Analysis of Laozi’s Dao De Jing

About this poem

A mythical or historical Chinese philosopher attributed as founder of Daoism, Laozi (circa 604 BC-531 BC) is considered to be the author of the Dao De Jing. Dao De Jing as a philosophy of life-force; of energy, or chi, both potential and kinetic, is regarded as nature’s Way of Life that, in its essence, encompasses all opposites. See my other online Tao poems on poetry.com entitled “DAO of Psyche,” “The TAO of E Pluribus Unum,” “The TAO of Direction,” “TAO Has no Scale,” “In TAO,” “Wisdom of DAO,” “Wisdom of TAO Te Ching,” “The Silent Wisdom of DAO,” “How Does The TAO See,” and “The Way of TAO is The Way of Spirit. ” See also the related poem Taoist poem entitled “The Essence of the Noumenon,” and the ‘nativist Tao poem’ entitled “We Are All Aborigines.” All of these poems treat the subject of both Tao (lowercase) and TAO (uppercase) as embracing the phenomenon of balance and harmony in the universe. TAO, or ‘The Way of Life’ makes observations of and asserts that there is an integral and even harmonious relationship of opposites, of Yin and Yang in nature. TAO celebrates the oneness of all existence, typically masked by the foibles and misapprehension of human perception that consider TAO superficially as being that of random multiplicity of the “1000 things.” Such a perspective often engenders friction, rivalries, conflict, and division in human societies and in human civilizations. Instead, TAO or DAO at its innermost core, celebrates the integral union and unity of universal ONENESS; of E Pluribus Unum as the unrealized divine, prescribed, existential underlying order of life presented to humanity in all its manifested complexities. In short, The Tao that is made manifest is not the TAO. Similarly, Kinetic energy is not potential energy. Likewise, The archetypal image is not the archetype itself. The multiple parts themselves are constituents of the whole, but are not the whole. Stated bluntly, “to be” is not the same as “to become.” The former is ‘kinetic.’ The latter is ‘potential.’ TAO is undivided. To be in TAO is to be undivided, to be in the state of an ‘uncarved block.’ To be in TAO is to become, in theological terms, ‘sanctified’ or ‘made whole.’ TAO as ultimate puzzle, is the conjunctive mystical union of Yin-Yang and of Being-Becoming. more »