(2200 words)

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College for the course of “Introduction to Comparative Religion: Eastern.”

After giving a brief introduction to Daoism, let’s read its foundational text, the famous Dao De Jing (the Classic of Way and Virtue) written by Laozi.

For scholars, given all the historical evidences we can gather, it is hard to proclaim with the same degree of certainty as the case of Kongzi (Confucius) that Laozi is indeed a real historical figure, and he single-authored a foundational text of Chinese religion called Dao De Jing. An earliest, popular version of the story of Laozi and Kongzi was told by Si Maqian’s “Record of Grand Historian” written in around 90s B.C.E, when it had been already hundreds of years later than the estimated actual time of Laozi’s and Kongzi’s lives. According to this story, Laozi was a grand archivist in late Zhou Dynasty, and Kongzi, since being a dedicated learner of Zhou rituals, went to the capital of Zhou to learn with Laozi on rituals. However, Laozi dismissed Kongzi’s interest in rituals, and thought focusing upon the learning of rituals is a misguided path to the cosmic Way, the Dao. After the meeting, on the side of Kongzi, according to the story, Kongzi praised Laozi and thought Laozi’s thought is mysterious and admirable. However, on the side of Laozi, he was so disillusioned by the social and political realities of his time, and decided to ride on a cow towards the western border of Zhou Dynasty so as to flee as a hermit. However, before being about to depart from the border, a gatekeeper convinced Laozi to leave some words for later generations, and this became the ultimate occasion for Laozi to write down his thought in five thousand words, which become the received text of Dao De Jing.

Both Ruists and Daoists, viz., the respective followers of Kongzi and Laozi, have interest to promote the told story. For Ruists, it indicates the virtues of intellectual humbleness and independence of Kongzi, since Kongzi constantly learned from varying teachers and eventually came up with his own systematic thought. For Daoists, the story was frequently told to prove the superiority of Laozi’s thought upon Kongzi’s, and hence, spoke very well for the dissenting nature of Daoist thought we analyzed in our previous unit.

Not only the story itself was worth doubting regarding its historical authenticity; according to the best knowledge we have today, whether the 5000-word text of Dao De Jing is a single-authored book which was written earlier than the major texts in the Ru school such as the Analects is also highly controversial. As stated above, Daoists may have an interest to believe that Dao De Jing was much earlier than the Analects, but there are varying versions of the text which were recently excavated by archeologists, and these versions are sometimes quite different from each other and dated in varying periods of time. Therefore, it is basically safe for today’s scholars to conclude that the received Dao De Jing is a stabilized version which results from a time-consuming process of compositions and compilation, which may start from the 5th until 3rd century B.C.E. More importantly, if you read the entire body of the varying versions of Dao De Jing, the dissenting nature of Daoist thought from the Ru thought is obvious. Because a dissenting philosophy must come after the one which it dissents against, we have reasons to aver that at least a significant portion of Dao De Jing (DDJ) was written after the flourishing of Kongzi’s school, and its sedimented nature of compilation also derives from the fact that the debate between the two schools was continual in a long period of time.

As briefly discussed in last unit, if we treat Laozi and Kongzi as the representative, somewhat symbolic figures of the schools of thought they helped to initiate, Daoists and Ruists have very different reactions to the social chaos created by the disintegration of Zhou Dynasty: one we summarized as being short on civilization, while another as being long on civilization. Actually, to compare two thinkers, no better means can be furnished than juxtaposing the best society they are dreaming for during one worst time of human history.

This is what Laozi dreams for:

“Let the state be small and the people few. Even if there be techniques replacing tens of hundreds’ of people’s labor, they would not be used. Let the people look upon death as a grievous thing and renounce traveling afar. Though there be boats and carriages, yet nobody rides in them. Though there be armors and weapons, yet nobody takes them out. Let people go back to the old days when knots in ropes were still used. People relish their food, like their dresses, find ease in their homes, and are happy with their customs and ways of life. People in neighboring settlements behold one another from afar. They can hear the barking of dogs and the crowing of cocks from the neighborhood. Yet they age to death without meeting or communicating with each other.” (DDJ, version of Wang Bi’s, chapter 80, my own translation)

Instead, This is what Kongzi dreams for:

“When the Great Way is followed intentionally, all under Heaven is distributed appropriately. People with virtues and merits are selected for public office, trust is cherished, and courtesy is cultivated. The people not only love their own parents and children, they properly love other people’s parents and children as well. The elderly are attended until death; adults are employed; children are raised. Concerning widowers, widows, orphans, the aged with no children, the disabled, and the ailing: they are all nourished. Males and females are bonded in marriage; their talents and jobs are matched. It is detestable for possessions and resources to be thrown away upon the ground. However, when gathering them, people would not store them solely for selfish use. It is detestable that people refrain from using their strength to fulfill their duties. However, when people do use their strength, it is not solely for personal gain. Therefore, intrigues and deceptions can gain no foothold. There are neither robbers nor thieves; neither is there any mob nor rebellious bandits. The doors of households appear to be closed, but they are never locked. This is a society of great harmony.” (The Classic of Ritual, the Chapter of Liyun, my own translation.)

So, in a nutshell, Laozi dreamed for a minimalist human society where life is simple, people are few, technology is disregarded, sociality is undesirable, and in a word, humans barely depart from nature. Instead, the idyllic picture depicted by Kongzi is one of all-encompassing social harmony by which fruits of civilization are continually generated and fairly distributed, while every human being is willing to keep their robust moral compass, and hence, can co-thrive based upon the most ideal measure of governance and social co-ordination.

