hi. i'm new here so if i'm asking something that's already been discussed - i'm very sorry. also if my question is stupid - sorry. i haven't read too much about taoism but i guess i know a few things. i've read stuff from diferent places and books, and there is this one thing that i recently noticed and isn't very clear to me. it's not something of great importance (i guess), but i will keep trying to find an answer untill i get things straight so can anyone tell me what you know or what is your own oppinion about the concept of 'Tien'. as i understand it can be 'Heaven' but as i also understand Taoism, that wouldn't be quite appropriate. or would it? i don't know. i've also read somewhere that it can be translated as ' Nature' or something of that sort. so how can anyone explain to me the term 'Heaven' in The Tao Te Ching? thanks
I don't see Heaven being discussed in the literal sense, I see it being discussed in more of a figurative sense. When I read the Tao Te Ching I try to take it all in, in a strangely vague way. As I'm reading I try and take a step back and look not at the words but what the words are attempting to convey. The Tao Te Ching has been translated and it is completely impossible for there to be a perfect Chinese - English translation. I would think some is lost in translation even though great writers have translated the text. Many try and keep the cadence of the original Chinese poetry, some are too wordy, some are too hasty. I take everything with a grain of salt when I read it. I have 4 versions of the translated english text, all of em are different and you get a better idea of what is trying to be conveyed by reading different versions of the book.
i know that u r right and that i shouldn't think of stuff like that (and i don't even find it that important either) but it still seemed a bit odd. actually when i first read a few parts of the book, and not knowing as much as i know now about it, i found the whole thing a lot more beautiful. now i know i'm going in the wrong way but i don't know exactly why and it's hard to look at it the same way and #%%#@ ....bla blabalbal .....i don't know if u can unerstand me so i'lll stop now thanks again
I wouldn't say that I'm right. There are many ways you can interoperate that. I don't think there is a right or a wrong, it just IS. The book IS beautiful. It is simple yet profound. What is troubling you with it now? What has changed for you as you have given more thought to the material?
If you look at the I Ching you'll find numerous references to 'heaven. In my view it stands for the creative principle.
i haven't gotten around to the i ching yet and i'll be picking up a copy of it this week. are there any obscure/semi-obscure books you think i should look into?
Can't think of any off hand. As for the I Ching, I recommend the translation by Richard Wilhelm - it has all the subsidiary material like the Great Treatise included which is omitted from most editions. A simpler, but good traslation, is by Thomas Cleary, but this gives only the basic text.
Allan Watts once wrote a book titled, "This Is It." I'm now going to mangle and damage his insight, but the basic idea I got out of it was as follows. What you see is what you get. This is it. Look around you. This is your universe, or your corner of it. It is not supernatural. It is here and now. It is all there is and there is nothing else. It is banal and disappointing, miraculous and complex beyond anyone's comprehension. It is the product of a god who is everywhere about us but can never be found. Deal with it. I hope I haven't answered your question.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, recommended. Only problem is, it's not in the least obscure. The i ching is the attempt of semi-learned orientals to build a philosophy on a foundation of six digit binary numbers. Well, who am I to knock it, I mean, if it works for you, okay, it works for you. It's not for me to say that it's better than, or worse than, two dice, or a roulette wheel, or a palm reader. Whatever gets you through the night. Also not obscure is Be Here Now by Ram Dass, Lama Foundation,1973. But this guy is pure, and an ordinary jerk off artist like myself can't deal with it. Ram Dass is talking about doing really heavy spiritual work here. It's simple in some ways but he's not talking about the easy path here, he's talking raja yoga, total dedication. He's talking (page 102) EXCEPT YE BE CONVERTED AND BECOME AS LITTLE CHILDREN, YE SHALL NOT ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. so like I say, I'm not pure enough to deal with that right now, but it sounds like you're a serious seeker. Go for it.
Neither Nietzche or Alan Watts were really taoists. With the I Ching, one has to see the difference between the underlying mathematical structure on one hand, and the fact that it is also a book of 'wisdom teachings'. After 30 years of using and reading it regularly, I can testify that the wisdom is very very deep, and seemingly has layers and layers of meaning which are almost inexhaustible. Tradition holds that the manin parts of the Ching were written down by King Wen and his son, the Duke of Chou. Niether were scholars, semi-learned or otherwise, but warrior kings. To describe the later confucian comentators as 'semi-learned' is merely cultural prejudice. Nice try at defining Tao BTW - keep trying, eventually the mind will give it up.
Thanks, Black Bill. Like I say, I don't have any special insight, I'm just another wing nut trying to get by. I suspect that anyone who is described as a warrior king has used a lot of threats, intimidation and slave labour to get his castle built, in a feudal society. That would apply to China, Japan, Europe and a lot of other places. If you successfully steal enough from lots of people, you will be considered wise. As for Tao, or unnameable essence, I wouldn't try to define it. Sit long enough by the side of a glacier and you will hear the wind.
