Tao

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tao, also spelled Dao and written with the Chinese character 道, is introduced in one ancient passage by an author who admits defeat before starting. "I do not know its name; I call it Tao." That line comes from Chapter 25 of the Tao Te Ching, quoted here from a translation titled Tao Teh Ching. The passage describes something complete and undivided that existed before heaven and earth. It is soundless, formless, dependent on nothing, and unchanging. It may be considered the Mother of the universe. Yet the word began as an everyday term with practical meanings such as way and path. So how did a word for a path come to name the source of everything? Why do Taoists, Confucians, Buddhists and even a Christian author all claim it as their own? And what does it mean to follow something that, by its own scriptures, cannot be put into words?

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• 2. The Unnameable Source

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  Chapter 14 of the Tao Teh Ching offers a stranger inventory than any dictionary would. The author looks and sees nothing, so he names the thing the Equable. Listening brings only silence, so it becomes the Inaudible. Reaching out finds nothing to hold, so it is the Subtle. Because these three qualities resist description, the text blends them into one and calls it The One.

  Other scriptures say the same. Among them are the Ultra Plainness Scripture, attributed to the Ultra Supreme Elder Lord, and The Wonderful Scripture on the Constant Purity and Tranquility. Each repeats that the Tao has no form, cannot be seen, and is present everywhere as the source of all. From such descriptions readers have concluded that the Tao is Absolute Truth, free of any condition, and the ultimate reality behind everything that happens. It is the underlying natural order of the universe. Its essence is hard to fence in with concepts, yet it shows itself in the plain fact of being alive.

  The early writers knew the problem. The Tao Te Ching and the I Ching both separate the "named Tao" from the "unnamed Tao". The first can be discussed. The second cannot be expressed or understood in language at all. According to the source, the term began as a form of practice rather than theory. Liu Da argues that the Tao is best understood as something lived and evolving, so that interpretations differ between cultures and even between individual practitioners, reflecting each person's character. Yet the same text that denies the Tao a name sometimes gives it a gender.

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• 3. The Mother

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  In some chapters of the Tao Te Ching, the Tao is the Mother of the universe. She gives birth to all existence and then sustains it. Other chapters turn the image into advice. Adhering to the Tao is called "keeping to the Mother", "keeping to the Feminine" or "being fed by the Mother".

  Ancient Chinese classics go further and describe a supreme goddess regarded as an embodiment of the Tao. She carries several titles, including Holy Mother the Original Lord, Ultimate One Original Lord, Uncreated Original Empress and Supreme Original Lord. According to those classics she was the teacher of the Yellow Emperor, of Lao Tzu, and of the Ninth Heaven Mysterious Goddess.

  Taoist scriptures add a male figure. The Ultra Supreme Elder Lord, written 太上老君, is also treated as an embodiment of the Tao. The scriptures hold that the historical Lao Tzu was his incarnation. Some Taoists go further still and believe that the Tao itself can take on human form to carry out its aims. Other Taoists reject any such picture, preferring an image drawn from the natural world.

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• 4. Water and Flow

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  The Song dynasty painter Chen Rong helped popularize the most common image for the Tao with his painting Nine Dragons. That image is water. Like water, the Tao has no distinct parts and refills itself without end. It is gentle and hushed yet enormously strong, and it gives without favoring anyone.

  A passage in Chinese, beginning 道貫三才為一炁耳, spreads the idea across the cosmos. It says the Dao runs through Heaven, Earth and Humanity as a single qi. By that qi the heavens turn, the earth produces life, and yin and yang rise and fall. Wind and thunder surge through it, and people breathe with it. Qi, the essential energy of action and existence, is closely related to the Tao. In some Taoist belief systems the Tao serves as the life energy in place of qi.

  Catherine Keller compares the Tao to the negative theology of Western scholars. She notes, however, that people rarely worship it directly. It resembles the Hindu ideas of karma, dharma and Ṛta more than a god. The Tao is a non-dualistic principle, the greater whole from which every individual element of the universe comes. It is usually expressed through wu, meaning void or emptiness, and through the shifting balance of opposites. That leads to wu wei, which means inaction or inexertion. Every action produces a counter-action, and proper practice means accepting or working with those movements as part of the Tao.

