This book is like a small read thread saving me from complete insanity

>Atheist
>Christianity

Stop baiting, Zizcuck

stay buttmad, I'm more chink than you

how can anyone be this insecure on an anonymous board? Your having a pissing contest with shadows. sad

the original proto-hegelian

What did he mean by this?

People are genetically predisposed toward a particular philosophy. I am Han. Taoism and Confucianism are my genetic heritage. I won't go so far as to say caucasians can't grasp eastern philosophy, but in my experience those that think they do don't. You absolutely have to be born with "it". Much of what gets presented as the Tao Te Ching is not truly the work of Lao Tzu. Same with the writings of Sun Tzu. Western scholarship on Eastern literature is sorely lacking.

>Western scholarship on Eastern literature is sorely lacking.

Why is the sea king of a hundred streams?
Because it lies below them.
Therefore it is the king of a hundred streams.

If the sage would guide the people, he must serve with humility.
If he would lead them, he must follow behind.
In this way when the sage rules, the people will not feel oppressed;
When he stands before them, they will not be harmed.
The whole world will support him and will not tire of him.

Because he does not compete,
He does not meet competition.

Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.

Is there a "consensus" as to whether the DDJ promotes laissez-faire government? Or are there viable alternative interpretations?

Why haven’t you all gone invisible to read the other great works of Taoism: understanding reality, the inner teachings of Taoism, the book of balance and harmony, practical Taoism, chuang-tzu, wen-tzu, the book of leadership and strategy, sex, health, and long life, vitality, energy, and spirit, the secret of the golden flower, immortal sisters, and awakening the Tao? You’ll get much more out of it than if you were to keep reading those dumb fiction books, and then we could actually have a substantive discussion here as opposed to bitching about nothing and pasting quotes out of context. It would be nice. Let’s get alchemical in this motherfucker

‘Invisible’ was supposed to say ‘on’...

What does it mean, in practice, to use lead, sense/vitality/mind of Tao, to control mercury, essence/spirit/human mind? What is the mysterious female in your own words? How does one go about finding the yellow center/woman? Does anybody here study this stuff?

The Tao that can be taught is not the true Tao.

yfw the Tao prepared East Asia for Christ and China will have the most Christians of any country within our lifetime

>People are genetically predisposed toward a particular philosophy. I am Han.
1. don't even use the term "genetically predisposed" if you know nothing of genetics, this is retarded.
2. "han" is a cultural group, you are part of a huge group of mixed heritage. Adopting various peoples over centuries, into the cultural and genetic boiling pot. This is the case for all large groupings of people.
3. is this bait?

4. Confucianism and Taoism are relatively young, by your logic, animism is your heritage.

The Tao = a glorious marble cathedral
I Ching = randomly stacked materials in the shape of a hut

it's over two millenia old, on a cultural level this is very old
on a genetic level it's irrelevant but that part of the post was retarded anyway

haven't confirmed, supposedly in chinese bibles translate 'way' as 'tao' when jesus talks about the way, the truth, the life

if true across the majority if not all chinese translations, it would mean something

It is the antidote to an existential crisis to be sure

The Taoist mindset was selected for during a time of inconceivable strife in what is now central China. Selective pressures were such that only those who were apt to think and behave in a specific way stood any real chance of passing on their genes and culture. I don't purport to be a Taoist, they are foreign to me, but I believe I've had enough exposure to Taoism to identify a Taoist. Perhaps you come from an environment that produces Taoists. I should think they would be prevalent anywhere in the world where conflict was common. The Balkans should be full of Taoists. Just remember that the Tao can't be taught, it can't be happened upon through a revelatory experience, it can only be inherited.

>>People are genetically predisposed toward a particular philosophy.

>caring about genes like academics told you

time to kys

>fav book
the tao te ching translated by gia-fu feng and jane enlish

>passage

2

>Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil...

It's mostly retarded.

Do you worship Tian?

Nine

>better to stop short than fill to the brim,
>over sharpen the blade and the edge will soon blunt
>amass a store of gold and jade and no one can protect it
>claim wealth and titles and disaster will follow
>retire when the work is done
>that is the way of heaven

Eleven

>Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
>It is the Center hole that makes it useful.
>Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
>Cut doors and windows for a room;
>it is the holes which make it useful
>There benefit comes frmo what is there;
>Usefulness from what is not there.

Culture isn't genetics. What you've said is like saying China should be full of Platonists because during the Zhou dynasty it was made of a bunch of tiny states and had material wealth, like Ancient Greece.

And like the other guy said, Han is a cultural group, it is very genetically diverse. Someone from Guangzhou has no common heritage with Laozi because he would have lived near the Yellow River basin.

Grew up in the American south,
>inundated with JESUS from a young age
>completely disillusioned with it
>openly identified agnostic as atheism just as much of a leap in faith as the true believers.
>found the tao in college
>only "religious text" I'd read up to that point that didn't seem preachy, archaic and an obvious fraud.
>truly how does any of the western cannon or Christ fit in with the Toa?

