/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14582408]

what exactly is the dao?

[Anonymous No.14582415]

THE DAO THAT CAN BE NAMED IS NOT THE ETERNAL DAO REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[Anonymous No.14582420]

Twitter bullshit

[Anonymous No.14582429]

Yes

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.14582459]

>>14582408
The way.

>>14582415
This is not the dao

[Anonymous No.14582474]

>>14582408
There it is

[Anonymous No.14582486]

dao is not

[Anonymous No.14582531]

>>14582408
Not two

[Anonymous No.14582588]

The Dao is the way things flow, as corny as that may sound, but also the flowing itself (it's not like a road, it's like the river and the water from the river at the same time). It's said it can't be named and all that shit because the moment you define it, you are confining it, identifying something that is actually ever flowing. We are constantly trying to do it though and daoist practices usually go on how to do things smoothly, intelligently, accordingly to the dao, in the same sense that a boat uses the wind. Sometimes you respond acting, sometimes you respond non acting. That is so in martial arts, in their medicine, in their philosophy, they have a hollistic sort of way to see things. The yin and yang in the Dao symbol is not, as some people think, about good and evil, though it could be too. They are more about figure vs background, contrast, something is up only because some reference is down, you only identify something because you distinguish between them in such way, it comes before any moral judgement.

[Anonymous No.14582616]

life

[Anonymous No.14582626]

>>14582408
It's the way the cookie crumbles, know what I'm sayin?

[Anonymous No.14582831]

>>14582408

[Anonymous No.14582901]

>>14582408
In the Analects Confucius stands by a river and says "all things flow like this, day and night, without resting". The interplay of the positive and negative substances inherent in all things, such as man and woman, heaven and Earth, is yin and yang. This eternal flow is the Tao.

Laozi wrote "the one made the two, the two made the three, the three made all things": the Tao made yin and yang, these made chi, in the end everything flows with and from the Tao

[Anonymous No.14582938]

>>14582408
The Dao that can be taught is not the eternal way

[Anonymous No.14582957]

I call it God; Lao Tan called it the Way.

[Anonymous No.14582991]

>>14582474
No, you're confused. That's a taijitu.

[Anonymous No.14583003]

>>14582957
Boomer take

[Anonymous No.14584138]

>>14582408
The dao is the dao

[Anonymous No.14584152]

>>14582408
http://classics.mit.edu/Lao/taote.html

this

a series of paradoxical phrases meant to humble you.

[Anonymous No.14584424]

>>14582408
An oriental prefiguring of the Christ.

[Anonymous No.14584427]

>>14582415
fpbp

[Anonymous No.14584445]

>>14582415
fpbp

[Anonymous No.14585163]

>>14582415
>>14582420
>>14582429
>>14582459
>>14582474
>>14582486
>>14582531
>>14582588
>>14582616
>>14582626
>>14582831
>>14582901
>>14582938
>>14582957
>>14582991
>>14583003
>>14584138
>>14584152
>>14584424
>>14584427
>>14584445
This is not the eternal Tao

[Anonymous No.14585518]

the natural world.

such a thing, however, is inconceivable directly. it has therefore to be socialized,and it is only through that process of socialization that the natural world can be conceived, as a mirror or container of the social world.

the 'tao', then is just the social echo of the living world, which is the source of all life, but which the human world cannot encompass entirely, for it is dependent and contained in it.

in a word, it is that which is inaccessible to all forms of consciousness while being its very source.

[Anonymous No.14585575]

>>14585163
Based.

[Anonymous No.14585583]

>i am like an idiot, my mind is so empty

[Anonymous No.14585591]

The Tao is the ineffable One. He's the way, the truth and the life.

[Anonymous No.14585742]

Lin

[Anonymous No.14585938]

Dao cannot be told, only e-x-p-e-r-i-e-n-c-e-d. Western thinkers try to unite the concept of the Dao with the Biblical logos (the cosmic mind of god, if you prefer), but that is a tendentious syncretism authored by "spiritualists" who are mostly faking their profundity.

[Anonymous No.14585964]

>he who knows it doesn't know it
>he who doesn't know it also doesn't know it
>no one knows it
So why should we care?

[Anonymous No.14585987]

>>14585964
you shouldn't
as soon as you begin to care about knowing the Tao, you lose it. it is an a-rational macguffin meant to frustrate rationalists, moralists, empiricists, positivists, etc.

[Anonymous No.14586842]

>>14582408
Always without desire we must be found,
If its deep mystery we would sound;
But if desire always within us be,
Its outer fringe is all that we shall see.

Read the 4 classic chinese novels, then the I-Ching and then the Dao De Jing if you want to know.

[Anonymous No.14586868]

>>14582408
The Dao = The Logos

I.e., the animating principle of the universe; the spiritual equivalent of the laws of physics.

[Anonymous No.14587139]

>>14586868
wrong. logos is the word itself. the tao is that which cannot be encompassed by any word.

[Anonymous No.14587174]

>>14587139
Wrong.

[Anonymous No.14587186]

did he follow the dao?

