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Is the Tao the "uncaused cause" in Taoism? What is the goal of Taoist practice, if any?

Doesn't Taoism have a goal? Why is it practiced?

Oh no, I think you're severely underestimating the level of effortlessness sought by Taoists. I'm a fellow member of E-Sangha BTW.

I'm more of a Buddhist than a Taoist, but I think Taoism is certainly more relaxed and laid back than Buddhism. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as a tradition, Taoists seek not to strive or exert themselves but to achieve goals effortlessly like nature, so they don't get involved in debates with others. I don't know if this is right.

It probably is a phenomenon according to the Heterophenomenological method. PS. WTF am I doing? I promised myself I wouldn't get involved in these debates!

Taoists see everything as interactions between primal forces?

Compassion? Benevolence? Power? Mellowness? Just ending their breath cycles or something like that?

Do Taoists believe in psychic phenomena?

I mean the actual old Vedic texts: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/#vedas

How about "inspired" instead of "derived"? Wasn't Nagarjuna the first person to come up with a complete Vedanta-like philosophy? (only it wasn't directly compatible with the Vedas as such) The Buddha and his followers certainly claimed to reject all older traditions and orthodoxies, whether they really did so or not. I myself don't see any connection between Buddhism and the Vedas. From what I can see, even the connection between Upanishadic philosophy and the Vedic hymns is tenuous at best.

The Vedas are not the same as Vedanta. The Vedas are an collection of ancient legends, rituals and other oral traditions. Vedanta are schools of philosophy based on the Vedas, affirming, clarifying and developing their teachings. Sort of like the Bible and Christian philosophy. If you took Christianity, cut off the Bible, God and Jesus from it, you get saint worship, which could be something like Buddhism. Seriously, you've read the Rig Veda, right? Google it, there are free translations all over the net. In Buddhism, the ladder of truth is something like fuzzy logic. Nothing can be 100% certain (1) or 100% illusion (0). It's impermanent, constantly changes appearance and branches off infinitely in all directions. "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form." The closest you can get is 0.0001% true or 99.999% true. If Vedantists called this infinite, uncertain, ungraspable property of reality "Brahman", then I'll agree it's almost the same as Buddhism. But then, you can't really call such a Brahman "real and truly existent in and of itself", can you? (not rhetorical, honest question)

I don't know where you got this idea because the Buddha specifically warned his followers against such dangers. Since there are a lot of dedicated converts to Buddhism these days, (many see it as a more compassionate alternative to Christianity) it becomes statistically probable that many Buddhists will fall into these traps even though thay have been forewarned. About the existence/non-existence thing, I'll answer later since it might be long. Suffice it to say that Buddhists reject Existentialism, Essentialism as well as the idea that the world observed through the senses is 100% illusory. (I can't think of any school which believes in complete illusion, but see Nihilism. How long will such a sect last anyway? ) Tibetan Buddhists classify most Hindu sects as "realism", since they maintain that the Brahman has true existence. He represents the bottom rung of the ladder of truth, the source of all wisdom. Buddhists maintain that the ladder has no discernible bottom. It branches out in many directions and is tied into knots.

What were telephones called at the time?

Vedanta didn't exist during the Buddha's time. Is it possible to blame us for misunderstanding trans-dimensional harmonics, a branch of science which will be discovered 1300 years from now? Neither existence nor non-existence as commonly defined, actually. Buddhists of all schools are very clear about this. The trouble with Tibetan Buddhists these days is that they tend to take things too seriously. I personally admire the Taoist virtue of playfulness. PS. In fact, nothing resembling modern Hinduism existed at the Buddha's time. The traditional religion of India back then is sometimes called Brahmanism. It involved worshipping the creator god Brahma with a host of minor deities.

Advaita Vedanta was mostly derived from Nagarjuna's Buddhist treatises by Adi Shankaracarya. Nagarjuna lived many centuries after the Buddha. How could the Buddha possibly have misunderstood Vedanta?

They stop at different positions. There's no "before" or "after" involved. The Buddhist in me says that dragging Brahman into the picture is an empty assertion without necessity or evidence, merely a polluting influence of the Vedic tradition. Such considerations don't arise out of logical necessity from the bare evaluation of sensory input without external contamination by pre-Advaitin traditions and axioms. That is, you can choose to see things this way out of piety ("attachment") and it would still make a logically consistent story, but you can happily see things differently without contradicting the available evidence. In Buddhist philosophy, this can be termed "delusion". Like the atheists are fond of saying, if you assert a positive, it's your job to provide the evidence that proves it, because it's scientifically impossible to prove a negative. I'm sorry if that sounds a little harsh. I could be wrong about all this. PS. Thank you, dwai. You have shown me the importance of both meditation and reason in spirituality. _/\_

That's why Buddhism is still called a religion. In almost 2500 years of history, the Buddhist method has never managed to settle anything for good. One does the best one can. PS. Then again, settling things was never the point, was it? Buddhist logic is crippled without meditative realization.

