Wisdom of DAO

About this poem

The Wisdom of the DAO: Over several centuries philosophers of Western cultures, like Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and other philosophers of Existentialism, have pondered over and meditated on the wisdom of Eastern philosophy, as articulated in the wisdom poetry of the Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese classical text of sacred poetry written around 400 BC and traditionally credited to the sage Lao Tzu. The main idea of the Tao Te Ching, “The Ultimate Teaching,” is for human societies to live life in harmony, balance, peace, and unity, with the explicit proposition that this can be accomplished by following the metaphorical “road less taken,” expressed in the opening lines of verse 1 (first stanza) of the Tao Te Ching, which reads, enigmatically and with subtlety, as follows: “A way that can be walked/is not The Way/ A name that can be named/ is not The Name. ” The distinctive and contrastive use of lowercase and uppercase letters for the common nouns employed in the poem, supported by the contrastive use of the definite and the indefinite articles, is applied to reveal the subtle intention of the message: What is seen and measured with the naked eyes is a mere shadow of what is unfolded and revealed by the Spirit. An extended Japanese-style 5-line Tanka poem is employed in this poem to develop and deliver the inherent wisdom message of the Tao Te Ching. more »