daoism

Daoism emerged in China in the fourth or fifth century B.C.E. The Dao de Jing is attributed to Lao Tzu, but the text most likely derived from a much earlier oral tradition. It is grounded in a naturalistic metaphysics derived from lived experience – from being immersed in the world and being a part of that world.

Dao de Jing : make this life significant

The Dao de Jing provides the basis of an exploration of leadership, ethics, strategy, harmony, and skilful living. The aim is to help us cultivate character, a “quality of character that makes this world itself a better place”.

Display a genuineness like raw silk and embrace a simplicity like unworked wood.

There is much about how to live well in this flowing, changing, contextually sensitive world. These insights had been honed over centuries and provide a rich source of encouragement and contemplation.

What is the Dao?

Dao is an ever-emerging way or ways, but not ‘The Way’, in the sense that something pre-exists that we have to try and follow or get in tune with. Dao also signifies way-making; it is always becoming.

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.

One concept that I am particularly drawn to in Daoism is the importance of sensing into the beginning of the beginning of a change.

All his skill lies in the earliest possible detection of the slightest tendencies that may develop. By spotting these almost before they have begun, before they have had time to emerge and manifest their effects, he will be in a position to foresee where they will lead.

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.