What does Veeky Forums think about daoism?
What does Veeky Forums think about daoism?
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i'm too pleb to get it, but according to this book it allows you to travel really fast if you tie some magic words on your legs and also allows you to summon storms and cool stuff like that, so it sounds pretty cool
bump
i laughed when that book became a libertarian meme because you can interpret some passages as an endorsement of small government
I liked it better when it was called Taoism.
There's actually a theory that the Daodejing is primarily a political text, and that's it's basically advice on how to consolidate rule.
Heavily underappreciated, Zhuangzi is good for laughs.
I don't think about it.
It was an argument against representations as the only means of knowledge or truth. Knowledge is bounded in action, not simply in language or symbols. So thinking, arguing, and reasoning are not the foundation of what truth is. A bird knows how to fly, it does not need formulas of aerodynamics. Basically don't confuse the moon for the finger pointing at the moon.
this is the proper methodology
I can't believe people are still getting into arguments about different Romanisations of the exact same name.
Just call it 道 or "The Way" or something.
and upon reading this, user instantly achieved awakening
>being this pleb
Begone, simpleton
He who seems so smugly sure about what others know or don't know is just as full of shit.
And so on.
This must be the first mostly coherent explanation of what "the Way" is, in words that a pleb like me can understand, that I have ever read.
not even mad, i'll just keep posting reddit-tier laozi quotes
Your wealth of ignorance astounds me
i'm not a wealthy guy, are you?
I try to keep a vow of poverty.
bump
I'd like to get more into taoism, too. What I've done so far:
read the tao-te-king in a German translation (am German)
read extracts from Chuang Zhu in a German translation
read John Blofeld - taoism - the quest for immortality
watched some youtube, this stood out:
youtube.com
downloaded Fabrizio Pregadio - The Encyclopedia of Taoism
what next?
The way that can be named is not the true way tho
>that quote
>basically confirmed by Socrates' experience
>also my experience reading Veeky Forums
just.
>some
It makes no sense to call it Taoism when you're going to be talking about "Laozi" and "Zhuangzi". Aesthetics should be built upon efficiency and coherency, not in opposition to them.
...aaand here we go again with this bullshit.
If you fixate on the finger it's not only the moon that you're not seeing.
But what if I'm fixated on the finger because I'm looking for new moons?
Ha, tao pseuds BTFO.
It is true though. It simply means to say that the way is without description because it is beyond concept. If you try to put it into words, you are turning it into an object, and thus not describing it at all.
If you're not ready to be found you'll never stop looking.
>read the tao-te-king in a German translation
Make sure the author actually knows Chinese. Many don't and translate translations/outright make up stuff. It would be best to go on chinese text project org and analyze the text word by word yourself (there's a dictionary) to check on them in any case. Not saying you should attempt to entirely translate it yourself obviously, but sometimes you can find entirely missing passages or words that have been changed to be more easy on a contemporary reader.
ohtheirony.png
user posts in Tao thread
where The Way is made clear
though not anymore than Frasier
Nihilistic crap.
There's a theory that Western free market principles were heavily inspired by the daoist concept of wu wei and from what I've read it actually holds up well.
The whole concept of Free Market, termed Laissez Faire, was indeed first experimented as an adaptation of Taoist ideals in economics, and its most significant example was (and still is, to some extent) seen in the case of Hong Kong.
What
why does ancient chink philosophy read like shitty internet bait?
It's too intelligent for Westerners.
Also so many hipster types borrow the aphoristic style from their basic readings into eastern religions.
Because that's literally what it is. It's expressly made to snap you out of the illusion.
>I shitpost to snap people out of the illusion
I wonder if I can use that excuse.
That's literally /pol/'s MO, but unfortunately they're just as deluded as the worst fundie.
That it doesn't end with the Zhuangzi
How could it end that which has never begun?
>never begun
you can only say so many times "things are not what they appear" until it starts sounding boring, even if you change your metaphor every time
>"things are not what they appear"
Who are you quoting?
trump
Explain what I am missing here? That is the reason why Taoist shit often sounds paradoxically or nonsensical, because - to reuse the basic analogy - they are trying to point towards the moon rather than describe the moon to you. In fact, all this philosophizing can be seen as potentially hazardous to realizing the way, which is why it often characterized as anti-intellectual at times.
>you can only say so many times "things are not what they appear" until it starts sounding boring
Sadly, I cannot strike you down.
you could if you had taoist magic powers, keep training and you'll achieve all your dreams
I think what he's trying to say is that you're doing precisely what you're critcizing.
I wasn't criticizing anything. I was explaining it to him in layman's terms because he termed it "bullshit", leading me to believe that he didn't understand the meaning behind it.
Oh, I see now. Thanks for putting it into words for me.
reminds me of good ol' Confucius
I've only read the Tao Te Ching, but I didn't really see any difference between it and Stoicism
uh oh
this is huh, wow
Geez, um, wew
In layman's practice, they are very similar but I would stress that Taoism is of course a religion, and its endgame is a state of pure experience: thoughtless, formless, where the subject and object of perception are interchangeable and ultimately transcended. Even enlightenment itself is emptied, so that the awakened can freely move between conceptuallessnees and form.
stoicism is also a religion and the goal is apatheia
Didn't know about apatheia, is it the same as awakening in a Taoist context?
