This is a traditional eastern painting titled “The Vinegar Tasters”. (For contemporary and fun purposes, I will insert some animations of babies eating lemons.) The three men in the painting are Confucius, the Buddha and Lao-Tzu, each dipping a finger in for a taste. Confucius has a very sour look on his face, as if the vinegar has gone bad and is no longer of good quality. He looks at the world and sees sourness, with things are out of order and there is a need for structures of respect and honor. In the middle we see The Buddha, who has a bitter expression, pained by the unpleasantness of what he has tasted. He has noticed the bitterness and pain in life, and strives toward the cessation of suffering. Lastly we come to Lao-Tzu, who is smiling happily at his sample, content and even pleased at his experience. Lao-Tzu comes to the vinegar - and the world - and sees it as precisely as it should be in its truest form.
This painting is about world view of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism - but it is also about expectations. As Lao-Tzu smiles, he is not saying that the vinegar tastes sweet to him, or that he doesn’t notice both the bitterness and sourness of life. His outlook is one of perfectly aligned expectations. Lao-Tzu expects the vinegar to taste exactly as it does. He expects life to have both ups and downs. And so when expressing his thoughts on life, he is smiling that the ups and downs are there. Life is not perfect, but it is just as expected.
Taoism is mainly concerned with being in line with the Tao, the divine and natural process of being, living, changing and dying. Lao-Tzu smiling speaks to aligning our human expectations with the way of how things are actually going to be. We all have expectations in our experiences and relationships: we expect to not get stuck in traffic, we expect our friends to be kind, we expect our body to move the way we desire, the list goes on... But traffic will happen, our bodies will move differently as we age, the weather will change and our expectations will go unmet.
So where do we go from here? Life doesn’t live up to my standards, I feel like the Buddha or Confucius. “Life is so bitter, it’s so sour!” Well, what does Lao-Tzu do in order to be happy from the taste of vinegar, from his experience of the world? Lao-Tzu is only in control of his expectations and his perception of the world. We can’t control how every event will unfold and we can’t control how other people act. However, we can control how we react and what we expect!
So let us wish that we can taste the bitter, the sweet, the sour, the amazing, the mundane, the awe inspiring, the heartbreaking of life... and like Lao-Tzu, smile.