  Taoist philosophy contrasts the cycles of the natural world with the straight-line, goal-driven actions of human beings. It holds that the Tao is "the source of all being, in which life and death are the same." The Tao can be known and practiced even though it cannot be defined. Its principles can be read from nature. The shared goal across Taoism, Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism is to "become one with the Tao" or to align one's will with nature for effortless action. That goal runs through meditative and moral discipline. A single character, 德, pronounced de, describes what that alignment looks like in a life.

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• 5. Many Taoisms

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  The translator Arthur Waley once listed the everyday senses of the word. It means road, path, method, doctrine and principle. The Way of Heaven, he noted, is ruthless, because in autumn "no leaf is spared because of its beauty, no flower because of its fragrance." The Way of Man includes procreation, and eunuchs are called far from it. Another phrase names the art of ruling. Every philosophical school had its own tao, and for one school it came to mean how the universe works, something close to God in an abstract sense.

  The source stresses that no single orthodox Taoist view of the Tao exists. Four texts show the range. The Tao Te Ching is the oldest and takes a speculative, philosophical approach. The Daotilun, an eighth-century commentary on the Tao Te Ching, gives the learned and traditional reading. The Qingjing Jing, a liturgical text first composed in the Han dynasty, serves as a hymnal in religious Taoism, especially among hermits. The Zhuangzi teaches through tales, allegories and narratives.

  Religious Taoism blends academic, ritual, supernatural, devotional, literary and folk practice, and Buddhism and Confucianism shaped how many sects framed the Tao. A common belief is that the Tao is always present but must be cultivated or perfected to be realized. The seed of primordial purity lies in all things. Some Taoists taught that breathing exercises let a person absorb parts of the universe. Incense and certain minerals were thought to represent the cosmos too, so inhaling them could work the same way. Both Taoism and Confucianism sometimes saw the Tao as a transcendent power that blesses, speaking directly through a prophet, priest or king.

  Philosophical Taoism takes the opposite view. Joseph Wu remarked of its Tao, "Dao is not religiously available; nor is it even religiously relevant." It is no deity and no mystical Absolute like the Hindu brahman. The self steeped in the Tao is simply the self grounded in its place within the natural universe, and mystical attainment is no escape from the world. Scholars warn that even this tidy split blurs, because sorting Taoist schools, sects and movements into categories is itself a difficult task.

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• 6. Virtue and Its Rivals

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  The character 德 can be rendered as power, virtue or integrity, and it names the Tao lived out rather than merely contemplated. Each named thing that emerges from the Tao has its own inner nature. Following that nature is de. Wu wei, or naturalness, depends on understanding that inner nature, which readers take either as a personal trait or as a general human nature within the larger universe.

  Confucians and Taoists drew the boundary in different places. Confucianism was largely a moral system built on humaneness, righteousness and filial duty. It therefore pictured de as obedience to strictly codified social rules. Taoists took a broader, more natural and more metaphysical view. At best they saw social rules as an echo of spontaneous human interaction. At worst they saw a hardened structure that blocked naturalness and bred conflict. The disagreement became philosophical and political, and several sections of the works attributed to Zhuang Zhou criticize Confucianism's failures.

  Confucius himself offered a humanistic Tao that can be translated as truth. He rated it as necessary as de and ren, meaning compassion and humanity, and he rarely mentioned the Way of Heaven. The early Confucian Xunzi spotted this contrast. He accepted that the Way of Heaven exists and matters in the sky, but insisted the Tao is mainly about human affairs. In the Zhongyong, or Doctrine of the Mean, harmony with the Absolute equals integrity and sincerity. The Great Learning says the Way illuminates virtue and improves the people.

  During the Tang dynasty, Han Yu sharpened Confucian belief as a defense against Buddhism. He stressed the ethics of the Way, explicitly paired Tao with De, and built a "tradition of the Tao" meant to shut out Buddhist tradition. The Song dynasty then produced richer readings. Shao Yong saw the Tao as the origin of heaven, earth and all within them. Zhang Zai described a vitalistic Tao, the basic substance or effect of qi, and Tai Chen later followed him in the Qing dynasty. Zhu Xi, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi read the Tao through li, meaning principle. Cheng Hao held that the core of li is humaneness, so cultivating compassion and altruism is following the Way. Wang Fuzhi called the Tao the taiji, the great ultimate, together with the road leading to it. In this view nothing exists apart from the Principle of Heaven, so ordinary daily life is already the path to the Absolute.