[Anonymous No.14587208]

>>14582415
Fpbp

[Anonymous No.14587248]

>>14582408
during and before the Warring States period (when China was breaking up and dividing into feudal states), there was an ongoing debate between philosophers about what is the Way, or the Course, by which they meant the path a nation should follow in order to be unified and prosperous. There were many opposing ideas, the most popular of which were Confucianism (which ended up "winning"), Legalism (the real winner, but it sounded bad so they started calling it Confucianism) and Mohism (which completely disappeared).
Then there's Daoism. What Laozi and Zhuang Zhou proposed is that there is no definitive Way of living, that the questions most philosophers were tackling were ridiculously impossible to answer accurately, and that the only proper way is that which is not enforced. In other words, "fuck off Confucius, you can't and will never dictate the correct way of living". Daoists believe that humans are naturally good, and that a good society flourishes with a small government that only interferes subtly, without interrupting the balance of Nature. The government should only intervene when appropriate (for example, to prevent a war or fight against an invasion).
More extreme daoists were primitivists/anarchists who believed government shouldn't exist at all, while other extremes took a hedonist spin that advocated for living a life of spontaneity, arguing that since you are part of Nature, doing whatever the fuck you pleases you will also please the balance of Nature. There's also the mystic part of daoism, which believes in bullshit diets, astrology, divination and other practices that help your body stay in harmony with the universe. Of course there are many schools of daoism just like there are philosophical schools and different doctrines of the same religion, so it all depends. But the definition of Dao comes from what I explained about the reactions to the philosophical and sociopolitical issues of the time. Tao te Ching is in many ways a political essay, except it's written in poetry.
>>14582415
that's not what the author meant retard. Dao meant something in his language, not just esoteric bullshit. See above.

[Anonymous No.14587275]

>>14587248
forgot to add: the ying and yang in the spiritual aspect of the Dao is the polar opposites in nature. Existence and nonexistence, true and false, beautiful and not-beautiful, horse and not-horse, etc.
It has a lot of spiritual and linguistic interpretations but the non-spiritual and most obvious one is that you can't label something without other things to compare it to. It's a bit hard to explain because both Zhuangzi and Tao te Ching used a lot of clever wordplay which is very hard to translate even to modern mandarin

[Anonymous No.14587287]

>>14587275
does daoism have any overlap with buddhism or are they entirely seperate?

[Anonymous No.14587290]

>>14587186
he WAS the dao.

[Anonymous No.14587321]

>>14587248
That is what the author meant, since the author wrote it, and the meaning of that line is in line with your long explanation on the sociopolitical origins of the daoists. It's not esoteric, it's just written poetically.

[Anonymous No.14587339]

>>14587287
Eastern religions aren't like Western ones where you can only 'believe' in one at a time. You can be a Buddhist and Daoist at the same time. In China there are many religious shrines where there is simultaneously Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian iconography.

[Anonymous No.14587345]

>>14587287
Daoism developed long before buddhism came to China but they have a lot of similar ideas, and Chan Buddhism (Zen in Japan) is basically daoism with buddhism on top. Even the clothes of chan/zen practicioners are similar to traditional daoist clothes. There are a few books about it. In Introducing Daoism by Livia Kohn there's a section that gives a brief summary of the zen connection. There's also a book called the Chinese Roots of Zen and one called the Tao of Zen which also discuss this. Zhuang Zou specifically gave instructions on a form of meditation called Sitting in Oblivion, VERY similar to zen and other forms of buddhist meditation
>>14587321
yeah, but when someone asks what the fuck dao is and you just reply with a copy/paste in Pinyin and no context of what is even the english definition of Dao, you're not actually explaining anything and are turning a very direct poetic message into some kind of esoteric riddle

[Anonymous No.14587367]

>>14587287
They seem to have arisen separately, but Mahayana Buddhism eventually interacted with Taoism to become (historical) Chan/Zen Buddhism. As >>14587339 points out (in a slightly over-simplified way, but still having a point), a type of “syncretism” is very common in the Far East with regards to religious traditions. There were a lot of Eastern scholars who used phrases like the “Tao” and “Buddha-mind”/“Buddha-nature” interchangeably, argued for an underlying unity between Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.

[Anonymous No.14587369]

>>14587339
yeah this too, there's so much Syncretism in the East, especially China and Japan, that I'm not sure if they even have a word for it, and if they do they don't use it much AFAIK. Japs for example have the saying "born as a shinto, marry as a Christian, die a Buddhist"

[Anonymous No.14587405]

>>14582408
the dao is the dao. it is dharma and the logos

[Anonymous No.14587474]

>>14582408
>exactly

it is exactly that which cannot be exactly defined.

[Anonymous No.14587843]

>>14587474
Kind of like the set of all sets that are not members of themselves?

[Anonymous No.14587875]

>>14585163
Based dipshit annoying little brother poster.

[Anonymous No.14587885]

>>14585518
>it is that which is inaccessible to all forms of consciousness while being its very source.
Obscurantist mysticism is fucken useless.

[Anonymous No.14587906]

>>14582408
Bros. Just downloaded some chinese philosphy books to get introduced to chink think. tao te ching, analects, book of chuang tzu and sayings of mencius. Are these good books to start with?

