The Tao as the source of all things

The Daodejing opens by disqualifying itself: the way that can be spoken of is not the constant way, the name that can be named is not the constant name. What follows is eighty-one short chapters that proceed by image, paradox and negation rather than by definition, and the form is a consequence of the opening claim rather than a stylistic preference.

The Tao is described as prior to heaven and earth, as the mother of all things, as empty yet inexhaustible, and as something that can be relied on but not grasped. It generates without possessing, acts without claiming credit, and accomplishes without striving. Water is its recurring image, because water benefits everything, contends with nothing, occupies the low places everyone else avoids, and wears away what is hardest.

Several negations are essential to understanding what is being claimed. The Tao is not a creator standing outside the world: it is immanent, and things arise from it as a process rather than by an act of will. It is not addressed: the Daodejing contains no prayers and the Tao has no preferences to be appealed to, and a much-quoted line says that heaven and earth are not humane and treat all things as straw dogs. It issues no commandments: there is no revealed law, and the ethical content of the text is advice about how things go rather than instruction about what is owed.

The associated cosmology is generative rather than fabricated. The Tao produces one, one produces two, two produce three, three produce the ten thousand things, a sequence read as the undifferentiated giving rise to polarity and polarity to the world.

Western scholarship long distinguished daojia, the philosophical Daoism of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, from daojiao, the organised religion of the Celestial Masters with its priesthood, liturgy, pantheon and pursuit of longevity. The distinction is now regarded as overdrawn and partly an artefact of Western preferences: the organised traditions read the same texts as scripture, treat the deified Laozi as a manifestation of the Tao, and understand their practice as alignment with it. What differs is not the conception of the Tao but what one does about it.

The Confucian contrast is the one the early texts themselves draw. Confucius held that human flourishing requires deliberate cultivation, ritual propriety, and the careful ordering of social roles. The Daodejing suggests that when the great way is abandoned, benevolence and righteousness appear, implying that the Confucian virtues are symptoms of a loss rather than a remedy for it, and the Zhuangzi puts Confucius into satirical dialogues in which he is instructed by butchers and cripples. In practice educated Chinese held both, along with Buddhism, without much sense of contradiction.

For a comparative reader the useful contrast is with theistic ultimates. The Tao is impersonal, does not choose, does not judge, and is not the object of a relationship; there is no covenant, no revelation and no salvation history. It is closer in kind to the impersonal absolutes of some Indian philosophy, and the Brahman of Advaita is the standard comparison, though Brahman is identified with consciousness and the self in a way the Tao is not. The Buddhist notion of dharmata, the way things are, is another. Chinese Buddhists in fact used Daoist vocabulary to translate Indian Buddhist terms in the early centuries, which produced centuries of fruitful confusion and helped shape what became Chan.