daoism
Dao de Jing : make this life significant
What is the Dao?
Wanderer, the road is your footstep, nothing else;
Wanderer, there is no path, you lay down a path in walking.
In walking you lay down a path and when turning around
You see the road you’ll never step on again.
Wanderer, path there is none, only tracks on the ocean foam.
Antonio Machado
My go-to texts on Daoism
With regard to Daoism, I am most engaged by the work of Roger Ames and David Hall, for their scholarship and the way they explain how Daoists take an engaged, contextual, relational, subjective and path-dependent view of change, so in tune with complexity thinking.
Ames and Hall explain that the Dao de Jing was written as a series of parables – devices to make the reader think – rather than as an explanation or compendium of answers.
The wind blowing through myriad different things causes these sounds to die out of their own accord. Together things each take on their own sounds, but who is behind it all?
Within the rhythms of life, the swinging gateway opens, and novelty emerges spontaneously to revitalise the world… whatever is most enduring is ultimately overtaken in the ceaseless transformation of things.
Where next?
There is much to say! The Dao of Complexity provides an overview of Daoist cosmology and teachings and reflects on its resonance with process complexity.
There are many many translations of the Dao de Jing. In a piece in The Dao of Complexity called ‘The missionary position’ there is advice as to how to choose translations that are as close as possible to the original ways of thinking.