Christ I hope I get better at this. It comes to my attention that my pride kind of got the best of me at the end of this month. I basically pulled an Icarus, flying high and thinking I had everything well under control, but the moment my emotional landscape changes the glue in my wings gets runny and I tumble back down to Earth. So yeah, lost some time there but I’m pretty sure that I’m back on the horse… the faith horse…
Yeah.
So, Taoism. Once again, February didn’t end with the kind of climax that I would have liked, but it was a successful month, overall. I’m happy with what I learned, even though I didn’t experience as much as I could have. But let’s sum this up before things get too deprecating, shall we?
There is a central “schism” in Taoist tradition that I have really failed to address, and that is the difference between religious Taoism and philosophical Taoism. Again, as with most things Taoist, this is going to be tricky to explain, and I don’t know whether or not I’m completely sold on the distinction being made, but it is still noteworthy.
Philosophical Taoism is where Taoism begins historically, it covers the Tao-te Ching, Chaung Tzu and some other texts, and makes up the foundations of all Taoist thought that was to follow, including religious Taoism. It is concerned with cosmogony of the world and one’s place in it (Tao) and translating those thoughts into actions, a way of living, into virtue (te). Philosophical Taoism is relatively unorganized, more like a kind of self-help program in which there are teachers rather than priests or monks.[1] While it possesses a cosmogony and an ethics (sort of) nothing is set in stone, and as I have said before, things are more prescriptive than descriptive, or dogmatic. There is still an awful lot of thought going on here, and I don’t think that I will be able to penetrate it all, now that I’m at the end of the month. Suffice it to say, philosophical Taoism is more a philosophy than a religion… as one might imagine. But possibly not in the way you expect.
This actually has a lot in common with a philosophical period that I much admire- the ancient Greeks, specifically Socrates and the Hellenistic period that followed immediately after his death, the Skeptics, Epicureans, Stoics, etc. Much of what Socrates was on about can be found in the Tao-te Ching. His epistemological approach, that one could call oneself wise only if one knew the extent of their own ingorance, is repeated almost word for word by Lao-Tzu,
To know you don’t know is best. Not to know you don’t know is a flaw. Therefore, the Sage’s not being flawed stems from his recognizing a flaw as a flaw. Therefore, he is flawless. [2]
Only through admitting your own ignorance can you begin to live well and start being a virtuous human being. Much like Socrates and the Hellenists, philosophy in Taoism is tailored to helping people lead better lives, rather than trying to analyze the world and our place in it. There is some of that in Taoism, yes, but the emphasis is on living a good life, a life of ataraxia (free from anxiety or free from worry) rather than the accumulation of knowledge.
I think this goes a long way to explaining why I tend to shy away from philosophical study once we pass the Greeks, until we get to the existentialists, anyway, and why my academic career veered into religion rather than deeper into philosophy. After the Greeks it seems that us Westerners became a lot more concerned with how we can know things and what those things are composed of, and how they came to exist, rather than ataraxia. Religion deals a little bit more with this moral realm, and does so through incredible myths and powerful imagery. Then again I might be trying to simply justify my abysmal grades in certain philosophy classes. I guess we’ll see.
Anyway, that is philosophical Taoism. Religious Taoism is what grew out of that fertile soil, with an emphasis on meditation and vital essence or qi (chi), movement of the body and filial piety. This is where the cultural mishmash from Confucianism and other folk religions come in, and honestly things get terribly confusing. The point I’m trying to make is that I sampled a very small part from a large body that can be called Taoism, a part that some people wouldn’t really call a religion, but was nevertheless what really interested me.
One thing you can say about Taoism though, is that there is no deity, or at any rate there is no theism. Ancestors like Lao Tzu are deified and there’s a lot of spirits and Immortals running about, but a creator God who keeps track of you and knows when you’ve been naughty or nice? No sir, not here, and that makes me extraordinarily happy. Why? Because this means that people who simply disregard religion because it involves the worship of a higher power no longer have a leg to stand on. The typically cynical and skeptical atheist actually has to take pause when confronted with this kind of monster, because the familiar chink in the armor is absent. Taoism cannot be written off as some folksy superstition held up on the Word of God, and do so reflects poorly on the detractor, and not on the idea.
This is one of my motivations for doing this project, because when I look out into the world to find people like me, which are people who are atheists but still like to talk about religion, all I see is a bunch of this, and that terrifies me. All these people can do is scoff and feel self important and choke on their own bloody hubris as they speak of that which they do not know. Taoism begins to show a trend that I hope to make apparent throughout the year, that atheism does not exist by itself, that like theism it is always a component of a much larger idea, and sometimes that idea is actually a religion.
Taoism occasionally felt so right. It was like love, something that exists beyond words. No matter how many times I try to describe it I fall short, like grasping at the sand, like grasping at water. The path goes so much further than what I have written here, or what I have gone through this month. It is a perfect pearl of wisdom born of the axial age, and I sincerely hope we will remember it for as long as we can, or at the very least, that I may carry it with me until I die.
[1] Huston Smith, The World's Religions, p. 200.
[2] Robert Henricks, Te-Tao Ching, p. 44