IB World Religions 1.8.3. Where Are We Going? Already There: Returning to the Tao Notes

1.8.3. Where Are We Going? Already There: Returning to the Tao

Already there

1. Taoists answer the question of destination by denying that there is anywhere to go. The Tao is held to be present in full already, in this world and in the person asking.
2. On that account nothing is being awaited. There is no other realm to be reached later, no final judgment in preparation, and no history moving towards a conclusion.
3. What is missing is realization rather than arrival. Taoists say a person must become fully in accord with the Tao, which means noticing and settling into what is already the case.
4. The change is therefore in the person and not in their location. Taoists speak of clearing away what obstructs the Tao rather than of travelling towards it.
5. This is why Taoist writing is so full of ordinary things. Water, valleys, infants and craftsmen are used to show a goal available in the middle of ordinary life.
6. The claim is not that the work is small. Taoists hold that habits of desire and cleverness make the obvious very hard to see, and that a lifetime is not too long to spend on it.

Fu and the return

1. The pattern that carries everything back is fu, meaning return. Taoists describe it as the invariable law of nature by which things flow out from the Tao and come back to a balanced state.
2. The Tao Te Ching states it flatly, saying that reversal, fan, is the movement of the Tao. Whatever runs to an extreme is held to turn and travel the other way.
3. The seasons are the standard illustration. Winter does not have to be persuaded into spring, and the turn comes because that is simply how the pattern works.
4. Return is described as a coming to rest. The text says the ten thousand things flourish and then each goes back to its root, and that going back to the root is called ching (Pinyin jing), stillness.
5. Taoists call the regularity behind this ch'ang (Pinyin chang), the constant. Knowing the constant is called clarity, and acting against it is said to bring disaster.
6. Because return is guaranteed, Taoists treat it as something to cooperate with rather than to accomplish. Nothing has to be pushed home, and the effort goes into not obstructing it.

Death as transformation

1. Death is read as the clearest case of return. A life is held to be a temporary gathering, and death is its going back into the Tao that everything comes out of.
2. The Chuang Tzu calls this hua, transformation, the endless changing of things into one another. A human being on that view is one shape the process is taking for a while.
3. The book presses the point hard. It has a dying man wonder cheerfully whether he will be made into a rooster, a crossbow pellet or a rat's liver, and decline to object to any of it.
4. Grief is not forbidden, but it is treated as a misunderstanding to be worked through. Chuang Tzu weeps when his wife dies, then stops on considering that she has gone back into the round of the seasons.
5. Funeral practice in religious Taoism is far more elaborate than these passages suggest. Ordained priests perform rites to settle the dead and secure their passage, and families go on making offerings to ancestors.
6. There is no judgment in the early account and no reward. Taoists of that strand describe death as neither a punishment nor a promotion, only the next turn of a pattern that never stopped.

The immortals

1. Religious Taoism developed a second answer alongside the first. It speaks of hsien (Pinyin xian), immortals, people who have so refined themselves that they escape ordinary decay.
2. The hsien fill Chinese art as wandering figures in the mountains. Stories credit them with great age, freedom from hunger and cold, and the ability to travel without effort.
3. Practices aimed at this goal have a long history. They include diet, breathing routines, gymnastics, meditation and inner alchemy, the refining of the body's energies into a more lasting form.
4. An earlier outer alchemy pursued the same end through minerals and elixirs. Several Chinese emperors are said to have died of the mercury preparations they took in the hope of long life.
5. Popular practice adds a crowded afterlife of courts, officials and registers, with rituals to help the dead through it. Families burn paper money and paper goods so that relatives are provided for.
6. Taoists have never agreed on how literally the immortals should be taken. Some treat them as the natural end of long cultivation and some as a picture of a mind entirely at ease, and both readings sit inside the tradition.

The sage

1. Both accounts describe a figure who has arrived. He is the sheng-jen (sage) of the Tao Te Ching and the chen-jen (true person) of the Chuang Tzu.
2. Such a person is described mostly by what has dropped away. They do not compete, do not accumulate and do not insist, and are said to be hard to injure for that reason.
3. The texts stress ease rather than achievement. The true person is said to sleep without dreams, wake without worry and eat without fussing over the food.
4. The sage is not pictured as withdrawn from other people. The Tao Te Ching has him governing, and his mark is that the people afterwards say things happened of themselves.
5. Nor is the sage described as unfeeling. The true person meets loss without being overturned by it, because they were not holding tightly to what changed.
6. All of this points back to where the account began. Taoists hold that the sage's condition is not somewhere else, and that a person in full accord with the Tao is already where the tradition says people are going.