>42

The Tao begot one.
One begot two
Two begot three
and Three begot the myriad of things

The Myriad of things carry yin and embrace yang
They achieve harmony by combining these forces

Men hate to be "orphaned" "widowed" or "worthless" but this is how kings and lords describe themselves.

a thing is sometimes benefited by being humbled
and diminished by being expanded.

What ancients have taught, i also shall teach.
"A violent man will die a violent death!"
This will be the essence of my teaching.

>Culture isn't genetics.
Of course not. Culture can be transmitted. Philosophy is innate.
>China should be full of Platonists because during the Zhou dynasty it was made of tiny states and had material wealth
China is full of Platonists. They've fled to the coast.

>Philosophy is innate.
So who is Taoism innate to? Han is a cultural group, Taoist thought spread (culturally!) south from the Yellow River basin. According to you, every part of China that wasn't part of the Warring States can't have Taoist thought because they're not genetically the same.

>China is full of Platonists.
Who?

>They've fled to the coast.
What does this mean?

I don't know where you get that impression on the I Ching. The I Ching is structured as a matrix of 64 symbols, made of 6 lines which are either solid or yielding. The meaning of an hexagram (one of the symbols) is the place it takes in relation to all other 63 hexagrams. They are constantly becoming one another, but their distance vary. In this sense, it is like a code, a mandala of possibilities, of circumstances.

The divination is really the part into which this code opens itself up and stop from being enclosed categories. In the sense that the book contains in itself the fact that it will be interpreted by someone. It's an open work. It's not about if you actually can or not see the future, because one could say the best way to do that is by calculating that future through factors at your disposal, that is, a scientific investigation, a rational consideration of elements in a scenario. But divination here can also be understood as something which will bring about a situation that is arbitrary and use it to mirror your current position and through this you learn new questions to be asked about your current problem that you wouldn't have thought about if you were to discover it only from what you already knew.

Besides, no one knows but a small confusing and doubtful theories on how this divination went. Whether they believed it or not, whether it was something more political or more mystical, if it was popular or if it was reserved to a given class. The text itself is a mess of no authorship and mistranslations, with personal names confused with metaphors, political nuances of a debate some thousand and such years ago in that one part of China, etc. The problem is that we project what we know of divination, which is probably a charlatan pseudo-tarot reader on a tv morning talk show telling you to be careful with your love life next week. We know the I Ching was used by kings in military endeavours, who is to say how much of it wasn't just a way to get advice that we have not developped a counterpart in our society. How can we know if the poetry we see isn't actually a boring document paper gone cryptic over 3 thousand layers of years on top of it.

What some other user said about authorship of the Daodejing is right as well. It was common for schools of one particular guy attribute their texts to the guy as if "inspired by Confucius" and thus signed by Confucius. Some writings take the name of the kings in the period, but it was some various different wise guys. There are rip offs that are hundreds of years apart, as if I were to republish Dom Quixote and sign it as my original creation.

Ask me anything about the Yijing.

Also, read Zhuangzi

In the 17th centuries some jesuits went to China to study and kind of stayed there being tolerated and studied back by the Chinese. Joaquim Bouvet for example actually sent this pic to Leibniz because he saw a resemblance with his binary system. Neither understood anything about the content of the book, just the drawings of the lines. Bouvet believed the I Ching and other Taoist works were actually Christian writings that changed shaped when it went to China, even considering that Jesus himself might have been to China. Of course, later all of that proved to be nonsense, the books are much older and you can trace its origins, even if vaguely, to central China but nowhere near christianity until then. The first translations to the west of the I Ching or the Daodejing in the 19th century used words like God and also portrays the word Heaven to be the same between China and Christianity.

I don't know about how the Chinese translate western material, but we do our share of projecting.

The conditions that gave rise to Taoism can exist virtually anywhere. Where those conditions exist, pockets of Taoists exist. Most are unaware of the fact that they are Taoists.

First empty yourself of what you know of Christianity. Leave Baptist heresy behind. John Smyth did not know the Tao. Second become Orthodox. Third read pic related.

I can recommend Plato's Parmenides, some Spinoza, Hegel's logic, Heidegger's later work and Michael Ende's writings.

Just remember that the absolute is not something which can be possessed, or something that justifies manipulating others for (((the greater good))), or you'll turn into a commie. The truth will set us free, etc.

Which translation?

Appreciate the reply friend. Ordered the book and will give it a read.

Steps 1 and 2 might be harder. Also aren't there 3 different groups of Orthodox Christians?