[Anonymous No.14587918]

>>14587248
So simpletons approach every spirituality/religion/philosophy/Way with their temperaments filtering it but the odd educated joker pops up now and then with some new version of the same ingredients and looks like a radical innovator. ie Crowley with his thing about no lust for result, lifted from a bunch of eastern books.

For mine, Daoism is a dumb stack of Hegelian sounding noodling that gets people nowhere but lets them fiddle interminably.

[Anonymous No.14587934]

>>14587906
>mencius
Pretty much a pacifist in a time of gangster machete warlordism being slowly turned into civilization. Kinda mild and boring. Learn where these things fit into the bigger picture or your head will still be a steaming pile of trivia, just with a few chinese scraps floating around in it

[Anonymous No.14587946]

>>14587934
good advice anon. thank.

[Anonymous No.14588144]

>>14585518
>that which is inaccessible to all forms of consciousness while being its very source.
In other words, the Noumenonal World. Kant did it better.

[Anonymous No.14588536]

Just a little feeling.

[Anonymous No.14588562]

>>14582408
Enlightenment is reached by asking the right questions. This is the wrong question.

[Anonymous No.14588613]

>>14582408
The Way and Its Power by Arthur Waley is your friend here.

[Anonymous No.14589566]

>>14582588
>The Traditional Chinese characters 陰 and 陽 for the words yīn and yáng are both classified as radical-phonetic characters, combining the semantically significant "mound; hill" radical 阝 or 阜 with the phonetic indicators ying 侌 and yang 昜. The first phonetic yīn 侌 "cloudy" ideographically combines jīn 今 "now; present" and yún 云 "cloud", denoting the "今 presence of 云 clouds".[7] The second phonetic yáng 昜 "bright" originally pictured 日 the "sun" with 勿 "rays coming down".[8] This phonetic is expanded with the "sun" radical into yáng 暘 "rising sun; sunshine". The "mound; hill" radical 阝full forms semantically specify yīn 陰 "shady/dark side of a hill" and yáng 陽 "sunny/light side of a hill".

[Anonymous No.14589574]

>>14582901
>Laozi wrote "the one made the two, the two made the three, the three made all things": the Tao made yin and yang, these made chi, in the end everything flows with and from the Tao
Oh so its literally just the Christian Trinity.

[Anonymous No.14589901]

>>14589574
>it say tree liek trinity. same thing
what an astonishingly retarded comment, even by /lit/ standards

[Anonymous No.14590222]

>>14589901
Care to explain the difference?

[Anonymous No.14590262]

>>14584424
>An oriental prefiguring of the Christ.
No way. The ancient Chinese were monotheists (like all ancient people, really), but they never degenerated into pagan/occult nonsense.

They went straight into

a) Jordan Peterson-style secularism -- i.e., "clean your room and respect your pappy, also religion stuff, but of course I don't really believe in it". This is Confucius.

b) "Spiritual but not religious" new-age nonsense. This is Laozi.

[Anonymous No.14590286]

>>14589566
> 勿 "rays coming down".
What? Are you nuts or just trolling?

[Anonymous No.14590311]

>>14590262
Quite possibly the dumbest post on /his/ at the moment

[Anonymous No.14590314]

>>14590311
wait this is /lit/

the sentiment still stands tho

[Anonymous No.14590320]

Anything that's not clearly defined and/or empirically verifiable is quite likely utter horseshit.

[Anonymous No.14590321]

>>14590314
Thanks, your NPC hot take is very valuable for the continuing dumbification of this board.

Also, please do continue to enlighten us with your reddit-tier snippet explanations of ancient Chinese culture.

[Anonymous No.14590324]

>>14590321
>Thanks, your NPC hot take is very valuable for the continuing dumbification of this board.

You are literally comparing Confucius to Jordan Peterson, and calling Laozi "new-age". Shut the fuck up.

[Anonymous No.14590453]

Whatever you want it to be. Chink mystics/clergy are the original grifters. Look at shit like Tibetan Buddhism and try not to cringe at what is an obvious personality cult network that westerners are loathe to attack for fear of wacism etc.

If you want a really tangy laugh, look into the recent implosion of Shambhala. The entire sect is on its deathbed because the leader was discovered to be a drunken serial rapist.

[Anonymous No.14590553]

>>14582408
http://esotericawakening.com/what-is-reality-the-holofractal-universe

[Anonymous No.14590563]

>>14590320
empirical verification has inherent limits just like the people attempting it do. You can pout and call most things horseshit, but that just means you swim in horseshit

[Anonymous No.14590566]

>>14590453
hot girl though

[Anonymous No.14590571]

>exactly

stupid westerner

[Anonymous No.14590576]

>>14590553
https://ascensionglossary.com/index.php/Main_Page

[Anonymous No.14590591]

>>14590563
>empirical verification has inherent limits just like the people attempting it do...
What?

>You can pout and call...
Your words speak for themselves.

[Anonymous No.14590601]

>>14582408
there's no true definition of the dao
for some it defines their way of life, for some it's the truth of the heavens, that kind of shit

[Anonymous No.14590670]

>>14590601
>there's no true definition of the dao
r u sure?