Read the story of Wen and Chou before you leap to conclusions. But it's only a tradition anyway - no one actually knows the origin of the Ching. It had existed for a long time prior to being written down. Some, Terrence McKenna for example, believe the Ching is actually only a fragment of something else, a larger system,which has come down to us. Sit long enough by a glacier and you'll most likey freeze.
tien = heaven / sky tien is the long male; earth is the enduring female. long and enduring because they don't exist for themselves. together, i call them the world.
the concept of heaven a la tao te ching is not some all happy no shit palce the way christians view it, it is simply the other side of life, the stuff you cant see often, the energy, i guess wherever all the ghosts go, its just the supernatural part of the universe( the absolute is trying to know itself, it created polarity, so if theres a natural side of the universe its going to need an opposite)
The word Tien or Tian is much older than Taoism. It comes from a Ural-Altaic root----the language family that stretches from Turkish to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese (though there is still a theory that Japanese is in a family of it's own---it has many Ural-Altaic roots). Hungarian is also part of this family. In fact, this root probably goes back to a super-language family that included Sumerian, and the Indo-European languages. For example, you have the word Thunder in the English (think tiander). An is Sumerian for sky, and also represented the Sky-God. Anu literally meant and the Sky God, and heaven. Deities were referred to as Dingir in Sumerian, which is connected to such words as deity, deva, deos, or deus, Zeus, and even Thor. In Turkish you have the word Tanri for God, and also for heaven, and Dingil means axle. What do the roots din~ and Tan~ have in common, and why does that connect to dingir (deity)? It refers to the tree of life, or the celestial axis that pierces the heavens, the earth and the lower worlds of ancient shamanic cosmology. It is the path that God would take into our world, or us into his. In many ways, it represented the sky god himself. Accross Siberia, Mongolia, and so forth, you have the Ural Altaic tribes that believed in the Ten, Tengere, and the Tengri----the sky-god, father sky, heaven, in some ways, the sun. Notice the similarity again to dingir, and dingil. In Ancient China, Tian was the sky god and heaven. At some point it was merged with Shangdi (The Heavenly Emperor is how I would roughly translate it), and connected to the Jade Emperor. Stories of the Jade Emperor himself are filled with shamanistic references. The Jade Emperor appeared in literature sometime after the establishment of Taoism, but his stories are certainly older. There is also the Tiangou a Chinese godlike sky demon that I think evolved from the Paleolithic/Neolithic gods. In Japan, the Tengu is a demon, but is also connected to the gods and can be benevolent. The character used for Tien is a picture of the sky over a man (I believe that is right without checking it's origin in my books, it looks like the character 'big' with a roof on it, but the way it looked later, and the way it started as a pictograph are not always the same). It is still used in references to heaven, sky, and so forth. Weather, for example, can be written with tien and the character chi, as in the chi that flows through you. How does this apply to the Taoism of Lao Tsu? Perhaps only symbolically. It is more significant to the popular Taoism of the common Chinese people, which I wrote about in the thread, 'Why do you think Taoism has not caught on as much in the West'---if you want to read more about that, check it out there. Now here is something different to ponder---the celestial axis is a spiritual center point to the universe, where all time, and all points, connect together. If the concept of heaven, and god are linguistically and thus conceptually connected to the axis in Ural-Altaic thought---is it possible that the Tao, as the Way, or Path, is also an archetypical symbol of the celestial axis. The axis is symbolized in many ways, from a vertical pole or tree, a mountain (and the cave inherently within), to a fire and the smoke (often combined with a hole at the top of a yurt), to a bridge, or even the milky way. It is up through the axis that the shaman makes his way to the spirit world. Is it possible that the path, that cannot be spoken, is, among other things, the celestial axis? The Tao encompasses many things, but this could certainly be one of them. Taoism did emerge from the Shamanism of China handed down from it's paleolithic/neolithic Ural-Altaic ancestors. And if you think about it, the bear dance performed by ancient Taoist priests in bear skins, danced out the shape of the Big Dipper----which points to the pole star (or in more ancient times, the void near the pole star) that all people of the Northern lattitudes associated with the celestial axis---the center of the universe. The Yin-Yang symbol is, after all, a representation of the dualistic universe spinning on its axis.
That's cool. In the culture I live in (I don't count myself a part of it), the only shamans and priests are Christian. Christianity deserves rejection unless you've been brainwashed otherwise. Other than Christianity, there is no spiritual tradition in Alberta in 2009, except maybe Wal-Mart. We have a crying need here for shamans wearing bearskins (synthetic, please)! Mountain Valley Wolf: Your signature quote is good. The cloud is obscuring what is beyond it. To call the cloud 'hidden' calls for a sense of humour, unless you have a roof over your head.
