2019 -- My Year With the Tao

About 45 years ago I came across a copy of The Tao te Ching, the seminal collection of writings for Taoism. I was a student employee of my college library, and my task was to unbox new books, to remove the dust jackets, and to split apart pages not totally separated during printing. I had a whalebone knife (not sure if it was really whalebone, but it was called that and was in any event designed to slide through connected pages and separate them without tearing anything). I was surprised how many books needed this help; no doubt printing has solved this problem since then -- but then an awful lot of people never buy the print copy of anything anymore anyway.


I picked up a coffee-table type book, wide, tall and thin, 81 short chapters, a new translation of the Tao te Ching, by Gia-Fu Feng, a professor of comparative religion and director of a Taoist meditation center, and illustrated by beautiful black-and-white photos by Jane English, a physics professor interested in the intersection of physics and Taoist thought. The book is allegedly a compilation of the thoughts of Lao Tsu, an ancient wise man who wrote them out before he went off to die, in or about the 6th Century B.C.E.


I was intrigued by the opening lines: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao/The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” So I was holding a book purportedly about something that could not be described. Kind of made my brain hurt. I was apparently standing at “the gate to all mystery.”


The final chapter was equally enigmatic: “Truthful words are not beautiful/Beautiful words are not Truthful/ …. Those who know are not learned/The learned do not know.” So it was a beautifully written book by scholars that therefore said nothing of value. Yet I knew it did.


Made my brain hurt, but in a good way. Something deep stirred, and I was hooked. I went from there to the and Zen, and all the other Eastern religious and philosophical works that made up the literary collage of many liberal arts students of that turbulent era. I even worked with the I Ching, a mystical art that allegedly advises about the future by means of coins or yarrow stalks.


I felt I understood something, but what was not sure of what. Then my life got complicated and I set it all aside as adolescent musings and moved on to what I though was the “reality” of life.


Two years ago I found my personal copy of that same Tao te Ching in a basement box, a yellowed paperback version that had suffered some water damage. I looked through it, recalled it, and set it on a shelf. But it stayed in the back of my mind. Then I rediscovered a book of mine by Carl Gustav Jung, an apologist for Eastern mystical thought (among other things, of course); the book was on synchronicity, e.g. meaningful coincidences, and I decided that those mutual rediscoveries were a synchronistic event. I also rediscovered another book, The Way of Chuang Tzu, translations of writings by the man who was the Plato to Lao Tsu’s Socrates.


This was too much to ignore.


I realize now where I was in relation to a study of the Tao; according to Lao Tsu, Chapter 41:


“The wise student hears of the Tao and practices it diligently.

The average student hears of the Tao and gives it thought now and again.

The foolish student hears of the Tao and laughs aloud.”


I was an average student, but this year I resolve to be more.


I am now viewing the Tao through the lens of age, now that I am nearing my three-score and ten, and understand that this life is, at most, a temporary stopping point in some sort of mystery, and I feel that there is something in Taoism that offers some sort of resolution, or clarification, if not an answer, to those mysteries.


So I resolve to study the Tao and its descendent, Zen Buddhism, every day, to practice whatever it is I discover in those readings, and to share some of what I feel I have found in this blog or in other writings.


I know there are some who would say this study is error, perhaps dangerous error, and that Christianity offers clear answers already. I don’t doubt that this is true for them, but it doesn’t call to me. To me it seems, based on my cloudy understanding of things, that all religions stem from the same need to understand, but they go separate ways when it comes to details. I know there are Christian mystics and alleged Christians who reject the evangelical side of their religion, and who would not reject Taoism as a mystical mistake. People such as Thomas Merton, the monk who translated Chuang Tzu in the book I mentioned above. The Tao is what calls to me.


In any event, I think and hope that one year from now I will have at least the rudiments of a better understanding of life, the universe and everything, a better answer than “42”.