Short, concise and useful introduction to Taoism. This book is a timely read: many Taoist ideas are helpful cures for the ills of modernity, particularly the media-induced fear and divisiveness we are being subjected to right now.
Notes:
Tzu = master (e.g. "Lao Tzu" = master Lao)Tao = the way [as in: the way to be followed], the path, doctrine
Te = virtue
Ching = a moral canon, sutra, teachings of outstanding moral value
* Very little is known about Lao Tzu, specialists do not even agree on his historicity, even whether he lived or was just a legendary figure. "Shrouded in impenetrable obscurity."
* Taoism and Confucianism as the only main philosophical schools of China that survived from the so called "hundred schools." Confucius lived during a period of growing decadence in Chinese life, putting in danger the order and traditional ideals of the culture. "Confucius considered it his mission to save that order and those ideals."
* The Tao Te Ching "appears to be an anthology of apothegms [aphorisms, sayings] borrowed partly from the common stock of wisdom, partly from various proto-Taoist schools."
* Quietism: calm acceptance of things as they are without attempts to resist or change them. Silent devotional contemplation.
* Concepts of the Void: "emptiness," having a gentle and accommodating outward demeanor, non-injury to all living creatures, inaction (wu-wei) which enables the sage to adapt to worldly change.
* Ancient contextual meaning of heavenly or natural order, often simply called Tao, seen in cycles of hot and cold, light and darkness, the alternating principles of Yin and Yang, cyclical phenomena that govern the behavior of all creatures.
* Yin is darkness, cold, withdrawal, rest, passivity, femininity; Yang is light, heat, masculinity, expansion, activity, even aggression.
* Tao as a principle of order which manifests itself in various domains: "He who hears of the Tao in the morning can die peacefully in the evening."
* The I Ching, "The Book of Changes," a strange and obscure work which was originally a manual of divination, containing various trigrams, hexagrams and symbols (somewhat reminiscent of Pythagorean thought/mysticism perhaps?).
* Traditional notions of Te: Te is usually translated virtue, thus the compound "Tao Te" designates what we would today call moral philosophy. To Confucius, Te was a quality acquired by living nobly in cultured company. An ideal of civilization and a model of behavior for all around him, his virtue is thus contagious, efficacious.
* Semantic problems with the word Tao. "One of the problems that long preoccupied the ancient philosophers, beginning with Confucius himself, was that of the relationship between words and realities." [to borrow a phrase from Buddhim: "The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon"]. Names can be arbitrary, they can have coercive value, they limit things into categories, there's no name that is suitable for the Absolute, and so on.
* Tremendous ambiguity and obscurity in the Tao Te Ching text, particularly in the first chapter.
* The man who lives in union with the true Tao possesses an interior light, which he carefully hides from view, thereby giving the appearance of a fool; an ordinary Tao would bring him the renown that the true Tao does not bring him.
* Trying to express ineffability or something that cannot be named. There is a superior reality that transcends the perceptible and imperceptible modalities of being, but this reality cannot be told of or taught. "The author is warning us that the multifarious doctrines and systems of wisdom or government current in the world are contingent forms of Tao, and that our language cannot express anything but relative truths. It is utterly incapable of expressing the absolute, for which not even an adequate name exists."
* "A man achieves a vision of reality with a penetration proportionate to the level of wisdom or holiness he has attained. Without claiming to lead him to the terminus, the Tao Te Ching will help him to progress along the way by offering him formulas, often paradoxical or enigmatic, calculated to stimulate his meditations."
* "The Void" an important concept of Taoist thought. "We shape clay into the form of a vessel; but it is where there is nothing that the efficacy of the vessel lies.... Thus we think we benefit from perceptible things, but it is where we perceive nothing [the Void] that true efficacy lies."
* One application of Taoism is to practice austerity, rid oneself of passion, give up pleasure, so that spirits from heaven and Earth can dwell peacefully within one.
* Understanding the cycle of birth and death: all creatures return to stillness, their original state, and to know this universal law is to be "illumined"... "Not to know it is to fret in vain and bring down misfortune on oneself."
* See also the central concept of yin and yang, a representation of the cycle of vitality and rest, day and night, life and death. "Conforming to the rhythm of the universe is the prerequisite of wisdom in all Chinese thinking."
