Page 352 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

DAOD E JING 313

apophatic or negative approach, the Dao, through its Virtue (*de), is said to be
the source of all life, the "mother," "pervading" (tong :@), "rich in promises"
and the only certain reference point (sec. 25); in this sense, it is 'both this and
that." All that can be said (dao) and has a name is transient and pertains to the
world; only the Dao that has no name is permanent. "Naming" and language,
however, are said to be the "mother" of all things.
This dimension of the Dao was retained, with varying emphases, by all
schools of Taoism. The Dao is the source of the world, the point to which
everything flows, the "treasure of the world" (sec. 62), that by which Heaven
and Earth can exist. It has an evanescent and mysterious hypostatized presence
that one would like to grasp or see (sec. 14 and 21), and seems to allude to an
inner experience resulting from meditation practices aiming at quiescence
(see *qingjing), and from a multidimensional view of the world. This gives the
Daode jing a poetic and lyrical tone, and endows its teaching with a character
different from that of other texts of its time.

Ambivalence and totality. The Daode jing repeatedly names pairs of opposites
such as good and evil, high and low, Being and Non-being, naming and not
naming, because they all imply and support each other, and pertain to a
common whole. As does the *Yijing, it points both to the binary structure of
our thinking and to the unity from which oppositions proceed, their relativity
and their correlation. The consequences drawn from this view, however, are
different from those of the Yijing. Whereas the Yijing holds that one can know
and prevent coming negative events by understanding the laws of the cosmos,
the Daode jing strives to show that thought is by nature dualistic and cannot
grasp the Dao, which lies before and beyond any differentiation. The Daode
jing not only aims to clarify the inadequacy of language to know the reality of
things; in saying that every assumption implies its own negation, it also seeks
to unite the two as the reverse and obverse of a coin, or to invert the common
order of things so that one can grasp the foundation of all assumptions: for
example, to ascend means to begin from the bottom (sec. 39). In doing so, the
text sets up a logic of ambivalence that is typical of Taoist thought. Priority
is not given to assumption or negation, but to the infinite totality of the Dao
where every dualism "has a common origin" (sec. I).
The Dao encompasses all possibilities because it has no form and no name.
Its Virtue is its operation that accomplishes everything in the world. Cosmo-
gonic metaphors connected with mythological themes (Chaos, Mother) call
for a Return (*fan) to its primordial undifferentiation, and the infant is taken
as a model because it has not yet separated from its Mother. In accord with
the logic of ambivalence, however, return to the Origin is not separated from
return to the ordinary world, as shown by the simple fact that the Daode jing
was written for the benefit of human beings.