6 Answers

  1. There are already a lot of great answers here.

    I might add that Lao Tzu was one of the many “sages” of the warring States era. This is the name given to the period of extreme feudal fragmentation in China. These were troubled times, when everyone attacked everyone.

    And in those days, it turned out that princes, military men and other influential people have a great interest in a wide variety of knowledge about how to fix everything.

    This led to the prosperity of the path of the “sage”, or as we would say “consultant”, “coach”. Many different schools of thought have emerged. Some insisted that the most important thing is to comply with the laws, others said that the most important thing is to communicate with everyone according to precise protocol and etiquette, not allowing any disrespectful liberties. Some called for abandoning the worldly life and cultivating their own health and longevity away from the vicissitudes of social life. Etc. Therefore, almost the same period of the “contending kingdoms” is called the “period of the scholars of the hundred schools”. A hundred in the sense of a lot.

    And the vocabulary of that time was such that when one of the sages put forward his own model, his own way to establish everything — the very concept of “method”, “approach” was just called the word “tao”. The hieroglyph represents the head and the route, trail. That is, it is like a “train of thought”. So far, if someone just wants to say “I do not know”, then it sounds like wo bu zhi dao. Literally “I do not know the way/path/method”, “I do not know how”.

    In this context, when the word tao was used to describe all sorts of things like “one must be law-abiding”, “one must be respectful”, “one must be healthy and follow the zohu”, Lao Tzu declared: “all these methods that everyone here uses in unison are complete nonsense and cannot be the real and final way of life.”

  2. Paragraph one of the treatise translated by Jan Hinshun:

    A Tao that can be expressed in words is not a permanent tao. A name that can be called is not a permanent name…

    Rather, this is part of the first paragraph. So there is a tao that we can put into words, and it is “not a permanent tao”; and there is a “permanent tao”.

    In words, we can only express that which exists, and we give it a name that, like that expressed in the words of Tao, is not permanent, that is, it changes in time and comes to an end one day.

    Permanent dao is the possibility of something appearing under certain conditions. For example, when certain conditions developed, a person appeared.

  3. I would like to add a little bit to the answers about what should be understood by the tao. To do this, you can define categories similar to the tao in other cultures. They partially combine the essence of this concept.

    In ancient Rome, a similar concept to tao is ratio(thought, mind, intellect)

    In India, it is dharma (the law that supports the cosmological world order)

    In Greece, it is the logos (universal law of being)

    In Russia-this is ла lad (harmony, peace)

  4. Tao generates a unit from which yin and yang appear, symbolizing the opposites that are necessary for our world. Without black, there can be no white, and vice versa. The Tao is everything, and in the same case it is one thing. The Tao is not divided, the Tao is one. It covers events such as absence and presence.

  5. Tao is an abstract natural order of everything in the world. And at the same time a natural abstract way of development of everything in the world. (which is generally logical, since the world is dynamic).
    In reality, it doesn't exist. But it supposedly exists somewhere above the world of ideas, is presented as almost the essence of the world.
    It is a very convenient concept to justify anything: since no one in the world knows what this order/path really is, then anything can be passed off as Tao, and no one can reasonably refute such a statement.
    By the way, I heard the opinion that all this was started for the sake of justification. Allegedly, Lao Tzu was given the task of ideologically justifying some kind of palace coup, so he came up with something that, according to him, was much more important than the legality of the transfer of the throne. But I don't really believe in this theory myself:) �

    The expression “he has learned the Tao” was originally used as a compliment to emphasize the pinnacle of wisdom of the one being spoken of. (although at the same time everyone understood that the Tao is boundless, and it is impossible for one person to know it in any way).

  6. The Tao expressed in words is not the Tao. Therefore, whatever answer you write, it will be far from the truth. For example, we can say that the Tao is a fundamental principle of the organization of the world, as a result of which interdependent opposites arise. We can say that the Tao is zero. If we express positive numbers with white balls, and negative numbers with black balls, then to express zero, we will need to mix all the white and black balls. On the one hand, zero is empty, because it expresses absence. On the other hand, zero contains everything positive and negative, because zero is needed before everything else manifests.

    It can be said that the Tao is the easiest way. Because it's easiest to go with the flow. If a person acts in harmony with the world, then he is following the path of Tao.

    All these examples are still not Tao, because words are ripples on water, and Tao is water itself.

Leave a Reply

Categories