thinker
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Everything posted by thinker
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The title of the topic is pretty much self-explanatory. I know that religious Daoism (daojiao) contains a pantheon of supernaturalistic entities. Is daojia inherently agnostic, beyond the often supernaturalistically interpreted concept of the Dao itself? To me the word "Dao" has no supernaturalistic elements, and refers only to a "path" in the philosophical sense. So to me this doesn't prevent daojia from being agnostic, although I know that many, including some who practice daojia, consider the Dao to contain supernaturalistic aspects. Perhaps some consider daojia to be inherently atheistic. For purposes of this thread, please assume that the notion of daojia and daojiao being separate traditions is accurate (I've seen several discussions elsewhere get derailed into heated discussions of whether or not this separation is legitimate). Thank you.
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I'm looking for photographs or other directly scanned images, ideally online, of some of the early texts of the DDJ. I've already found photos of the Guodian slips, but I can't seem to find any of the Mawangdui texts except for the one on the Wikipedia. What I'm looking for is close-ups of the entirety of DDJ texts A and B, with enough detail that I could recognize the individual characters myself, if I had the requisite knowledge and in those cases where the characters are legible enough to allow for this to be done without being in the presence of the physical material. Failing this, I'd like to find complete transcripts of the originals using the actual characters that appear on the texts rather than their "modern equivalents". Am I just not finding what's there or do such images not exist? I have trouble believing that such images don't exist in any form anywhere, as the museum that houses the texts would have to be very foolish not to have ever made any images of such old and fragile documents, even if only for their own archives, in case an accident should destroy the irreplaceable originals. Thanks.
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There are an infinite number of "ways to go", Daoism is only one. But you're right, I don't approve of "classes" in society, unless there's such intensive social mobility that people can go back and forth among them at will, based on aptitude, merit, effort, etc... And in no case should one person be allowed to "put" someone else in a class, let alone trap them there. As you say, at least some of Confucianism is about "fitting in". But it shouldn't be necessary to be of a certain class or act in a certain way to fit in. If a garbage man goes to an upper-class golf club after work and hangs around with the millionaire CEO's, then he should be treated exactly as if he were one of them when he does so. Ideally, there should be no mechanism by which anyone else can even find out what his job is, and if they do know they should still accept him as one of their own, even in the privacy of their own thoughts and feelings. I judge a person by what kind of person he is, not his social status, and I believe that this is something that Daoism encourages us to do. Yes, Confucius "saw that and assigned each his place in the structure of society", but who is Confucius to do that? Perhaps garbage men are more to be admired than princes. In that case, shouldn't etiquette demand that princes grovel before garbage men? I don't see that Confucius has any right to say otherwise. As for the rest, forgive me, but you don't know me that well. You say "You hate that because you don't like the place assigned you in society and you want equality so no one is better off than you." You're completely incorrect. I have no problem with lots of people being better off than me. But I'll rise or fall on the basis of what I do, in a society where all options are always open to me, not on the basis of where someone else "puts me", and I won't be trapped in a social class by the need to walk around with some sort of etiquette-based sign on my forehead saying that I belong to such-and-such a social class until someone says differently. You say "...someone has to be the head and another the asswhole. You don't like that. You want Daoism so no one gets to be the head even if everyone become asswholes." Again, you don't know me well enough to say what I like or don't like. I don't mind if having a "head" is necessary to have a prosperous society. Just so long as we have term-limits, and the opportunity to contest and re-contest for the head-ship, based on intelligence, compassion, and other desirable qualities. I've lived at both ends of society's digestive tract, and my attitudes towards liberty and opportunity, and my actions towards others, have always been the same. Confucianism's attitudes in this regard (as poorly as I understand them) are one of the reasons why I reject it. (Don't worry about the misspellings. Even the Dao isn't mighty enough to overcome some constraints. )
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What I've translated of the received version seems to show a fairly uniform anti-Confucianism. One can only go so far in making statements based on the Guodian slips given how much is in the received version that they lack. Overall, the received version is so similar to the matching parts of both the Guodian slips and the Mawangdui silk texts that I don't suspect poor old Wang Bi of too much monkeying yet. But it will be a long time before I finish enough translating of my own to say anything with complete certainty. Curious that you should mention chapter 5. It's come up for me in other conversations elsewhere in the last few days. The fragment that you posted translates as "...the universe is not humane...". The other discussion centers around the question of whether the first part of chapter 5 is implying that this is a good thing or a bad thing. i.e. must one always be humane or are there exceptions.
