Taoism, according to tradition originated
with a man named Lao Tzu.
A shadowy figure, born about 604 B. C.
Before his retirement from society, he left
a slim volume of five thousand characters titled Tao Te Ching, or
The Way and Its Power.
A testament to humanity's at home-ness in
the universe, it can be read in half an hour or a lifetime, and remains
to this day the basic text of Taoist thought.
He didn't preach he didn't organize or
promote, he wrote a few pages on request, rode off on a water buffalo,
and that was it as far as he was concerned.
A. The Three Meanings of Tao. -
Literally, this word means path or way.
1. The way of ultimate reality -
This Tao cannot be perceived or even clearly conceived, for
it is too vast for human rationality to fathom.
2. It is also immanent. - In this
secondary sense it is the way of the universe, the norm, the
rhythm, the driving power in all nature, the ordering principle
behind all life.
3. In its third sense Tao refers to the
way of human life when it meshes with the Tao of the universe
as just described. Most of what follows in this chapter will detail
what the Taoists propose that this way of life should be.
First, however, it is necessary to
point out that there have been in China not one but three Taoisms.
B. Three Approaches to Power and the Taoisms That
Follow. - Tao Te Ching, the title of Taoism's basic text, has been
translated The Way and its Power. Just as the first term
Way can be taken in three senses, so can the second term Power.
Corresponding to the three ways
Te or power and be approached,
there have arisen in China three species of Taoism so dissimilar that
initially they seem to have no more in common than homonyms like
blew/blue or sun/son, that sound alike but have different meanings. We
shall find that this is not the case.
All were engaged in vitalizing programs
that were intended to facilitate Tao's power, its te, as it flows
through human beings.
1. Efficient Power: Philosophical Taoism.
Philosophical Taoists try to
conserve their te by expanding it efficiently, whereas
the other two "vitality" Taoists work to increase its
supply.
It is essentially an attitude
toward life, it is the most "exportable" Taoism of the three,
the one that has the most to say to the world at large.
2. Augmented Power: Taoist Hygiene and Yoga.
These Taoists want to go beyond
conserving to increasing the quota of the Tao they had to work
with.
They worked with three things:
matter, movement, and their minds.
They tried eating virtually
everything to see if ch'i could be augmented
nutritionally.
They sought to draw ch'i from the
atmosphere by breathing exercises.
They used programs of bodily
movement such as t'ai chi chuan, which gathers
calisthenics, dance, meditation, yin/yang philosophy,
martial arts, and acupuncture into synthesis that was designed
to draw ch'i from the cosmos and dislodge blocks to its
internal flow.
Taoist meditation, (the physical
postures and concentration techniques are reminiscent of Indian
reja yoga),
was designed to reach realization with which comes truth, joy,
and power.
The Taoist yogis recognized that
they could not hope for much understanding from the masses, and
they made no attempt to publicize their position.
3. Vicarious Power: Religious Taoism.
Reflection and health programs take
time, and the average Chinese lacked that commodity. Yet they
too needed help.
Taoists responded to such problems.
Using the unchanging landscape of Chinese folk religion,
Religious Taoism institutionalized such activities.
Popular, Religious Taoism is a
murky affair. Much of it looks - from the outside, we must
always keep in mind - like crude superstition; but we must
remember that we have little idea what energy is, how it
proceeds, or the means by which (and extent to which) it can be
augmented.
It was under the rubric of magic as
traditionally conceived that the Taoist church - dividing the
territory with freelance wizards, exorcists, and shamans -
devised way to harness higher powers for humane ends.
C. The Mingling of the Powers.
In the interest of clarity, the lines
between the above three divisions have been drawn too sharply. No
solid walls separate them; the three are better regarded as currents
in a common river.
Where these three things come together
there is a "school", and in China the school this chapter describes
is Taoism.
D. Creative Quietude. - The object of
Philosophical Taoism
The object of Philosophical Taoism is
to align one's daily life to the Tao, to ride its boundless
tide and delight in its flow.
The basic way to do this is to perfect
a life of wu wei.
Creative quietude combines within a
single individual two seemingly incompatible conditions - supreme
activity and supreme relaxation. This happens when our private egos
and conscious efforts yield to a power not their own.
Effectiveness of this order obviously
requires an extraordinary skill.
Clarity can come to the inner eye only
insofar as life attains a quiet that equals that of a deep and
silent pool.
E. Other Taoist Values.
The Taoists rejected all forms of
self-assertiveness and competition.
People should avoid being strident and
aggressive not only toward other people but also toward nature.
This Taoist approach to nature deeply
affected Chinese art.
Pomp and extravagance were regarded as
silly.
It was this preference for naturalness
and simplicity that most separated the Taoist from the Confucian.
All formalism, show and ceremony left
them cold. What could be hoped for from punctiliousness or the
meticulous observance of propriety?
Another feature of Taoism is its notion
of the relativity of al values and, as its correlative, the identity
of opposites. Here Taoism tied in with the traditional Chinese yin/yang symbol.
This polarity sums up all life's basic
oppositions: good/evil, active/passive, positive/negative/negative,
light/dark, summer/winter, male/female. But though the halves are in
tension, they are not flatly opposed; they complement and balance
each other. Each invades the other's hemisphere and takes up its
abode in the deepest recess of its partner's domain. In the end both
find themselves resolved by the circle that surrounds them.
In the Taoist perspective even good and
evil are not head-on opposites.
If this all sounds very much like Zen,
it should; for Buddhism processed through Taoism became Zen.
That in China the scholar ranked at the
top of the social scale may have been Confucius' doing, but Taoism
is fully as responsible for placing the soldier at the bottom. "The
way for a vital person to go is not the way of a soldier."
Circling around each other like yin and
yang themselves, Taoism and Confucianism represent the two indigenous
poles of the Chinese character. Confucius represents the classical, Lao
Tzu the romantic. Confucius stresses social responsibility, Lao Tzu
praises spontaneity and naturalness. Confucius' focus is on the
human, Lau Tzu's on what transcends the human.
Confucius roams within society, Lao Tzu
wanders beyond. Something in life reaches out in each of these
directions, and Chinese civilization would certainly have been poorer if
either had not appeared.