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Rob_Hugo@PortNWPlease use this area to work with your group to prepare for the debate.
AnonymousThere is a lot of information about Taoism around the web. Wikipedia is a nice synopsis. This is an exceprt:
The philosophical aspect of Taoism emphasizes various themes found in the Tao Te Ching such as "nonaction" (wu wei), emptiness, detachment, the strength of softness (or flexibility), and The Zhuangzi such as receptiveness, spontaneity, the relativism of human ways of life, ways of speaking and guiding behavior. Most philosophical debate concerns dao--what way we should follow, but really, Taoists more directly question what dao is, how or if we can know it and emphasize more than other schools the ways social daos depend on and presuppose natural daos. Their more detached discussion and their reluctance to formulate or advocate a social dao of their own means their discussions tend to be more playful and paradoxical than dogmatic. This makes their tone strikingly different from Confucian and Mohist texts.
AnonymousThanks, Dennis, for the Wikipedia excerpt. Alan Watts devotes the first chapter of The Way of Zen to Daoism, where he presents it as a challenge to Western thinking because of its paradoxical disregard for logical categories. But Daoism is more than mere paradox. Equally important is the idea of complementarity, the concept most familiar in the West as yin-yang: the way backward is also the way forward, etc. This becomes very interesting philosophically when it is applied to tough problems such as death. Life and death, for the Daoist, are complements of the Dao, or the Way, or whatever consciousness is. Death follows life but it also precedes it, in the sense that all being arises out of non-being and, with the passage of time, returns to its primal state. The Ebrey Chinese Civilization Sourcebook has some wonderful selections from the Laozi (poetry) and the Zhuangzi (stories), the two classics of Daoism (pages 27-31). The last two stories from the Zhaungzi, about Zhuangzi not mourning his dead wife and rejecting his disciples' plan for his tomb, are especially moving and instructive in demonstrating that Daoism is a true way of liberation (as Watts puts it) and not just a perverse denial of standard categories. In the East Asia textbook Ebrey points out something else that is important, I think, for understanding Daoism and its contribution to East Asian thought and civilization. Traditional Chinese thinkers and rulers studied both Confucian and Daoist texts, regarding Daoism as the complement to Confucianism, so that the ideal wise ruler would be both a Confucian and a Daoist, with their contradictory approaches to life as the opposing forces that balance the Dao--an idea any Daoist would be likely to support.
Anonymous"Their more detached discussion and their reluctance to formulate or advocate a social dao of their own means their discussions tend to be more playful and paradoxical than dogmatic. This makes their tone strikingly different from Confucian and Mohist texts."
This is a good point and I think this is what the Daoists were going for-a mocking tone about social achievement and ambition. They mock or ridicule because they see the other schools of thought, in the eyes of the Daoist, going against the fundamental rules and order of nature-nature controls us, we don't control it. The quicker we come to that realization and give up our control, the better our society will be. The laws of action and control through achievement, ambition, success and how we establish relationships all serve to develop certain norms of behavior that, once established, are hard to reverse. These norms of behavior create inequity, injustice, suffering,and get in the way of the true understanding of who we are and what our true potential and purpose is, mainly to let nature and our environment dictate those norms. Once we see, observe and learn, we will realize the 'way' and become better for it.
There is an Allman brothers song and some of the words go like this-walk along a river, sweet lullaby, it just keeps on flowing, it don't worry about where its going.
I think this is what the Daoists are about. [Edit by="tstevenson on Jun 25, 9:44:00 PM"][/Edit]