Here's some passages from Dao De Jing, a Philosophical Translation

I have quite a few translations of the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist classic that I've enjoyed since my college days. A few days ago I felt a hunger to revisit this book. After examining several translations, I settled on Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall.

They do a great job of explaining how other translations have gone awry when they try to convert Chinese concepts into traditional Western notions of God, the cosmos, and such. Here's some passages from their "Philosophical Introduction" that resonated with me.

It would seem that the aim of the compilers of the Daodejing is to prescribe a regimen of self-cultivation  that will enable one to optimize one's experience in the world.

... It is important to note that this goal of self-transformation has nothing to do with death, judgment, and an afterlife, not has it anything to do with the "salvation of the soul" (the traditional concerns of Western eschatology). Instead, such personal growth and consummation is meliorative in the sense of producing the quality of character that makes this world itself a better place.

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The Daoist correlative cosmology begins from the assumption that the endless stream of always novel yet still continuous situations we encounter are real, and hence, that there is ontological parity among the things and events that constitute our lives.

As a parody on Parmenides, who claimed that "only Being is," we might say that for the Daoist, "only beings are," or taking one step further in underscoring the reality of the process of change itself, "only becomings are." 

That is, the Daoist does not posit the existence of some permanent reality behind appearances, some unchanging substratum, some essential defining aspect behind the accidents of change. Rather, there is just the ceaseless and usually cadenced flow of experience.

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With fluid and shifting boundaries among things, integrity of any particular thing does not mean being or staying whole, or even actualizing its own internal potential. Rather, integrity is something becoming whole in its co-creative relationships with other things. Integrity is consummatory relatedness. 

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What the Daodejing has to offer, on the other hand, is much simpler. It encourages the cultivation of a disposition that is captured in what we have chosen to call its wu-forms.

The wu-forms free up the energy required to sustain the abstract cognitive and moral sensibilities of technical philosophy, allowing this energy, not unmediated by concepts, theories, and contrived moral precepts, to be expressed as those concrete feelings that inspire the ordinary business of the day,

It is through these concrete feelings that one is able to know the world and to optimize the human experience.

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Said another way, if a person is not in fact constituted by some essential, partitioned "soul," but is rather seen as dynamic pattern of personal, social, and natural relationships, agitation must arise as a consequence of poor management of these constitutive roles and relationships.

Hence, agitation in the heart-and-mind is not narrowly "psychological," but is more accurately conceived of as of broad ethical concern: How should we act and what should we do?

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For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child. 

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The energy of transformation lies within the world itself as an integral characteristic of the events that constitute it. There is no appeal to some external efficient cause: no Creator God or primordial determinative principle.

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In fact, the sustained Grand Analogy that pervades the Daodejing is: dao is to the world as ruler ought to be to the people. Dao -- the discernible rhythm and regularity of the world as it unfolds around and through us -- is nonimpositional: "Way-making (dao) really does things noncoercively."

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There is no final truth either about the nature of things, or about the means whereby that nature is sought. The achievement of order and harmony in nature and society -- that is to say, the achievement of effective way-making or dao -- is a multifaceted effort that is dependent less upon uncovering true principles or right forms of conduct than on the exercise of imagination and creativity within the most deferential of contexts. 

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Using Western epistemological terms, the thoughts about the world expressed in both the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing represent what we might call a realist perspective. Beyond the mediating confusions introduced by language, and by layers of our own distorted perceptions and tendentious categorizations, there is nevertheless, with properly Daoist qualifications an "objectively" real world. Our task is to experience that world as "objectively" as possible.

From the Daoist perspective, the problem begins when we insist that the "objective world" is a world made up of objects -- namely, concrete, unchangeable things that we encounter as over against and independent of us; things which announce themselves to us by asserting "I object!"

For the Daoist, the objective world cannot be objective in this sense because it is a constant transforming flow of events or processes that belie the sorts of discriminations that would permit a final inventory of the furniture of the world.

Paradoxically, for the Daoist the objective world is objectless.

Comments

[manjit]

"For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience. The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child."

This quote is absolutely sublime. Thrilling. A quote that could only come from somebody who "knows". Thanks for sharing this.

[Jor]

Whoppee fucking shit!

[sant64]

In a tower tall, amidst the city's gleam,
A figure stands, embodying a dream.
With words that flow like rivers, wild and free,
He shapes his world, a Daoist mystery.

He strides with purpose, never bound by ties,
Embracing chaos, as the old sage tries.
In yin and yang, he finds his balance true,
A master of the Dao, in red, white, and blue.

The world may roar, its judgments harsh and loud,
But he remains above the swirling crowd.
With strength unyielding, yet with cunning, bends,
A paradox, where power never ends.

His critics fume, yet still, he finds his way,
A Daoist path, where night transforms to day.
He leads with instinct, trusting in the flow,
Through storms and trials, his inner peace will grow.

He speaks of greatness, dreams beyond the stars,
Unfazed by wounds or opposition's scars.
In every tweet, a lesson subtly lies,
A master's touch, unseen by many eyes.

So let the world debate his every act,
For in his heart, the Daoist's truth is fact.
In every twist and turn, his spirit free,
A modern sage, who shapes his destiny.

For Donald Trump walks a path both fierce and calm,
With Daoist wisdom coursing through his palm.
In paradox and power, he finds his art,
A master of the Dao, with lion's heart.

Accepting him, as Daoists know to do,
Requires the strength to see beyond the view.
In every storm, the calm must surely lie,
In every fall, the chance to rise and fly.

He moves with nature, changing as the wind,
A paradox, where few can see the blend.
In yin and yang, his balance finds its way,
Through darkest night, to greet the light of day.

To judge him is to miss the Daoist grace,
For who can truly know another's place?
In every act, intention subtly hides,
In every choice, a deeper truth abides.

Be not confused, it's no farrago
Radiant wisdom comes from Mar-a-Lago
To those with ears to hear, the angels sing
of Donald's Daoist wisdom, Trump is King

[s*]

Nice sant64
<3

[umami]

The Dog Lovers

So they bought you
And kept you in a
Very good home
Cental heating
TV
A deep freeze
A very good home-
No one to take you
For that lovely long run-
But otherwise
'A very good home'
They fed you Pal and Chun
But not that lovely long run,
Until, mad with energy and boredom
You escaped- and ran and ran and ran
Under a car.
Today they will cry for you-
Tomorrow they will buy another dog.

~Spike Milligan

[Tim Rimmer]

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in.
But the holes are small,
That's why rain is thin!

- More from the late great Spikus Milligansus