IB Philosophy 10.10.1 the Nature of the Tao Notes

The Tao as the Ultimate Principle of Reality

1. The opening line of the Tao Te Ching (the founding Taoist text, meaning roughly "The Book of the Way and its Power") declares: "the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao." From the very first verse, Lao Tzu insists that the nature of the Tao cannot be pinned down in words: any verbal description is incomplete and provisional.
2. Lao Tzu presents the Tao as the origin of heaven and earth: the source from which all things arise, not through deliberate choice or design, but through a kind of natural generation (spontaneous bringing-forth). The Tao is not a creator God who decides to make the world; it is an impersonal principle whose own inner vitality produces what Lao Tzu calls "the ten thousand things" (all of existence).
3. The Tao is described as formless and nameless, existing before any distinction between being and non-being. Chapter 25 calls it something "silent and void, standing alone and not changing, reaching everywhere and not endangered." This places the Tao outside the world of ordinary things and makes it the metaphysical ground (the deepest foundation that makes everything else possible) of all reality.
4. The concept of wu (non-being) is central to understanding the Tao. Lao Tzu argues that the Tao's creative power comes precisely from its emptiness: just as the usefulness of a cup depends on the empty space inside it, the Tao's capacity to generate all things depends on its not being any fixed thing.
5. This makes Lao Tzu's view a fundamental departure from Western philosophy. Where Parmenides argued that non-being is literally unthinkable, and where Western metaphysics has generally privileged being over void, Lao Tzu treats nothingness as the fertile source from which all determinate things spring. Emptiness is productive, not merely absent.
6. The Tao operates through ziran (spontaneous naturalness): it does not impose order on the world through force or deliberate design but allows all things to unfold according to their own intrinsic natures. Because of this, the Tao can be said to govern without governing and create without creating. This is what Lao Tzu calls effortless action.
7. The Tao's relationship to the ten thousand things is one of immanence (present within things) rather than transcendence (remote from them). The Tao is not a distant first cause that sets things in motion and steps back; it is the sustaining principle that flows through every being, nourishing them without claiming ownership or demanding recognition, like water moving through a landscape.
8. Chapter 42 sketches a cosmological unfolding (the Tao's sequence of creation): "The Tao gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, three gives birth to the ten thousand things." Each stage arises naturally, without any external force or deliberate plan, from the stage before it.
9. This produces a cyclical picture of reality: beings emerge from the Tao, flourish, decline, and return to the undifferentiated source. This pattern of fu (return) is central to Lao Tzu's understanding of natural process. It also distinguishes Taoist metaphysics from linear or teleological (goal-directed) accounts of reality, where history moves in a straight line toward some final destination.