This juxtaposition of social dreams will become more interesting if we furthermore explore how these dreams are argued and legitimized in a cosmological scale. Normally, popular readers of ancient Chinese thought think cosmology is unique to Daoism, while Ruism just focuses upon ethics and politics. Unfortunately, this is one entrenched misconception which we need to dismantle. As discussed in last unit, there is a continual process of debate, critique, and mutual influence on virtually all topics of philosophy and religion between the named two schools of thought in the period of Warring States, which means if a Daoist text uses a cosmology to refute, or doubt the social activism advocated by the Ru school, Ruists would very probably come up with their own cosmology to contrast and counterbalance. In the following, I will illustrate how this happens using two texts which are respected by each of the named traditions as its own cosmological foundation: one is still Dao De Jing (DDJ), and another is called the Great Commentary (or the Appended Texts) of the Classic of Change (GC). For the purpose of comparison, I will still call the views in Dao De Jing as belonging to Laozi and the latter as to Kongzi.

Regarding how humans should comport themselves in face of society and nature, Laozi says: “humans follow the earth, the earth follows the heaven, the heaven follows the Dao, while the Dao proceeds out of its own.” (DDJ, chapter 25). However, Kongzi says: “Without humans, the Dao would not proceed automatically in the human world.” (GC, part II, chapter 8). Obviously, these two thinkers have a very different view towards how the Dao functions in human society.

Then, my question is: how the Dao proceeds in general in the cosmological scale? Why does Laozi think humans just need to imitate the cosmic Dao while Kongzi thinks humans need to manifest the cosmic Dao in a specifically human way?

There is a sequence of the cosmic creation of the Dao argued by Laozi. He says: “Out of Dao, One is generated. Out of One, Two is generated. Out of Two, Three is generated. Out of Three, the myriad things are generated.” (DDj, Chapter 42). According to my best knowledge, the sequence can be illustrated as the following chart:

“Non-being” (Dao) ➡ One (the undifferentiated whole of “being,”) ➡ Two (Yin/Yang vital-energy; Heaven and Earth) ➡ Three (Heaven, Earth, and Human Beings) ➡ the myriad things.

Chart I: Laozi’s Cosmology

The most important feature of this cosmological sequence are that 1) this is a temporally unfolding process which indicates how the Dao generates everything in the universe from the earliest stage of a gigantic vacuum of non-being, to an undifferentiated whole of being, via the differentiation and interaction of yin/yang vital energy, and then, comes up with a myriad concrete things. 2) Laozi cherishes the idea of “temporal priority” in this cosmological sequence such that one temporally earlier stage is always thought of as being more powerful and ideal than a later one, since the earlier one generates the later and thus, better manifests the power of the Dao. 3) Laozi actually thinks the cosmological sequence is cyclical, so that when any being, including plants, animals, and human society, comes to its mature shape, they will start to decay, degenerate, and hence, come back to the Dao, and then, the cosmic process will be regenerated again.

Given Laozi’s cosmology, it will be easy for us to understand why he dreams the minimalist human society where human conditions barely depart from nature: this is because the earlier stage of the cosmic generation where a human can be, the more powerful, ideal, and in a word, closer to the Dao we can become.

Now, let’s see how Kongzi envisions the cosmic generation of the Dao. He says in the Great Commentary that: “Thus, there is Ultimate Limit in the Change. Ultimate Limit creates two modes. Two modes create four images. Four images create eight trigrams. The eight trigrams define good and ill fortune. Good and ill fortune give rise to the great enterprise.” (GC, part I, chapter 11). Here, Ultimate Limit was the signifier to the Cosmic Dao which creates the entire universe in an ontologically layered process, and the process can be illustrated as follows:

Ultimate Limit (Dao)
⬇
… ➡ Two Modes (Yin/Yang Vital-Energies, or Heaven and Earth) ➡ …
⬇
… ➡ Four Images (Four Seasons) ➡ …
⬇
… ➡ Eight Trigrams (Thunder, Lightning, Wind, Rain, Sun, Moon, etc.) ➡ …
⬇
… ➡ Human Beings and a Myriad of things ➡ …

Chart II: Kongzi’s Cosmology

Here, what matters is not to seek any historical, temporal origin of the cosmos. Rather, Kongzi thinks that regardless of the origin of the universe, human beings just need to understand their conditions of living in the endlessly changing cosmos here and now, and hence, try their best to fulfill their potentiality of being a human so as to manifest the cosmic Dao in a uniquely human, and thus, humane way. Understood as such, the vertical arrows illustrated in the chart explain the varying layers of patterns and principles that regulate cosmic changes. Human life, on the one hand, is conditioned by these patterns and principles so that humans need to organize a society and civilization within the non-human nature. However, on the other hand, since these patterns and principles are just conditions, rather than cosmic causes, humans can still adapt to , or utilize them for creating new ways to manifest the cosmic Dao in a uniquely human way, viz., the way of humaneness and harmony as indicated by his social dream.

Yes, that’s it. This is how we read the Dao De Jing from the original historical context it arises and evolves. This cosmological and comparative angle I bring here is just one among many we can read the text, which succumbs to your judgment of its soundness, and surely the contrasting views of the two schools can be compatible with each other. But in order to furnish a compatible interpretation, we must know each of them in their own terms at first. When you delve into the text, you’ll find many other themes such as statecraft, meditation, military strategy, aesthetics, etc., which are no less riveting and worth of pondering. Since Dao De Jing is frequently touted as the second most translated book in the world, I guess, we should at least find one time in our life to read it. And I hope our course is just this time.