Year of Faith

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

Meditated for the first time this year yesterday.  Did about fifteen minutes, and it felt like I was reading the Tao-te Ching, only more so.  Calm, focused, and… well, slightly odd.  Without any external stimulus, without any distractions or movement, you only have one place to go- inside.  It felt much longer than fifteen minutes, and I would have done more, but I was antsy to eat something after getting home from work.  Will do more meditating after this post, I think.

I was planning on meditating at work, before I opened the store.  It’s dark and quiet and there are plenty of cushions, but the Olympic torch was heading through downtown, waylaying my transit plans, and making me late for work even when I left early.  I tried meditating on the way over, which was still calming, and certainly made the commute go by faster, but it wasn’t the same.  Harder to focus, harder to center.

I’ve started to read the Chaung-Tzu, a compilation of stories and Taoist wisdom from a man of the same name and a few other Taoist teachers.  It is considered one of the central texts of Taoism, alongside the Tao-te Ching, but it is very, very different.  Much like how Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is praised because of it’s timeless wisdom in the art of conflict, the Tao-te Ching is timeless in it’s easy to understand advice and observations on the human condition.  If The Art of War is good for battle, then the Tao-te Ching is good for the soul.

But the Chaung-Tzu is an enitrely different kind of animal.  Instead of simple allegory and common sense sayings, it relies on word games, paradoxes, and strange stories to convince the reader of the uselessness of words and definitions to work your way through the world.  Better just to be and let the world in unlabeled, without expectation.  To show you what I mean, here is how the Tao-te Ching begins:

As for the Way, the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant Way.  As for names, the name that can be named is not the constant name.  The nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things.  The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.  Therefore, those constantly without desires, by this means will perceive subtlety.  Those constantly with desires, by this means will see only that which they yearn for and seek.

Alright so maybe that doesn’t seem as straightforward as I thought it would, but it’s a walk in the park compared to what you find in the Chaung-Tzu:

In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is K’un.  The K’un is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures.  He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P’eng.  The back of P’eng measures I don’t know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.  When the sea begins to move, this bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven.

That’s how this book starts.  It hasn’t drawn me in the same way to Tao-te Ching has, but it’s still good.

Taoism doesn’t feel like a very big shift for me, behaviorally speaking. It’s not that I do tai chi and meditate all the time, it’s that I tend to be very calm and balanced. I assess things and take my time to understand them, I’m soft spoken and it’s very hard to raise my temper.  I listen closely to my own body to figure out what it is I want to do, what I want to eat, etc.

Taoism calls for all of these things, but the difference is that Taoism begins and ends with the Tao, the Way, from silence and emptiness.  This is the onus for all the actions of the Sage (the perfect Taoist).  I don’t really know why I am the way that I am, as far as I know I’ve been this way most of my life.  I discovered the Tao-Te Ching early in my life, before I started reading any other philosophical or religious text, and some of those passages have been with me ever since.

So the Tao-Te Ching may be the reason for me acting the way that I do, it may have influenced my behavior in some way, but it was not through any meditation or deep insight.  It just made sense, and it still makes sense.  More than that, it just feels good.

I read the Tao on my way home from work today and I started to feel… well, almost high.  Not like disassociated or elated or giggly or anything.  I was still very much in control of all my faculties.  But I felt warm, reassured, and happy.  Just reading this thing makes me feel at peace.  It’s like it is strumming the chord of my being, and all I can do is sit back and hum.

So to recap, I may have Taoist-like tendencies, but I don’t think that counts unless it comes from the right place.  Knowing my desires through and through does not make me the master of them, but I think it’s fair to say that I’m starting this from an advantageous position.