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MORE BELOW ON MY EBOOKS  These gadgets are invaluable for ease of access to new work. It feeds the Taoist's craving for print and understanding - a small failing, considering that we talk so much about darkness, misunderstanding and the uselessness of language...beware! The print can stupify! So take it easily, and with humour...
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| The Tao-Te Ching
Around
the time of the unification of all China, some two-thousand two-hundred
years ago, this small text the Dao-de Jing (The Book of the Way and its
Energy} appeared. Revised and authorized by the later Han scholars
(c. 200 AD), during the first great flourishing of the Chinese imperial
rule, it became a seminal text for the Daoists, a motley crew – who
could only have been born in China.
The middle Kingdom, as China
knows itself, is undoubtedly the world’s eldest civilization – written
records stretch into the second millennium BC and while the Egyptian,
Sumerian and Babylon, and Indus cultures are of equal antiquity, it is
only in China that a continuous, unbroken and responsive line is
preserved. Locked in by the Himalayas, by northern deserts and southern
jungles, China became a cauldron for a unique ferment of
proto-scientific inquiry and superstitious practice, whilst adhering to
an earlier Neolithic sensitivity to the natural world. This was
Daoism. At the center an officialdom embraced Confucian ideals of
propriety and correct behavior, while all around the Daoist world was
alive, building a model of the cycling seasons, the sun, moon and stars,
the mountain and the water-fall; representing a harmony and deep
intimacy with nature, and reverence for the yielding feminine
principle. They took in all that was neglected, outcast, downtrodden,
out-of-fashion with the times, magical even, slightly eccentric,
foreign.
The Dao-de Jing, as preserved, exists in some
eighty-one chapters (eighty-one is nine times nine, nine was the number
of Heaven to the Daoists); and is divided into two halves – the first
concerned with the Dao, the Way and Path, the second describing the De,
inner virtue, power or energy.
It has always been a work of
inward cultivation, a spiritual tract, giving veiled instruction in
breath-control and meditative practice; as well as a treatise on
government and personal behavior. Philosophy in China was concerned
with how to live; how to be a good ruler over the people. It never saw
much need in being speculative, metaphysical. They were so busy
living!
Tradition states that Lao Zi (literally ‘the old fellow’)
wrote the book in a single night, as he was passing through the
mountains to the West. The Dao-de Jing was born during the decline of
the Zhou state, when a cultural extravagance was winning over the simple
life. Disgusted at the customs of the time he traveled to the borders
of his land and there met the Gatekeeper to the pass into the Himalayan
massif. We have to thank this man for convincing Lao Zi to produce this
profound work.
The story is no doubt fanciful. But it
communicates exactly the spirit of this work. ‘The Dao that can be told
is not the constant Dao’ (Ch.1). There is little the Daoist feels he
can communicate. Self-discipline and self-discovery are close to his
heart. And it is a philosophy for troubled times: a quietism which
believes in the action of non-action, meaning that to strive for
personal, political or societal change must be less effective than
trusting to the inner radiance of the spirit.
‘Cultivate virtue in the
yourself and it will be real, in the family and it will abound, in the
neighborhood and it will endure, in the nation and it will be abundant,
in the world and it will be everywhere (Ch.54)’.
I commend this
book to the reader. Take time to dip in to savor it. In a troubled
world, an ounce of good thought is worth a barrow-load of action.
Back to Tao Booklets here.
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