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• 7. Crossing Traditions

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  Buddhism began to spread in China in the first century AD and reached a golden age of growth by the fourth century AD. Within a short span, monks translated hundreds of collections of Pali and Sanskrit texts into Chinese. The Sanskrit dhyana became 禅, chán, and later "zen", which gave Zen Buddhism its name. Borrowing nearby Chinese ideas such as the Tao helped the new religion feel familiar. It also caused early misunderstandings, and Buddhism in East Asia eventually grew into a distinct tradition, with the Tao standing for central Buddhist tenets.

  Pai-chang Huai-hai once advised a student struggling with difficult passages of the suttas: "Take up words in order to manifest meaning and you'll obtain 'meaning'. Cut off words and meaning is emptiness. Emptiness is the Tao. The Tao is cutting off words and speech." Zen Buddhists treat the Tao as another name for both the Buddhist Path and its result, the Noble Eightfold Path and enlightenment. The emptiness he mentions is the Buddhist concept of sunyata. Finding it is an active response to the Four Noble Truths that words cannot fully carry.

  Folklore took yet another direction. Yayu, the son of Zhulong, was reincarnated on Earth as a violent hybrid of a bull, a tiger and a dragon. He was allowed to enter an afterlife called "the place beyond the Tao". The story shows that popular myth could picture the Tao very differently from orthodox religion.

  The Christian author C.S. Lewis used the word Tao for "the doctrine of objective value", the belief that some attitudes are really true and others really false. He argued that every religion and philosophy holds foundations of universal ethics, as an attempt to line up with the Tao, the way humankind was designed to be. In his thinking God created the Tao and displayed it fully in Jesus Christ. The Eastern Orthodox hegumen Damascene (Christensen), a pupil of the scholar and monastic Seraphim Rose, identified logos with the Tao. He published a commented translation of the Tao Te Ching titled Christ the Eternal Tao. Some Chinese New Testaments agree, rendering the Greek word λόγος as 道 in passages such as John 1:1.

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• 8. Anatomy of a Character

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  The Shuowen Jiezi, a dictionary published in 121 CE, took the character 道 apart. It joins the go radical 辶 with 首, meaning head, to suggest a head going or leading the way. The oldest forms come from bronzes and writings of the Zhou dynasty, 1045-256 BCE. They draw the head element clearly, as hair above a face. Some variants swap the go radical for 行, the original crossroads, or for two footprints, 彳 and 亍. Others add 手, hand, or 寸, thumb, as in the related character 導, meaning lead.

  The linguist Peter A. Boodberg concluded from this evidence that the word was always both noun and verb. Passages in the Analects use it as a verb, as in this saying of the Master: "Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame." For Boodberg, Tao was a more dynamic idea than the translation "way" suggests, closer to "lode" as in lodestar. He also linked it to a homonym meaning to tread, a reminder that feet matter as much as the head.

  The sound shifts with the sense. Modern Standard Chinese separates dào, meaning way or path, from dǎo, meaning guide, usually written 導. A rare third reading, dāo, survives in the northeastern phrase 神神道道, meaning odd or bizarre. The Hanyu Da Zidian dictionary lists 39 meanings for dào and 6 for dǎo. John DeFrancis counts twelve, three and one. From the Song dynasty onward, Dao also named an ideal in landscape painting, in which artists tried to show the harmony of people with their surroundings.

  Victor H. Mair proposes an even older link. He connects the archaic sound, roughly drog or dorg, to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to run along. He points to Russian doroga, Polish droga and Czech dráha, and to the English words track and trek. He also notes Hebrew d-r-g and Arabic t-r-q, which mean track or path. Axel Schuessler's etymological dictionary instead offers two possible tonal derivations between the noun and the verb.

  English borrowed the word slowly. In Cantonese it is dou6 and in Hokkien to7. Japanese uses dō, tō or michi, Korean do or to, and Vietnamese đạo. The Oxford English Dictionary records three senses, from the absolute source of the universe to the Confucian right conduct. It dates the spellings Tao to 1736, Tau to 1747, Taou to 1831 and Dao to 1971. The Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault already used the term Taoist priest, 道士, in a work printed in 1615, spelled Tausu in Latin. Samuel Purchas rendered it Tausa in English in 1625. Since 1982, when the International Organization for Standardization adopted Pinyin, many Western languages have been moving from tao to dao.

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