Tag: Dao

• May 1, 2014

  Philosophical portraiture: ‘What the eyes cannot see’

  In Aleksandra’s recently completed philosophical portrait (visible below), the man exhibits soft concentration while the woman exudes a soft composure attained through experience and contemplative practice. Both appear to be thinking together about the non-discursive. The allusion in the title is to an early Daoist text called Inward Training. In Verse 4, the authors write, As for the Way: It…
• May 17, 2013

  ‘Yet here I am in my wretchedness’

  The end of Chapter 6 of Chuang Tsu’s Inner Chapters is startling. It has been raining for 10 days, and one friend, Tsu Ysu, believes his friend Tsu Sang to be in a bad way. When he arrives at Tsu Sang’s house, he hears a lamentation. ‘O Mother! O Father! Is it heaven, or is it man?’
• March 17, 2012

  On the ‘profound de’: An excerpt from David E. Cooper’s Convergence with Nature: A Daoist Perspective

  The following, 10 lines down below the hash marks, is an excerpt from David E. Cooper’s Convergence with Nature: A Daoist Perspective (Green Books, 2012), pp. 76-7. In the Daoist tradition, the sage was someone who lived according to the Way (dao). But how was he to do so? The sage cultivated “profound de.” De can be…