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Yes, although I see now that it was first published almost 3 years ago, not several months like I thought.
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I'm afraid that's not something that I'm ever going to write. I was suggesting it as a methodology that you might use to demonstrate your point that the different traditions were, in some sense, the same. Aside from lacking the time or the interest, to me Daoism could fairly accurately be named "anti-Confucianism". Not only do I not believe that the two traditions are similar, but I believe that a large part of Laozi's message could be summarized: "I've had it with the oppressive, Confucian bastards who are running the government. Let's invent guns, line them up against the wall, and mow them down." Human nature hasn't changed that much over the millennia. If someone tells you that in order not to dishonor yourself you need to act in accordance with an etiquette that requires you to signal your lowly status to the world (in other words, grovel when the princess walks by) there are only two possibilities. First, the upper class is a bunch of sadists that get their thrills by making the peasants publicly humiliate themselves. Second, the upper class wants to enshrine submissive behavior into the culture so as to limit both upward mobility and thoughts of revolution. The only good answer to that sort of nonsense is to overthrow the government, and reduce the offending nobility (there might be a few good ones who don't deserve to suffer) to the level of garbage until they learn that the words "dignity" and "respect" apply to everyone. Then they can re-enter society as tradesmen and work their way up from scratch. Among the adjectives that I don't believe apply to Daoism are "Confucian", or "Buddhist".
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I've always taken a somewhat simpler approach. To me a "Daoist" is "someone who practices Daoism". "Daoism" is basically "the doctrine recorded in the DDJ" or, if referring to the movement, "the social movement whose membership consists of the set of all Daoists". Certainly there's room for legitimate discussion as to whether or not part or all of some other works should be included, but I draw the line at going so far afield as to include direct borrowings from either Buddhism or Confucianism, both of which I see as radically different from Daoism. I don't have enough information to determine if the DDJ is a syncretic text or not. Lacking this, I just take it as a presentation of an internally consistent philosophy. If, one day, I come across original sources from that far back sufficient to make that judgement then I will. However, even if the DDJ does turn out to be formed from borrowings from many difference sources that may not make it "syncretic". If, for example, two different sources include the notion that "thou shall not kill", and both influence some philosopher who combines them into a single text that states "thou shall not kill", then I don't think that the resulting text is "syncretic", as it doesn't combine multiple traditions with different content. But I could be wrong. I'm not sure precisely how the term "syncretic" would be used when dealing with the merging of separate, but identical, traditions, or traditions that are different but whose precepts (logically speaking) imply each other. Good list of sources. As soon as I get a decade or so of free time I'll have to try to read them all. I've actually got an English translation of the complete Huainanzi waiting for me on my e-reader (a complete one was finally published just a few months ago), but it's so long it will probably take me forever to get through it.
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Have you thought about heading south and visiting Australia or New Zealand?
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Assuming even remotely equivalent aptitude and training, the latter. Don't ever go into a real fight with the attitude that you're going to be nice to your opponent. That may sound really good in the reading room or the dojo, but in the inner-city where the crack-head is willing to kill you for enough money for his next fix, and possibly already high enough to keep fighting even with a bullet in him, and may have a gun concealed on his person that he's willing to shoot you with as you walk away thinking that you've won, that's asking to die. If you're unsure of this and have the opportunity, as some cops how they would answer the question.
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The fact that some choose to practice all three traditions at the same time doesn't make them the same tradition. I know at least one hybrid Catholic/Daoist, but that doesn't mean that there's an identity, or even a similarity, between Catholicism and Daoism. The fact that there's a sect that syncretizes the three traditions also doesn't make them identical, any more than I can turn chocolate into peanut butter by making Reese's Pieces out of them. I was thinking more along the lines of taking the Three Treasures and showing that practicing them would, per force, cause one to exhibit each of the Confucian virtues, and vice-versa. i.e. literally making a list of the doctrinal points of each religion, and showing that practicing all of one would force one to practice all of the other, and vice-versa. This would prove an equivalence relationship between the two traditions. Or making the case, on sociological grounds, that the kind of society that would result from everyone becoming a devout Confucianist would be essentially the same as the kind of society that would result from everyone becoming a devout Daoist.
