My Daoist Journey: Daoist Philosophy

My Daoist Journey, Part One

This is part 1 of a multipart series.

I’m embarking on another series of blog posts here, this one on my personal experiences and growth as a Daoist. I expect it will come to something like 6 posts or so. I already have a blog post series going about the books I’ve been reading, but a couple of the books I want to write about in that series would really benefit from some background that I will be providing here.

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I was raised as an Episcopalian and steeped in Christian lore when I was a kid. I wanted to take it seriously, but I could never buy into it. There was a lot that was suspicious and strange about it to me, but ultimately, the core story didn’t ring true: That Jesus was God come to Earth, and sacrificed his life, so that whoever believes in him and accepts him into their heart, would go to Heaven when they died. That eventually he would return, and bring the Kingdom Heaven down here to Earth. The story completely contradicted my understanding of how the world worked, and I was pretty confident in that understanding. I think I was always ready to accept that this core story was true in a symbolic sense, but at the time, symbolic truth did not have much space in my realm of actual truth.

I guess my disillusionment with Christianity made me a seeker for other truths; other stories that might provide meaning to life. I was pretty interested in science at the time, but its draw seemed to largely fall into the, “Hey, isn’t this neat?” compartment. There were profound truths in science, but they didn’t really drive meaning. At the core, there was a vacuum. Science provided dispassionate explanations of a world filled with strange, super-conscious life seemingly everywhere. As Alan Watts would say, nature is wiggly, not square.

I don’t think I was terribly interested in learning about other religions, but I am not surprised that I found Daoism as a teenager. It seems a perfectly natural development for me, and I am thankful for it. I immediately enamored myself to the philosophy. Unlike the Christian God who took an active role in the human world, Dao was indifferent. Somehow, Dao sensed that the unfolding beauty of the world, with all its difficulties, was enough; perfect in itself. It didn’t interfere. And Daoists followed this example. They practiced wuwei, the path of doing without doing. They went with the flow. And they approached the Dao through meditation and asceticism.

In high school, I read my first book on Daoism. I think it was Taoism: The Road to Immortality, but I can’t be sure about that. It might have been some other thin book with a brown cover. I’ve never reread it, but I’ve flipped through it from time to time to try to determine if this was the book I read, and I’m fairly sure it is. It provided a great introduction to Daoism for me. I was particularly fond of it for talking extensively about immortality, a subject of great interest to me in my youth. I’m pretty sure it pointed out that it might be wise to take the quest for immortality as allegory, and I was accepting of that, even though I still desired the real thing. In the least, practicing Daoists could expect longevity, and that seemed like a good start. Most importantly, the Daoist story of achieving peace and immortality was a believable story, unlike the Christian one.

In high school, I also read The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet, two wonderfully charming books that explain the basics of Daoism to westerners. Pooh and Piglet were still fresh in my youthful memory as vivid experience, different from the more distanced perspective of a parent watching or reading with their children. In my twenties, I used to buy up all the copies of a small handful of my favorite books at used bookstores, and give them away freely as gifts. The Tao of Pooh was one of them, although I’m quite sure I gave away more copies of The Hobbit than any other book. I’m happy to say that I am directly responsible for at least a dozen people reading The Hobbit. But I digress.

I’m fairly sure that I also read Zhuangzi in high school, (Burton Watson translation), but it might not have been until college. While commonly considered the second most important Daoist text, this joyous, mischievous book takes the top spot for me. The Dao De Jing to too austere and abstract. Zhuangzi brings us the light-hearted whimsy that is an essential quality to human flow through the Dao. The translation is good, and I highly recommend the text - especially the first twelve chapters.

I read the Gia-fu Geng / Jane English translation of the Dao De Jing in Humanities class as a freshman in college. This beautiful book features stunning black and white artwork, the Chinese text for each verse in lovingly rendered calligraphy, and a satisfactory translation. It’s a great place to start if you are looking to pick up a copy. While the poems of this text are cryptic and open to interpretation, they describe the Daoist philosophy with authority. I have yet to find a translation I prefer to the English. I recommend reading more than one, as each translator can bring out different aspects of the underlying meaning.

One other book I read in this period was The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity: A Modern Practical Guide to the Ancient Way. This strange book exposed me to non-western perspectives on diet and health. It touches, I recall, on interesting topics such as how often a man should be achieving orgasm depending on their age, (less often than you might care to hear), and stories of people living past 200 years. It has some crazy illustrations as well, including a cock ring, people having sex in various positions, and portrayals of large intestines - one healthy, the others seemingly extremely unhealthy, although the author passes off the unhappy ones as typical American intestines.

All of these early studies into Daoism gave me a strong grasp on the Daoist philosophy. This made it abundantly clear that I was missing something. Author after author emphasized the fact that Daoism is not merely a philosophy, but a practice; a way of life. Growing up firmly embedded in a suburban American environment, this seemed completely out of reach. I knew the importance of meditating, but I didn’t know how to meditate. I made some minor inroads to changing my diet, but there was no easy way out of Western eating habits. The whole vibe of American culture, in fact, felt distinctly anti-Daoist to me. It seemed more or less impossible that I would ever have an opportunity to develop a Daoist practice. To my joy and surprise, I did get this opportunity a little later in life, but that’s a story for the next installment.