My feeling is that when Lao Tsu's wisdom was revealed, some emperor quickly decided that the attitudes that would grow from this philosophy would not be conducive to industry, or the production of wealth of any kind. So began a campaign to corrupt Lau Tsu's teachings by polluting it with Confucianism. With subtle insinuations of acquiescence to class divisions, along with a healthy dose of reverence for the state, Confucianism was the perfect foil for the perceived indigence of Taoism. Furthermore, I believe many of the later Taoist authors were actually in the employ of these emperors who were interested in furthering this goal. And so that brings us to "Peoples Taoism". Chock full of Ghosts and spirits, God and Heaven, Rituals, incense, other various meditational paraphernalia...(.All great stuff for western tourists) It's now no different then any other b.s. religion. Starts out good, but ends up being used to control people. Anybody wonder why china has never been able to rid itself of Totalitarianism? We're facing a similar problem today, right here in America, I think. ZW
Zombiewolf, I do agree with you that Confucianism corrupted Chinese thought. And Confucianism certainly could have influenced the evolution of Taoism. Likewise, many Taoist priests or authors over the years have certainly been self-serving with profit motives in mind---this is no secret to Chinese folktales, movies, and the like. And Confucianism became an ideal institution for politicial exploitation, just like any religious institution----though certainly better than popular Taoism, since Confucianism was based on the regimental State-oriented goal of achieving perfection through proper morals, duty, action, thought, etc. In Jungian terms Confucianism can be viewed as a product of an inflated persona---i.e. the product of someone who is so ego-centrically focused on his own persona, that he expects all others to live up to the standards of his own inflated persona (which typically he himself cannot do). As this person's persona grew, the rest of his psyche shrunk in significance---his life grew meaningless----hence the driving thirst for meaning----an ideal candidate to lead an institution. On the other hand, Lao Tsu was a highly individuated person---very self-actuated, having come to terms with, and achieved balance between both his conscious and unconscious. Hence very different from Confucious---certainly unaffected by the persona of Confucius, and therefore, Confucius would see him as---how was that? The uncontrolled dragon flying to the heavens? Or something like that... But at the same time----the animistic traditions that gave birth to Lao Tzu's philosophy, and at the same time, the Popular Taoism of the masses, was in place long before Lao Tzu put brush to paper. The ancestral worship, the I-Ching, an extensive astrology, all the gods and spirits, and even Tien----were all handed down from a rich animistic spiritual tradition. When I speak of spirituality, I define that as opposed to institutional religion. Animistic spirituality tends to be free of morals, rules, and codes. It is not the product of political motives. Instead, it is a powerful one-on-one relationship with the universe. What I think has changed over the years, is the ritual knowledge and spiritual relationship that spawned the deep understanding of the universe that Lao Tzu had. The ancient Taoist dance of Yu that I have written about is one example of this. The ecstatic relationship may have been lost. Like the ecstatic relationship of the Soma eaters---the Aryan shamans---that was lost to time. I think that many Hindu practices such as Yoga and Hindu meditation are attempts to recreate the ecstatic experience of these ancients. It's possible that Taoism suffers some of the same fate. This is not to say that meditation and the like is useless, or ineffective. But the ecstatic experience can be a bit different, and tainted by the institution. But within any religion, there is buried that core of spirituality that can lead people to that ecstatic experience---the key is digging through all the institutional b.s. The less institutional a religion is, the easier it is to achieve a profound relationship with the universe. Popular Taoism fits in the less institutional category.
Oh---and I can certainly see why there would be political motive to corrupt Taoism. I have written elsewhere of how confucianism moved China to the cultural revolution. It also gave power to the Japanese emperor and empowered a political regime there that lead to Word War II. The Japanese educational system even today embraces confucian fudamentals---though Confucianism itself is not referred to. I would never put a kid through the Japanese educational system. It does not conduce originality, or thinking outside the box. For centuries after Japan imported the civilization of China into their own lands, the Japanese were somehow succesful in staying in toouch with their kokoro--their spirit or heart. But I think in many ways they lost that in the 20th Century--giving way to the Confucian objectivism. The Chinese had the Taoism of the masses to temper the Confucianist ethic---but the Cultural revolution did its best to cleanse China of the ancient ways of the popular Taoism---leaving the religion of the State in a clean sterile Confucianist framework. So even while popular Taoism grew into an istitution and was subject to exploitation by the State, it still had a useful and very viable purpose against the cold objectivism of Confucianism.