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Again, not to seem argumentative (I have a gift for it), but... Of necessity. As far as I know, the earliest recorded indisputably Daoist text that we have, even if it wasn't called "Daoism" back then, is the DDJ from the Guodian Chu slips. Before that, what we might today call "Daoist doctrine" was an oral tradition whose content we have no way to verify. So if we're to discuss "early Daoism" in any meaningful fashion then we can't go much further back than the Guodian slips (very roughly 300 BC) without losing most of our confidence in the subject. By 100 AD we've already progressed to the point at which Daoism was being significantly affected by non-Daoist influences, such as the arrival of Buddhism via the "silk road". This being the case, when I speak of "early Daoism", or "classical Daoism", or "Dao Jia", I am, as far as I know, referring to Daoism as it existed from about 350 BC to about 50 AD. I accept the legitimacy of syncretic Daoist sects that contain significant non-Daoist influences acquired after 50 AD, such as Gods, elements of Buddhism, etc... but I disagree with them. That is, they still contain enough Daoism to be labelled "Daoism", but they're no longer purely Daoist. When I speak of Laozi "creating" Daoism I mean that in the sense that he was recording, espousing, and possibly expanding upon, part or all of an already existing oral tradition, whose further past we may never know anything about. I disagree with you when you seem to say that Daoism is defined by: "The first real movement to organize some thought about what is a Daoist was Huang-Lao period of Han. The great historian, Sima Qian, stated Daoist were a mix of the 'best of the rest'." First, the first real movement to organize some thought about "what is a Daoist" was the writing of the religious doctrine that we call the DDJ. The fact that they didn't call it "Daoism" then doesn't change that. He/they were assembling a doctrine by which they thought people should live, by whatever name. Second, to me using Sima Qian's work is a bit like having a written recording of the words and actions of Christ, and then stating that Christianity is as defined by some historian who came along several centuries later and syncretized the words and actions of Christ with material taken from several other admittedly non-Christian sources. By that logic, if Christianity had neither caught on, nor been defined yet, then I could come along tomorrow, syncretize it with ballet dancing, declare wearing pink tutus a sacrament, and from that point on "Christianity" would be formally defined in terms of both Christ and pink ballet tights, because I wrote about it first. Christianity is not defined in terms of what the first historian to write about it choose to say about it when he coined the term (what makes his opinion worth anything anyway?), it's defined in terms of what we know about the words and actions of Christ. Similarly, Daoism is not defined in terms of what Sima Qian chose to say about it when he wrote about it. What if he had turned out to be a serial killer and thought that the "best of the rest" included human sacrifices? Would we then mandate that Daoism had to include human sacrifices because a historian describing it centuries after the fact said so? Daoism is defined by the words and actions of Laozi, or at least the words and actions attributed to him in the DDJ, should he turn out not to be a single, or even real, person. The extent to which Sima Qian added in new, non-Daoist elements when he wrote about it several centuries later is the extent to which he got it wrong. If no elements of Buddhist doctrine are present in the DDJ, or in other similarly dated works, if you wish to include them in the Daoist canon, then there's no Buddhism in Daoism. Buddhist elements may have been adopted into some Daoist sects later, but that's what makes those Daoist sects "syncretic".
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Some people may feel that this is the case. Certainly not all do. A long time ago I took several years of jujutsu (badly). Everyone in the class was there because the school explicitly rejected spiritualism and concentrated on how to hurt, cripple or kill people who were trying to do the same to you. Not only are there many schools like this, but there are many that are not like this but whose advertisements attempt to make it seem as if they are, because they know that this draws in more paying students. This is because no matter what philosophers/spiritualists want, most students are only going to put in that kind of time and money if they can effectively use it for self-defense. If you're unsure of this, visit a Krav Maga class sometime. Or better yet, count the number of commercially successful martial arts classes that explicitly state in their advertisements, in large letters, that what they teach has no self-defense value, but will enhance your spirituality. If you're getting something spiritual out of it that's great. But I don't think that most practitioners would claim that that's what all martial arts theory amounts to.
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That's an interesting supposition. We joked in some thread recently that every Daoist seems to be writing a book about Daoism. I think this is yours. If you can support this idea, that Confucianism and Daoism converge on the same outcome, it would make interesting reading.
