The number five interests me here. It is for purely cultural reasons. The western world has used a seven note scale that repeats at the octave for hundreds of years. We have used others though. This interested me and I found that the Greeks, Scots, and others in the west used pentatonic scales as well. What about the five colors? I can see three easily enough: red, green and blue-violet. We use them a lot. When we paint, we use yellow for green. Pantone uses six colors. A magazine uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So perhaps the five are red, yellow, blue, white, and black?
The five colors cause one's eyes to be blind.
The five tones cause one's ears to be deaf.
The five flavors cause one's palate to be spoiled.
Racing and hunting cause one's mind to be mad.
Goods that are hard to get injure one's activities.
For this reason the sage is concerned with the belly and not the eyes,
Therefore he rejects the one but accepts the other.
The five flavors interested me because those I am already familiar with. There is sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory, though we never learned about savory when I was growing up. There is a cultural disconnect for me in this chapter, but I think it is the mark of an amazing writer that it still shows so much relevance. Despite the numbers, I have no doubt what Lao Tzu means.
Over stimulating your senses causes those senses to be less acute. Surround yourself with beauty and you will hardly notice it. Racing and hunting are things we still do today, but we could simply put television and World of Warcraft in for those things and the meaning would be clear. Obsessive hobbies slowly drive us mad. The mind races. It locks itself into this world and refuses to come out.
Have you ever known a collector? Someone who has to have every single one of the Fleer 1994 X-Men trading cards, all stock parts on a limited edition automobile, or simply every Pokemon? When you spend all your time collecting hard to acquire things, nothing else gets done. It is always expensive: sometimes in time and sometimes in money, but very often in both.
So the sage puts away the senses, beauty, intense hobbies, and collecting things. All of these would cause him to strive. With these things he has no hsü and by trying he has no wu-wei. The belly is what we need to survive. At the end of a seven course meal or a bland stew of potatoes, all that matters is that your belly is full. What did you eat for breakfast on Monday three weeks ago? Does it matter now? Why did it matter then?
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