A 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 power
eone breathing: something virtually rooted at its source, spontaneous and without difficulty. The second is developed over time, much like the cellist needs years of practice to play her instrument perfectly - it is where most of the wu wei is concentrated. The last kind of "non-ado" is the mystical type, in part a combination of the first two kinds with a large element of the extraordinary added. The philosophy of Taoism, as contradictory as it is, only makes perfect sense when it has been reached. Tao, manifested cognitively as te, is embodied by the Sage and through his or her learnings and life experiences practiced as wu wei. It is the inherent contradiction within this relationship among these things that was a model of the majority of the paradoxical metaphors in Tao Te Ching. These seemingly nonsensical things represent life's obstacles and hang-ups. Once you fully understand the book, you understand life. And it is within this where one may find the foundation of tao, the most puzzling and equivocation of all: to master life, an individual must understand that life cannot be mastered. [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
Some common words found in the essay are:
Sage Tao, Te Ching, Taoist Philosophy, wu wei, Wu Wei, wu wei sage, wei sage, yin yang, philosophy taoism, te ching, understand life, Tao Te, actionless action wu, actionless action, action wu, tao te ching, tao te, action wu wei,
Approximate Word count = 943
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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