Tao and Zen

Tao and Zen

Laotsu Bhodidharma

I am not a follower of Tao or Zen in fact, if I were, then by the stringent ideas of these creeds, I would not even be writing this article: according to one, you should be achieving the understanding that my article tries to pass on through your own meditative efforts, while according to the other, the forces of the cosmo would naturally make it happen without me doing anything to force it. You could look at analogous cases like a capitalist spending money on propagating the virtues of free enterprise he should be using his capital to seek the highest return. The Warring States philosopher Yang Zhu was more consistent: he promoted Selfishness as the guiding principle of life, on the hard to refute premise that if everyone does the best for himself, then society as a whole is improved. He left behind no books - if he wrote books and taught students, he would be helping others, hence violating his own principle of selfishness.

The great proponent of Tao was of course Laozi, an archivist at the Zhou royal court during the Later Spring-Autumn period, somewhere during 600 to 500BC. We have virtually no biographical information about him, just brief mentions in several ancient texts. Zhuangzi mentioned him most frequently, but as a sage-hermit figure appearing in fragmentary fables, which tell us nothing about him as a physical person; Hanfeizi discussed Laozi in rather academic ways , thus also not being very helpful for biographic purposes. Mentions in several Confucian texts are somewhat more concrete, showing him as Kongzi s mentor. However, the idea that he was only a mythical or composite figure, and the book Daodejing was written by a later author, was put to rest definitively when a copy of the book was excavated in a Warring States tomb during the 1970s, showing that the book could not have been written later than early Warring States and most probably existed much earlier, though it received some minor editing to end up in the current standard form. The discovery also confirms that Laozi was smoe kind of government official, since the availability of writing material was highly restricted during the Spring-Autumn period and books from that age and earlier were all official documents of one kind or another.

Given the author s status, Daodejing was not a book about mysticism, religion or even philosophy, but about politics; (It is also useful to point out that de originally meant something like grace in X, by the grace of God, King of Y , i.e., divine mandate.) however, its political views derive from certain ancient mystical ideas, which I show in the following diagram of various ancient Chinese artifacts

folowed by something more Western

the commonality between east and west is the serpent that swallows its own tail, or in the words of Keats the poet: in my end is the beginning.

In the West, the Uroboros serpent was at least 3600 years old, its first kno

• Tags: buddhism, taoism