Beauty is to see beauty in beauty and ugly || Acharya Prashant, on Lao Tzu (2014)

True words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not true. (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching)

Speaker: Lao Tzu says, “True words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not true.”

What could he mean probably? “True words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not true.” And I would also want to extend this to, “Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram (Truth, Godliness, Beauty)”. The Upanishads say that only the ‘Truth’ is ‘Beautiful’. And here we have Lao Tzu saying, “True words are not beautiful and beautiful words are not true.” How do we reconcile the apparent contradiction?

Let’s look at beauty. What do we mean by beauty? Usually, when do you say that something is beautiful?

Listener 1: When it is pleasing to our senses.

Speaker: When it is pleasing to our senses and it is conforming to the patterns already experienced and stored. That is the reason why what one calls as beautiful, the other may as well call as ugly. We have become habituated to using terms like ‘beautiful face’, ‘beautiful place’, ‘beautiful words’ and so on. But what exactly is a beautiful face? What do we mean by a beautiful face?