven and earth?) ）
It is empty and unyielding, and it moves and comes out.
(It is empty and not depleted, and the more it stirs the wind, the more it grows, and it never ceases to exist.) ）
It is better to be poor than to keep the middle.
(The multitude of decrees is more confusing and more unworkable, so it is better to remain quiet.) ）
The above is the general original text and translation.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" > [first sentence]:</h1>
The original text: Heaven and earth are not kind, and all things are dogs.
01
The so-called sword dog is a fake dog made of grass during ancient sacrifices.
During the sacrifice, it is enshrined in the incense case and worshiped;
After the sacrifice, he was abandoned in the wilderness and allowed to be trampled on.
Therefore, in the eyes of heaven and earth, all things are like dogs, and there is no distinction between high and low. Everything is just natural, fate dictates. Why does Lao Tzu say that?
02
There is a story of deer and wolf that we are all familiar with:
In 1906, then-U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the killing of wolves in the forests of Alaska, usa, in order to protect the beautiful and lovely white-tailed deer. Unexpectedly, after the extinction of the wolf pack, the deer lost their natural enemies and began to breed on a large scale, and the number soared, exceeding 100,000 within a few years.
100,000 deer roam the forest every day, where can the forest be overwhelmed? Not long after, a great plague broke out due to the destruction of the forest's ecosystem. So the white-tailed deer began to die on a large scale, and a few years later, only four thousand remained.
Seeing the deer herd dead and on the verge of extinction, President Roosevelt woke up like a dream. To salvage the tragedy, he had to convene an emergency meeting at the White House, and the final solution was four words:
Find the wolves!
After many years, the whole forest returned to its former vitality and vitality.
03
Therefore, heaven and earth are not unkind, they cannot be benevolent. Heaven and earth must be treated equally and without preference.
Heaven and earth favor eagles, and snakes are victims.
Favoring snakes, frogs are the victims.
With a preference for frogs, mosquitoes are the victims.
With a preference for mosquitoes, humans are the victims.
To take another example of human society, there was a report in the international news in the middle of the twentieth century:
An Indian businessman who likes to travel around the world discovers a secret while traveling to Hong Kong – the Chinese like to eat field chickens (i.e., frogs).
Isn't that a huge business opportunity? He felt it was an opportunity for him to make a fortune. So he returned to his hometown and made a call, and the villagers put down their hoes to catch frogs, which he was responsible for buying and finally reselling to Hong Kong. Of course, he made a lot of money as a "second-hand merchant of field chickens".
But what everyone didn't expect was:
After a few months, the local frogs are basically extinct, the mosquitoes have lost their natural predators, and nature is boiling and begins to rage everywhere. The entire village was hit by malaria and many people lost their lives as a result.
In the end, the local government had to hire an army of frogs from other places to calm the ecological imbalance war.
04
Therefore, the preference of heaven and earth is to destroy the laws of nature, which will inevitably lead to the disorder of the ecosystem. And the species favored will eventually be eliminated by society like children who are overly spoiled by their parents.
Therefore, the heavens and the earth are not benevolent, but they are benevolent.
US President Roosevelt did not understand this truth, and tried to intervene in the natural ecology by destroying natural enemies, which backfired. Maybe you will say, it is not necessary to destroy natural enemies, I just simply feed and help those rare animals, right? The answer is:
No!
Decades ago, a group of environmentalists in Germany had staged an ecological disaster with their "compassion". They used to be hungry because they couldn't bear to watch wild boars go to a forest every year to put a lot of feed, especially in winter, 40% of the food of the entire wild boar herd came from human feed, what was the result? The result is:
After a few years, the number of wild boars increased, completely exceeding the carrying capacity of the forest. After eating the various fruits on the ground, they began to nibble on the seedlings of the trees, and this "off-off" foraging method eventually slaughtered the forest to the point that there were "no trees to follow", and eventually the wild boars began to die on a large scale due to lack of food.
In fact, after tens of millions of years of evolution, the forest itself has already formed a set of independent ecosystems, and this piece of primary forest in Germany is more "intelligent". In order to maintain ecological balance, it secretly manipulates beech and oak trees - they only bear fruit once every five years, knowing that these two kinds of trees in other places bear fruit once a year, why is this primeval forest so abnormal? In fact, the reason is very simple:
The purpose of the forest is to produce less fruit, to starve a part of the wild boar every year, and thus to control its breeding population, so that all the beech and oak trees will unite to deliberately create one famine after another (1).
Can you imagine that this is a premeditated and planned mode of automatic regulation by nature? In fact, the ancient Chinese people have long understood this truth, so there is a sentence in the "Yin Rune Classic" that is particularly insightful:
"Heaven is gracious and gracious." ②”
It is worth mentioning that biologists have not yet figured out why the beech and oak trees in this forest can communicate and communicate with the fungal group underground with their roots, thus violating the universal law of plant growth, and can only express their admiration and awe at the greatness of nature in the laboratory, and then reluctantly give a biological name to this network of natural systems that "lead the whole body":
"Nutritional cascade effect" (3).
Unfortunately, many animal protectionists do not seem to understand this truth, and they often ignore the objective "unkind laws" of nature and blindly pursue the subjective "aesthetic morality" of individuals, resulting in self-defeating mistakes and irreparable mistakes.
That's why Lao Tzu said:
Heaven and earth are unkind, and all things are dogs.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="98" >:</h1>
1. Peter Worreben, Nature's Social Network Chapter 10: How Earthworms Manipulate Wild Boars
2. The Yellow Emperor Yin Rune Sutra • Part II
3. Sean Carroll, The Law of Life, Part III
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