They couldn't be any more different. Daoism is a very material philosophy/religion (Daoists even tried to become physically immortal - see: sexual Daoism) while Stoicism is very spiritual and the material world isn't held in high regards.
You might think of Buddhism or Zen (which is initially a strange syncretism of Buddhism and Daoism) but you're not talking about Daoism for sure.
i don't know about taoism, but Evola compared it with buddhism and said it was a lower level of achievement
>The limit of Stoical ascesis is apatheia, the destruction of any possibility of disturbance of the spirit through passions or outside contingencies. A well-known symbol is the rock that remains firm and still while stormy waves break against it. To this is added tranquility of mind based on consciousness of one's own rectitude and a certain amor fati, that is to say, a confidence in cosmic order. From this standpoint, the irrelevancy of all that is purely individual and terrestrial is considered and experienced.
>In the sphere of the Buddhist jhdna, both of these forms of ascesis are surpassed since the human condition in general tends to disappear. Only if the discipline of the Ariya were to stop at .sila and samadhi could its achievements he likened to that of the most enlightened Stoicism. But Buddhism — like all initiations -has higher and freer realizations, and so, instead of the rock against which stormy waves uselessly break, the simile of air that one may try in vain to capture in a net or cut with a sword is far more appropriate. Imperturbability and calm fixedness (samatha) equivalent to the Stoical apatheia, along the path of awakening is, in fact, considered at a certain point as a bond from which one frees oneself in order to approach the domain of "nonexistence.' At the same time, the "sidereal" element here encourages such detachment as will induce Olympian quality in all higjier states of consciousness and destroys in that detachment any residue oihybris, of pride or of will for power attached to the "person." To "life" — even at its summits — Buddhism opposes that which is "more than life."
There is no "awakening/enlightenment" in Daoism; you're still talking about Buddhism/Zen.
I don't know, but it sounds a little far-fetched.
Wei wu wei (acting without acting) is all about the knowledge how something wants to be treated and treating it in that way afterwards.
A famous example is the carpenter who looks at a tree trunk, sees the form of the chair which already exists in the trunk and just cuts it out instead of cutting a specific chair he has in his mind out of the trunk. Go with the flow instead of against it - treat stuff like it wants to be treated, not how you want to treat it.
Judo for example is a Daoistic martial art: you always use the motion energy of your opponent instead of applying any energy yourself.
how to into taoist magic to dispel ghosts?
All ancient Chinese texts are primarily political. Politicians were the only ones who could read and write and there was no separation between public and private spheres of life.
It is dumb '68 hippies looking to justify their own inane ideology with absolutely no knowledge of actual Chinese language or culture, who spread the idea that it is a self-help book.
Lol, I actually killed a translator of Daodejing. That's a long story.
>pic related
But this presupposes that there is something like an abstract, platonic sense that stands behind every representation. If the chinks had read Wittgenstein, however, they would know this is retarded.
Even if it turns out to be a truth of psychology that I do in fact associate a mental picture with every sentence of a language (e.g. English), then I'm still just left with another representation, albeit in this case a mental one. At some point the chain of meanings must reach something like an end, and at this point, there is no meaning left to grasp beyond to sign itself.
Daoism gels pretty smoothly with libertarianism.
Think hippies and you're halfway there.
>At some point the chain of meanings must reach something like an end
Do you know this or are you assuming it? Because in Daoism there's no "end" to it. Saying the organ exists for the body or the body for the organ are both untenable positions. The "forget" the words is more that you can let go of them than that you ought to discard them.
>at this point, there is no meaning left to grasp beyond to sign itself.
I'm not sure what you'er getting at here. Is this good or bad?
>(Daoists even tried to become physically immortal - see: sexual Daoism)
Pretty sure this is "condemned" in the Daodejing. Religious Daoism is weird.
The mindset which seeks to bring everyone down to your level the moment someone criticizes you.
Overly intellectual.
Another thing to have in mind is that Daoism also developped in response to other philosophies. One of them was the School of Names or logicians, often represented by Huizi in the Zhuangzi. They were infamous for proposing various logical paradoxes, one of them for example is "a white horse is not a horse", wherein a "white horse" could not be a "horse" because a "horse" has no specific coloration (i.e. can be brown, black or white; while a "white horse" cannot).
So the point to be taken is also that words and signs exist within a context, and when forcefully taken out it they fall apart and stop making sense, much like anything else.
This past summer I worked out in the middle of the deserts of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Arizona running supplies for an Outdoor Education company through the most remote parts of the country. I was alone in the middle of nowhere, driving and camping with nothing but my freighter rig and my gear for days at a time with no cell phone service, sleeping out under the stars in that massive silent empty place.
With me I took the Tao Te Ching. I had heard interesting things about it from a friend and wanted to read it in a place which resonances with its ideas, away from human civilization.
Needless to say, with the Tao's coaxing or not, I learned a lot about myself out there.
What did you learn?
Do you know those words, user? I could really use some speed buffs right now.
sorry, the talismans are never explained and he said some retarded magic word like "speed" that i suppose was a shitty translation from some cool ancient chink concept
don't have the book to check which word it was exactly