Page 344 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

DAO 305

To a great extent, Taoists' ambivalence about reification of Dao prefigures,
and parallels, the struggles of Chan/ Zen Buddhists (who were deeply influ-
enced by elements of classical Taoism, like Zhuangzi). The reason for Taoists'
resistance to reifying Dao is that, like many Chan/ Zen Buddhists, Taoists valued
spiritual practice over intellectualization, and refused to allow philosophical
conceptualization to supplant the practice of self-cultivation. To Taoists, 'being
Taoist"-i.e., achieving the goals of Taoist practice-could take place without
necessarily having any intellectually coherent explanation of what Dao "is."
In that sense, to be Taoist was to ignore an assumption familiar to modern
minds-that one cannot pursue or achieve what one has not first coherently
conceptualized. Taoists often preferred to leave Dao as a mystery-"mystery
beyond mystery."
"Dao": The range of meanings in classical sources. In traditional China, dao was
a term forced to bear many burdens of meaning, by people of different eras
and inclinations. Some were imposed by people who were never, in any sense,
Taoists. The original term- perhaps pre-Taoist-denoted a set of teachings
that allow us to live life on optimal terms. Confucians, and others in classical
China, used the term in that sense. But among those who would apparently
become the forerunners of Taoism-i.e., the people who produced such texts
as the *Neiye and the Daode jing- the term took on a broader range of mean-
ings. Though the Daode jing became the touchstone of many of the theoreti-
cal frameworks of many later forms of Taoism, we should beware assuming
that it was a summa of classical Taoist thought or practice. For instance, many
other elements of later Taoist theory and practice can be traced to the Neiye,
and there the term dao is used-quite imprecisely-as a synonym for terms
referring to the salubrious life-forces (like *qi) that the practitioner is work-
ing to cultivate. While there, as in the Daode jing, one reads that, "What gives
life to all things and brings them to perfection is called the Way," the Neiye
otherwise seldom uses the term dao as in the Daode jing or Zhuangzi, or even
in terms that are common in other forms of later Taoist thought and practice.
For instance, the Neiye presents no conceptualization of Dao as the "Mother"
of all things, nor differentiates Dao in terms of Non-being and Being (*wu and
you). Such conceptualizations, which evidently first appear in the Daode jing,
came to inform such later Taoist systems of thought/ practice as *neidan. But
the Daode jing also uses the term dao to mean, "the way life operates": there,
Dao is not only a primordial unity from which all phenomena evolve, and to
which they ultimately return, but also a benign, if imperceptible, force that
operates within the phenomenal world- a natural guiding force that leads all
things ineluctably to their fulfillment. To some in ancient China, such char-
acteristics clearly suggested the qualities that a healthy person is bequeathed
by a loving Mother, and the Daode jing goes on to identify the qualities and