The Tao te Ching
Wednesday January 2, 2008
As the story goes, the wise man Laotze was halted on his travels by a customs official, who demanded he declare his items of value. Laotze replied that he had only one thing of value- his wisdom. The official pondered this and decided that as payment, Laotze should write down his wisdom. The result was the Tao te Ching, or, "The way and its power," a profound, 81 chapter tractate that is the source of Taoism.
The Tao te Ching describes the "Tao," or "way." The first verse contains a seeming contradiction:
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The Tao te Ching describes the "Tao," or "way." The first verse contains a seeming contradiction:
Read more
Comments
Just a comment about wu-wei…
It isn’t so much a practice of being detached from worldly things as it is being in harmony with the eddys and tides of univeral energies.
Some people also have the notion that wu-wei means not doing anything. What it really means is not doing anything that would cause disharmony.
For example, if a swimmer were practicing wu-wei, he would not stand in the middle of the river and do nothing, and he would not swim against the current. He would align his energies with the energies of nature surrounding him….in this case, the current of the river……and he would swim with the current.
By the way, there is a way to swim back upstream without going against the current…you just have to know the Dao of rivers.
(Rivers don’t flow perfectly straight, like string falling. The waters shift and turn. When the waters from the center of the river work their way to the edge and bump the riverbed, they tend to be turned backward like a billiard ball with a spin on it, so that all along the edges of the riverbank, the waters are momentarily “flowing” in the opposite direction until they rejoin the regular current. If you swim along the edge of the riverbank, you can actually swim with the movement of these reverse-swirls without swimming against the current.