* The "sage" (or "holy man" or "wise man") knows that all life is governed by the same law of impermanence: the return to the origin. But the sage is not content with nearly knowing this law intellectually; he realizes it within himself by returning to the Tao in person.
* "Mere learning" thought of as dangerous, a source of dissipation. Struggling against the temptations of discursive knowledge: "The five colors blind man's eyes. The five notes deafen his ears. The five tastes deaden his palate. Riding and hunting madden his mind. Hard-to-get goods impede his labors." Thus requirements to practice asceticism, moderation, and rejecting all learning. Fascinating idea of escaping "ludic" learning, falling in love with yourself for your credentials/what you know/how learned you are, etc. Academic learning can give a person blinders rather than helping him see.
* On the interesting perspective of virtue in the domain of Taoism. Social values are considered to be prejudices and as such wrong, because they cloud reality and land us in the vicious circle of contradictions. In the Tao "all contradictions are reconciled and cancel out." Virtue then is a pole of attraction, a refuge, it can be something to be proud of. "Righteousness" would be an example of a virtue celebrated in Confucianism but rejected in Taoism. A Taoist would also consider it vulgar to take pride in Confucian virtues like etiquette. Ritual-mindedness would be the worst form of this: like relying heavily on decorum or etiquette (I guess in the place of sincere virtue or sincerely loving your fellow man, you're following rote behaviors that merely signal these things). These Confucian norms were instituted to mark distinctions, divisions, and classes. Essentially Taoism renounces the dangerous temptations of an over-polite society in order to return to healthy original simplicity.
* Wu-wei (without doing, absence of action, or "doing-not-doing"): everything in nature comes about of itself without any particular kind of intervention. Similarly, the holy man takes good care not to intervene: he lets all creatures develop according to their own nature and thus attains the best practical results.
* Sooner or later, deliberate intervention always results in failure. The holy man's policy of non-intervention is nothing more than congruity with natural law, the heavenly Tao, that which conquers without striving. Since all action gives rise to reaction, the normal counterpart of a seemingly right action will be wrong. This is very similar to the idea of "surrender" or true acceptance of a situation.
* "Arms are ill-omened instruments, and are not the instruments of a sage; he uses them only when he cannot do otherwise."
* This book brings to mind different instantiations of the "midwit problem." Midwits (including myself!) really struggle with the various paradoxes presented in Taoism.
* Examples of how a modern person might follow the way of Tao:
- being quiet
- avoiding consumerism
- not flexing your wealth
- avoiding vanity
- practicing virtue in private, not virtue-signaling, ever.
- "practicing inaction" or practicing non-resistance to what is (surrender)
* Water as an important metaphor and symbol in Taoism: "Nothing in this world is softer or more yielding than water, yet nothing can surpass it for overcoming the hard and the strong."
* Long life:
Practices for prolonging life: holiness and longevity were thought of as related. The principles of wu-wei cause the sage not to exhaust himself, as well as foster the "soft elasticity" he was born with.
* Discussions of breath control
* The tao te ching as a form of mysticism:
- No rational demonstration of the doctrine
- Teachings are deliberately obscure and ambiguous and can be interpreted on more than one level
- Discards discursive knowledge in favor of intuition
- Examples of ecstatics in Taoist history including Lao Tan himself, saying to Confucius "I had gone for a stroll at the origin of all things"
* The initial unattractiveness of Taoism:
"Music and fine food make the passerby pause.
How different is that which the mouth utters about the Tao!
How tasteless, how lacking in savor!
For if you look at it, you can see nothing; if you listen to it, you find nothing to hear; if you use it, you can never use it up."
* And here (one could read the "inferior man" as an interesting example of a typical midwit reaction to Taoist ideas):
"When the superior man has heard of the Tao, he hastens to follow it.
When the average man has heard of the Tao, he sometimes thinks about it, sometimes forgets it.
When the inferior man hears of the Tao, he bursts out laughing; if he did not laugh, it would not really be the Tao."
* The holy man must keep his light hidden: it must not be "apparent to the vulgar" in order to be authentic. Not only must his holiness go unrecognized he must give the appearance of a fool.
