Discourse on Taoist Philosophy

In an ancient China full of selfish lords, underhanded merchants who would do anything to turn a profit, and faithless children who went against their parents out of self-interest, the modest thinker Lao-Tze created his philosophy of Taoism. It sought to balance the excess of creative impulse and active imagination [yang] with receptivity, passiveness, and understanding [yin]. His timeless text, Tao Te Ching, overflows with paradoxes and antilogies as it attempts to explain the mysterious power of the cosmos [Te], a concept virtually unheard of in the Western world, translated as "actionless action" [Wu Wei], the being who has mastered wu wei [the Sage], and the way itself [Tao] - things which to the untrained eye, appropriately enough, may ironically never be understood.

Te may best be described as "the effortless spontaneity of all things acting in a harmonious way." Lao-Tze saw te as the forces of the world at their purest - the perfect concord of yin and yang. It is characteristic of all natural things to act in regard to one another, and Lao-Tze obviously wanted to carry this over to human behavior. Te is also seen as the power which is used by a master of tao - not a physical po

wer [that would go against the word of the tao] but rather the humility that living simply will bring. The true key to understanding te is to realize that one is not living life but that life is living the individual instead; to see this one must grasp that all humans are living the same cycle and that they are part of a greater whole [which is paradoxically nothing] - they are born from nothing, they exist, and then they return to nothing. To think about this enigmatic cycle is truly humbling. It is no wonder that Lao-Tze described te as "the mystical virtue of the world."

The being who masters wu wei is known as the Sage, "a person who embodies the perfect human virtue of wisdom, and who therefore embraces the mystery and beauty of life to its fullest." The Sage has truly taken the basic concept of wu wei and elevated it to its highest form - such that even his or her movement that is an "action that mirrors the perfect emptiness of its source." The Sage also fangzhu xuewen, or "banishes learning" - which is not to actually remove learning from its place in life, but instead to become masters of everything done; thus, one eventually phases out learning and replaces it with doing. The wu wei of the Sage also applies to his or her general life as well as his or her specific talents. He or she experiences life naturally, in tandem with tao and all of its elements, and it is this living that enables the Sage to espouse the subtl