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Good point. Perhaps I should have said that it was an oral tradition that was first recorded in writing roughly at, or shortly after, the time of Confucius, apparently (to me, YMMV) in reaction to the Confucian authoritarianism and rigid social codes of the day, the philosophical foundations of which may also have existed long before Confucius was born.
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Give me a couple of days to think about this one.
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I copied this quote from another thread, because responding to it there would have driven that thread way off topic. kaaazuo: Are you sure that you're not speaking of Confucianism? I'm far from an authority on either Confucianism or Daoism, but the extreme emphasis on courtesy, etiquette that incorporates information about social relationships, and so forth seems a lot more like the former than the latter. Certainly there was a lot of this about in the early days of Daoism, but if my understanding is correct it was not a part of Daoism, it was a part of the prevailing culture that Daoism was rejecting.
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OK. That's pretty much what I meant. Idiotic Taoist is just way ahead of me on the whole "brevity" thing.
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I'd go in the opposite direction. My understanding is that Daoism formed as a reaction against Confucian ideology and traditions, and in the millennia since has evolved to contain much ritual and ceremony of its own. Thus I would say that early Daoism was more centered around the rejection of ideology and traditions, while contemporary Daoism has become more approving of it. I'm not sure how to read the rest of the post. I see no problem in having hard work and honesty without good posture and etiquette, particularly given that notions of good posture and etiquette seem culturally bound.
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I'm not sure if I would idealize Daoism this much. To a Confucian, Daoism may seem to have its own rigid ideology and traditions that need rejecting. After all, isn't the idea that we should strive to act in accordance with nature an ideology, even it not a very rigid one, that we don't reject? Perhaps to a Confucian this seems like a license to act like an animal, which tendencies they believe that we should try to overcome by practicing Confucian virtues. I know that the overwhelming majority of Daoists believe that Daoism encourages us to avoid distinctions and judgements. I've yet to be convinced that this is encouraged by Daoist doctrine, or even a good idea. I do seem to be almost in a minority of one on this one though.
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Firstly, when it comes to violence I know nothing of the sort (I'm a Daoist, not a Buddhist, and you might find it useful to read up on both). The old cliche "violence never solved anything" is garbage on the face of it. Violence frequently solves problems. Often with a morally desirable outcome, and when nothing else will. This is the case almost every time a police officer has to use violence to subdue a criminal. If you must fight, kick ass. What alternatives are you contemplating? Newsflash from the real world: turning the other cheek just gets you hit on the other cheek. Submitting over and over again just gets you hit over and over again, until you die in agony, at the hands of an assailant who will then walk away with all of the marbles, never to be punished in any fashion for his misdeeds, in this life or any other. And you will get no prizes, in this life or any other, for your forbearance. If you want to learn a martial art then by all means do so. Just realize that it takes a lot of time and effort to become proficient, and is no guarantee that you won't get the **** beat out of you. You might also think about carrying a gun. Regarding karma, as far as I know there's no concept of karma in Daoism. That's a Buddhist thing. Of course you should fight back if necessary. The word "necessary" implies that you have no reasonable alternatives. Why would Laozi, or whoever we attribute with the creation of Daoist doctrine, want you to stand quietly by while you get the **** beat out of you? What possible purpose would that serve? I know that there are some who think that engaging in violence for any reason at all causes a form of "spiritual contamination" that dulls your spiritual senses (or something like that). Personally, I find that being kicked in the head repeatedly by a violent criminal, until I have permanent brain damage, is far more destructive to my spiritual senses, and I recommend avoiding it by any means available, including violence. Daoism is no excuse for not using common sense.
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So in order to be Daoist I must stand, sit, bow, and walk in such a way as to conform to something called "Daoist etiquette"? Where in the world does that appear in either the DDJ or the ZZ? And this is important because this etiquette incorporates social relationships peculiar to Chinese tradition? So in public I must continually move in such a fashion as to signal the social position that has been assigned to me by society? What if I don't accept what society thinks of me? And conforming to strict rules regarding movement and posture protects me against dishonor? So I dishonor myself if I don't continually signal my socially-assigned social status? I can't just move in a way that naturally feels good to me? It's really not my intent to either offend or cause an argument here, but to me this sounds like a fairly stringent form of Confucianism masquerading as Daoism, which I believe was formed as a reaction against the authoritarianism and rigid social codes of Confucianism.
