Page 343 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAOISM A-L

Dao

"The Way"

Among the most difficult issues in the study of Taoism is that of explaining
the term dao. The public often sees little difficulty, since a century of writers
have "explained" the idea, based on simplistic understandings of the Daode
jingo For twentieth-century philosophers, the issue was more complicated,
but their task was ultimately given comfortable boundaries by the notion
that Taoism was a "school of thought" consisting merely of the Daode jing,
the *Zhuangzi, and a few commentaries. Such misunderstandings, though
enshrined by generations of sinologists, deserve repudiation, for, rooted in
Confucian perspectives, they are often at odds with the facts of both Taoist
tradition and East Asian cultural history. Achieving an accurate understand-
ing of the term dao requires us to break with such interpretive frameworks
and put aside decades of orientalist romanticization. By recognizing the wide
range of meanings that the term carried through Taoism's long evolution in
China, we can achieve an understanding that, while more complex, is also
more accurate and properly nuanced.
"Dao": Polysemy and non-reification. To be faithful to the values of premodern
and modern Taoists, we must beware allowing our interpretations of the
term dao to be tainted by other, non-Taoist concepts that may initially appear
analogous. The Taoists' Dao does not quite correspond to concepts of "the
Absolute" in other Asian or Western philosophical or religious systems. Taoists
of many ages warned against reifying the term: the celebrated opening words
of the Daode jing warn that verbalizations cannot truly convey what the term
dao signifies, and its twenty-fifth section repeats such warnings. Later Taoists
often insisted that the term is "empty" of definable content, and throughout
Chinese history Taoists generally maintained its polysemy-its rich variety
of meanings, which Taoists seldom disentangled in pursuit of intellectual
clarity. For example, the seventh-century *Daojiao yishu (Pivot of Meaning
of the Taoist Teaching) opens: "This Dao is the ultimate of reality (zhen ffij;),
the ultimate of subtlety, and yet there is nothing that is not penetrated by its
emptiness." At times, Taoist intellectuals of many periods went further, to
express conceptually exactly what that inexpressible Dao actually was, and
exactly how it relates to the sensible world-though not always in terms that
seem accessible to religious practice.
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