* The Chuang Tzu
* Most of the ancient quietest texts have been lost; apart from the Lao Tzu, almost all that is left us is the Chuang Tzu. "If the Tao Te Ching is by far the most famous, the Chuang Tzu is incontestably the most important... it above all gives us insight into the thought and the way of life of the early Taoists." Little is known about Chuang Chou, the author of the Chuang Tzu.
* Like the hermit sages, the Taoists felt that any compromise with ruling powers would defile them.
* Celebrating silence, inaction (wu-wei) and true oneness, see for example the allegory of Knowledge meeting with The Silent One and the Jester: "For he who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know."
* Chuang Chou singing and beating time on a bowl after his wife's death, one of the most famous passages in the Chuang Tzu: he talks about the origin of all being, that she returned from where she came, that life and death are mere transmutations of forms. Death is a natural phenomenon, a mere change of form that we ought neither to fear nor desire.
* "The Tao neither acts nor has form; you can receive it, but not grasp it." On being humble about receiving knowledge, not grasping at it or demanding it come to you in some form easy for you to receive or digest; rather to be open to accepting wisdom however and in whatever form it comes, even if it comes in the form of insult, ego injury or suffering. Another way to think about this is that "We must empty our hearts for the Tao to come and dwell in them." Or, "Holiness comes through purification of the soul by ascetic discipline."
* The ill-prepared disciple who believes he knows everything (before it is really the case) is a frequent theme in Taoist literature. Experience soon proves to him that he was presumptuous; he then has to go home or off to some desert place and live as a hermit... During the instruction the master seems to be wholly passive, this is required by the doctrine of wu-wei, teaching without words. It is the adept himself who has to progress by gradually emptying him himself of his social self, his false self. One must eliminate one's prejudices, known or unknown, likewise one must empty the mind of its clutter of opinions.
* Being like a mirror, reflecting the world, not being aroused to anger by it or to seek approval from it, but simply sitting with it/deep acceptance. Being immune to emotional or psychological arousal.
* A proper King should be a holy man and do nothing, not get involved in the lives of the people, and merely demonstrate his holiness by being so.
* This idea of wu-wei/doing-not doing really conflicts with Western ideas of "don't just sit there, do something!" or "never let a crisis go to waste"... In reality we should be following the Mungerism "don't just do something, sit there."
* Chuang Tzu takes this idea so far as to proclaim the superior value of uselessness: (!) A tree's chances of growing tall and venerable depend on its wood being worthless to the carpenter.
* The Buddhist sect of Zen is also heavily Taoist influenced.
* Chapter on the Taoist religion:
* Historians distinguish between the philosophical school of the Tao and Taoism as religion. This is what is sometimes called Neo-Taoism, Taoism with scripture, a creation myth/cosmology, ethics, etc.
* Lao Tzu's original philosophical stock was profoundly transformed by grafting of different religions and magical traditions on top of it, some of which were indigenous some of which were foreign. The most important of the alien traditions was Buddhism, which gradually won currency and support from the 1st Century AD on.
* Lao Tzu is deified by some of these religious schools, even presented as the Buddha himself, and Taoists exploited his legend to combat Buddhist propaganda as fabricated in a famous apocryphal work The Book of Lao Tzu's Conversion of the Barbarians.
* The Taoist religion is regarded by many to have been born during the reign of Emperor Huan, AD 147-167.
* Various ideas and impressions of Taoist heaven, or heavens: places where there were elixirs for immortality, an idea that the Taoist religion seems to chase. The author seems to have a little bit of a cynical or even sarcastic view here and there about some of the doctrines and ideas of these various religions.
* Discussion of anatomy and human physiology per the doctrine of Neo-Taoist religion. Mapping the body as a microcosm of the cosmos, thus organs correspond to different cosmological bodies.
* A section on alchemy and using different materials to achieve immortality that will strike a modern reader as impracticable to the point of pointlessness. Maybe interesting to the most geek of the Tao-curious.
* Taoism as a non-organized, bottoms-up religion, with no centralized or organized doctrine; it's one of the things that's somewhat difficult about Taoism as a religion practice. It "was never brought under the discipline of a central spiritual authority."