What is the Tao?

Before I properly begin this rather difficult post, I should start with the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching (道德经), the seminal text of both Taoist philosophy and Taoist religion, and written by it’s founder Lao Tzu (老子).

The Way [Tao] that can be told of is not the Unvarying Way [Tao];

The name that can be named is not the Unvarying Name 

Chapter One

Every morning when I go with my partner to the subway station, we walk across a little park. Keep in mind that in Harbin, China, the temperature is often around negative twenty degrees celsius, just a little bit cold. Despite this, every day there is a group of elderly people doing Tai Chi, that interesting practice which involves slow, flowing movements of the body, said to be very beneficial both physically and mentally. They seem to interchange each morning, one day using just their hands and legs, and on other days, they’ll be using swords. Quite an incredible sight, especially in this weather!

Tai Chi has its roots in the spiritual traditions of China, in particular with Taoism and it utilises the concept of yin-yang, which is very important to the philosophical and religious tradition. But that is maybe a post for another time. Seeing these elderly people, flowing their bodies on these crisp, icy mornings, inspired me to write a little bit on what the Tao is, the principle that underlies not just Taoism, but much of traditional Chinese thought.

The reason why I posted the quote above was partly to relieve myself from a little bit of pressure from doing a good job at explaining the Tao. Also, it was to show that trying to box the Tao into a category or concept is of fundamental unimportance to the spiritual philosophy. In similar ways to how I see God as being beyond conceptualisation, these first two lines from the Tao Te Ching suggest the exact same sentiment. If you say the Tao is this, then it is not that. If you even name it Tao, this is still not the Tao.

With this in mind, I can perhaps make an attempt to at the very least give some semblance of an idea of what the Tao is.

So where else to begin to get an idea of the Tao but from the Tao Te Ching:

There was something formless yet complete,

That existed before heaven and earth;

Without sound, without substance,

Dependent on nothing, unchanging,

All pervading, unfailing

One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.

Chapter Twenty-Five

This appears to suggest that the Tao is the creator of the universe, God, so to speak. Indeed, the language does not sound all too different to how we would conceive of God, at least in the sense that God is utterly infinite, perfect and incomprehensible. However, there are differences between the Tao and conventional understandings of God in the West and in Hinduism.

Perhaps the biggest difference is the idea of creator and lord of the universe. And in Chinese thought, the Tao is far from this, even though early Christians translated Tao as the Logos – the creative of force of the universe which manifested itself in Jesus Christ. Instead of being seen as the governing king with his hands on everything, it’s perhaps better to conceptualise the Tao in a different way. And the word “mother” in the above verse could very well be a hint. The Tao is not the tinkerer who manufactured the universe, but more like a mother who doesn’t really actively create a child by using her will to grow it’s organs and limbs. Instead the child arises and grows out of the mother, as her energies naturally brings it into existence. The Tao is more the behind-the-scenes force that allows the universe to do it’s natural processes, rather than the active creator.

The Tao can be seen as an impersonal God in some senses. It doesn’t have a personality anything like the God of the Abrahamic religions or the many gods that represent Brahman in Hinduism. Nor is it strictly pantheistic (God is the universe), the Tao isn’t just the things that contain the world. On the whole, the Tao defies categories, but if needed, I would label it under the panentheist conception of the divine. The Tao can be further understood as the essence that sustains the universe, the energy of things, the natural way. It is that which allows the seasons to change, trees to grow, planets to revolve, and is what guides animals to do what they do best.

The flow of water is perhaps the most prominently used metaphor to describe the Tao. It gives and sustains all without discrimination, and will go to places where no one else will. It is weak and flexible, so it is humble, but it can flow into anything and is able to break down even the strongest of things. In this sense it reminds me perhaps of the Holy Spirit in Christianity.

Therefore, with the idea of the Tao being intimately involved in the natural processes of the world, the Chinese have traditionally conceived the universe as an organism, and the Tao is the completed system, the totality of it all. Instead of seeing the universe as a series of causes and effects, like Newtonian physics and how we in the West usually perceive the world, Taoism see the universe as mutually arising. In other words, everything depends on everything else. Things of the world coexist and are inseparable from the other. High and low, hot and cold, life and death all can’t really exist without their opposite, arising together in interdependence. The spiritual philosopher Alan Watts uses bees and flowers to illustrate this. The bee needs the flower and vice versa, you don’t find bees in a place where there are no flowers. One can’t exist without the other and so came into the world order together.

The Tao is that which allows this process of mutual arising to exist, it is the base of the universe, the Ground of all Being. It is that which binds everything together. It is what flows through everything and gives it life and being. It “loves and nourishes all, and through it, all things are accomplished (Chapter Thirty-Four).”

So hopefully, I’ve managed to give a bit of an idea of what the Tao is and it’s relation to the universe. It’s quite difficult to grasp, given that most writers try to explain it through metaphor, and according to the key texts of Taoism itself, the Tao is impossible to fully understand with reason alone! I’ve been reading about Taoism on and off for several years now and still have trouble grasping the basic concepts of this philosophy, yet I still find it another beautiful spiritual tradition that has done nothing but enrich our perspective of the world, particularly when it comes to the ways of nature.

Finally, the ultimate point of Taoism is to learn how to flow with the Tao, letting it work through you, much like how other religions encourage you to allow God do his workings through you. So I thought I would end on this quote from the Tao Te Ching, as it speaks to me quite strongly:

The Tao is like an empty vessel that yet may be drawn from without ever needing to be filled.

It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world.

Chapter  Four

 

* I should mention on a very final note, that a lot of my recent research on the topic was from Alan Watts, so if you want a more comprehensive and far more eloquent look on Taoism, his books and lectures are a great place to start.