Lucky7Strikes: Very little of what appears to the senses is really real. It's like a bottomless web of deeper and shallower "realnesses" with no existential "absolutely real" end to be found. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon For example, elementary particles in the Abhidharmas. A mathematical formula could also be called a noumenon since the formula itself doesn't appear before the senses, but it can nevertheless describe certain aspects of the real world, being an abstraction from the properties of phenomena. See the link to the debate I posted on page 2.

I'm with Jet Li on this: http://www.jetli.com/jet/index.php?l=en&am...=essays&p=3 Just make sure your bandwagonlessness doesn't turn into a bandwagon of it's own. This may turn out to be harder than you think. Thanks, that's similar to what I tried to explain yesterday. Advaita does have a modified form of DO though, and looking down on different schools of thought is rarely conducive to helping others. My examples were existentia and essentia, but Buddhists reject traditional ideas like Brahman for the same reasons. This is the mindset Buddhism tries to avoid: I have a preconcieved notion of what God, Brahman, Tao, Buddha, Emptiness, Theory of Everything, etc is, and I want to investigate experience in order to "learn more about it" or "disprove it" or ... Buddhists will first analyze the idea itself, and try to acertain which aspects of it are true, viable or applicable. I'm not sure, but I doubt Advaita does this to the same extent, since it seems to borrow concepts and inspiration from the Vedic tradition. Like I said, I don't know for sure.

I am by no means well-versed in philosophy, let alone Buddhist philosophy, so I could end up ranting about things I don't understand. What I think Buddhist philosophy does is try to re-evaluate all sensory input from ground-up with NO assumptions, preconceptions or axioms of any sort. It even transcends assumptions like "I'm going to use use predefined terms such as 'existentia' and 'essentia' to dissect and classify my experiences into my preexisting worldview." This is what it seems to specialize in and primarily focus on: how to take nothing for granted. At all. (Of course, it also devotes a lot of thought to suffering, compassion, spiritual emancipation, etc.) Thus it seeks to avoid fixation on any single point of view or thought structure. For the sake of completeness, it also goes on to explain how this resulting "emptiness" is itself "empty" without creating logical inconsistencies. It spares nothing (not even nothingness ) from this ground-up re-evaluation. I've heard this mindset shares an affinity with post-structuralism in western philosophy. After all, why not? Internally consistent systems abstracted from a specific domain of phenomena usually make sense when confined to it's domain. For example, while the theory of relativity is valid in the case of relativistic distances, extremely minute phenomena are better described by quantum physics. I don't see any basis for rejecting the Buddhist position off-hand: Trying to build a Theory of Everything by correlating smaller, widely divergent disciples is impractical without undertaking forays into metaphysics like the String Theory. If all abstract systems are shown to be meaningless except within specific contexts, that itself would provide ample basis for philosophical emptiness. I'm not a supporter of calling any side "better" than the others. "Better" is an almost meaningless word anyway. The difference between Advaita and Buddhism is similar to that of this guy's views and philosophical materialism: http://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic....=23&t=65636 (I'm not sure if you have to register to see the thread)

To make a long story short, Buddhists don't believe in an ultimate reality. They disagree on what this disbelief implies. PS. Generally speaking. Yoga complicates matters. That is, Buddhism is an essentialist philosophy as opposed to existentialism. PPS. Sorry, that was incorrect. I think Buddhist philosophy occupies the unique position of being both non-existentialist and non-essentialist at the same time.

Would "perfectly unattached" be a good description?

The major metaphysical difference is this: Advaita posits an all-embracing, immortal, pantheistic sentience called Brahman which is the "true self" behind all experience. This is what stays in the background, sensing all of creation. Since people, races and civilizations rise and fall before this "one mind", it's a non-dual philosophy. In Buddhism, the ultimate reality is "emptiness" or perfect neutrality. From this impenetrable void, both "seer" and the "seen" entities arise as semi-dependent phenomena, interacting with each other and causing sensation. Nothing remains permanent. Hence, Buddhists reject all labels including dualistic and non-dualistic. Pantheism is also rejected to an extent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism#Hinduism

Taoism influenced the Zen distrust of words, right? What does Taoism itself say about words? Especially, can words carry meaning or is semantics completely determined by other factors?

Isn't there anything like a consensus among religious Taoists?