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I think that you're beating up on yourself without justification. Daoism encourages us to act in accordance with nature. One of the mistakes that I frequently see Daoists make is to assume that "negativity", in whatever form, is not part of nature. All emotions are nature's way of guiding us towards pro-survival behavior. In this light, hate is no more unnatural than love. Because hate is unpleasant, and usually associated with unpleasant events, we try to avoid it. We come to consider it intrinsically bad. Sometimes we even enshrine such mistaken beliefs in our religion. Then, when we fail to live up to our mistaken ideals, we feel unjustified guilt. Hate is no more intrinsically bad than a gun is. A gun may be used to rob, or to defend against robbery. Hate may encourage us to assault someone who doesn't deserve it, or may give us the strength necessary to defend ourselves against unjustified assault. Hate is only bad if it controls us so completely that we either fail to make the right judgements concerning our hateful behavior, or make the right judgements but lack the self-control necessary to implement them. Further, it's natural to feel hatred even when it's unjustified. Remember that we don't always have complete information about a situation in the first few instants, and sometimes nature doesn't give you any more time than that to prepare yourself to deal with a threat. i.e. it's a pro-survival trait to get the fight-or-flight juices going quickly, just in case the rapidly approaching caveman is coming to kill you. You can always abort your intended defense as soon as he gets close enough for you to see that he's your brother coming over to ask you how the cavewife is. So accept your hatred as natural. Don't get upset unless you ran off and killed someone between paragraphs.
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All of this is why I maintain that some form of sinophilia is involved. In the West today there seems to be a fascination with Asian culture in general, Chinese and Japanese in particular. We don't seem to have a similar degree of fascination with Indian, Greek, Israeli, and so forth cultures. Hence, when it comes to Daoism, there's an intense desire on the part of many Daoists to irrevocably glue Chinese cultural elements to it. I think that it would be more in keeping with Daoism if those who felt that way were to separate out the two influences and treat them as separate practices. i.e., if they were to consider themselves to be aficionados of Chinese culture and Daoists, and thus allow Daoism to continue onward unencumbered by a collection of cultural traditions that aren't a part of it, except in the accidental sense that they were a part of the culture in which the religion was founded. I think that transplanting religions among cultures, and watching them adapt to the new conditions, is a good way to understand the religion better. In such circumstances, those elements of the religion which are not merely cultural trappings may become more apparent.
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I'm beginning to get the impression that a lot of Daoists are working on a book. Perhaps it should be considered one of the requirements for being a Daoist. Like most, I doubt that I'll ever finish mine. I started translating (for myself) the DDJ under a new set of assumptions. First, that it's a straightforward text, and that any mysticism and poetry that appear to be there are the result of poor translating. Second, that it must be translated in its historical context (I've already found references to events of the day that wouldn't be clear without the history). And third, that you have to go back to the original texts and meanings of the seal script characters, rather than using a (relatively) modern Chinese dictionary, which seems to be what many translators, inexplicably, did. And so on. Eventually I even decided to throw out the customary line breaks, many of which seem to be have been chosen for nothing more than their ability to produce an admittedly awful set of translations, and to treat each chapter as a single run-on sentence until I could break it up in my own way. The difference in meaning that this has made at some points in the text is so significant that I've come to consider translating using either a modern dictionary or the commonly accepted line breaks to be a waste of time. In the off chance that I finish before I die of old age, I'll probably e-publish the result. Re your sentence "If ZZ or Laozi thought you could just list it out logically, I'm sure they would have.", based on the results of my translations, I think that Laozi did, and that most of the vagueness and mysticism that a lot of Daoists today seem to prize is really just poor translating. I've often wondered, if I'm more or less correct, and one day mysticism and mystery cease to be a part of Daoism, then how many will leave the fold because what they really value isn't the Daoism, but the mysticism and mystery. There seem to be a lot of people who's biggest fear is that there's no mystery, mysticism, or supernaturalism in the universe, just science and common sense; and they choose a religion not for the sake of enlightenment, but to give them hope that there's more than that, and a feeling that they're special because they've mastered knowledge that most others don't have. I wonder how many come to Daoism because its vague and poetic presentation caters to that need, and thus they always seem to be more loath to give up the mystery than anything else. Certainly a lot of Daoists seem, to me, to be misplaced Buddhists; but Buddhism is much better defined than Daoism, in empirical terms, and I suspect that many choose Daoism for that reason, even if they don't consciously realize it.
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Amen.