Thanks for the recommendations friend. I've not read Parmenides yet, but Spinoza, Hegel, and Heidegger are not new to me. What specifically from Michael Ende's later work would you recommend? Equally no chance of being turned into a commie, walked down that road and back, graduated art school about little less than a decade ago, currently finishing up part 2 of the Gulag Archipelago and although I used to openly tell people that socialism was the best ideology and that it's already being practiced by the elite and it'll only be a matter of time before they start to share with the rest of us, I now have nothing but contempt for the ideology and what is has done humanity. I have learned from the errors of my youth, or at least I try to think I have. Having to get a real job and getting a divorce certainly help shake a lot of the stupid out of you.

33

Knowing others is wisdom;
knowing the self is enlightenment
mastering others requires force;
mastering the self needs strength

he who knows he has enough is rich
Perseverance is a sigh of willpower
he who stays where he is endures
to die but not to perish is to be eternally present

i always thought albanians were somewhat zen

put this shit in context dumbo

You're welcome brother. There are roughly three branches of Orthodoxy (Eastern, Oriental, Assyrian). But it's not as cut and dry as in the West with people being "in communion" or not. I go to an Eastern (Greek) Orthodox Church, but we have Eritreans, Assyrians, and even Indian Orthodox. While we have some differences, we all recognize each other as fully Orthodox. I hope you like the book.

>it can only be inherited.

Bullshit.

>Bullshit.
Like me, your thinking is far too rigid for you to ever be a Taoist. In that respect we are as brothers.

The bullshit comment was my first response to you in the thread.

you may be speaking broadly of others ideology and thinking with little to go on.

What did you mean by "it can only be inherited" then?

Took it to be in line with the other statements about how a specific culture or genetic group are the only true Taoist, which is of course, bullshit.

A true Taoist was born a Taoist. His brain is configured in such a way that he can only be a Taoist. A man with no awareness of the Tao might still be a true Taoist if he is the product of an environment that is conducive to producing Taoists. I suppose you could say that a person's personal philosophy is largely dictated by biology, but that's not quite right. I can't really explain it, which seems appropriate given the topic of discussion.

Can anyone explain what meme orthodoxy is about and if everyone at that monastery was a heretic?

>I'm genetically predisposed to two philosophies that are completely opposite.
Heathen double-think at its finest.

just hopped into this thread to say thanks for sharing this with us

I have been a huge fan of the dao de jing (and zhuangzi) for some time now but never bothered with the I ching

time to give it a shot

are you an academic?

>The divination is really the part into which this code opens itself up and stop from being enclosed categories. In the sense that the book contains in itself the fact that it will be interpreted by someone. It's an open work. It's not about if you actually can or not see the future, because one could say the best way to do that is by calculating that future through factors at your disposal, that is, a scientific investigation, a rational consideration of elements in a scenario. But divination here can also be understood as something which will bring about a situation that is arbitrary and use it to mirror your current position and through this you learn new questions to be asked about your current problem that you wouldn't have thought about if you were to discover it only from what you already knew.
In English please?

I've been reading this for about a month now and I still don't understand anything. Am I a brainlet or do I need to keep on reading?

Also are there any companion texts to read and help me understand it?

I'm an academic but not in this area. My knowledge is very very limited about China and Daoism, but I'm very familiar with the I Ching and the hexagrams. I could say all I know about China comes from my studying of the I Ching.

English is not my first language and I mess up when I try to explain something tricky like that.

Suppose you are in a dillema and you don't know what to do. You can perhaps ask a friend and thus borrow from his life experience an advice that you can choose to follow or not, which can help you even if you don't follow through. When we can't move, we ask for feedback from the outside. Even a shitty feedback can help you understand your own dillema better and perhaps even make you more certain of the path which you were considering before. The I Ching, in one simplified and limited interpretation, can be used as a tool to think a certain problem in a new way. It does that through the combination of a perfectly structured set of possibilities in relation to one another and the fact that each interpretation is unique and coming from the diviner and querent at a given time towards a given circumstance. The structure makes it so that it is "even out", while divination allows the I Ching to be more than just a rigid cosmological theory of everything. The feedback it gives is thus, more neutral than of a friend (who would be emotionally involved in your situation), but also provocative since it is too vague for you just follow it the way it was said to you, you must interpret it first.

What I'm saying is, if you don't believe in mystics accessing the future, no problem, read the I Ching even so, it is much more than that.

The argument I'm making is perhaps better explained here
youtube.com/watch?v=Nm6FM28d9_U
youtube.com/watch?v=wfRF-5EGAOk

Anyone studied zhuangzi?
I'm really struggling to find ANY point to the chapters with Confucius. Like there are parts where I think, THIS is where Zhuangzi is going to critique Confucius but he doesn't, just portrays him.
I've done some divination's with the I ching, desu they all meant a lot to me and I'm suffering for not listening to them.

"The uncanny thing about the I Ching is that it seems to work, even in hands of its critics it seems to work".

I was sceptical af at first, but after getting great answers 10 times in a row, the answers which seem to completely relate to my questions I started using it regularly.

This, trips confirm.

>People are genetically predisposed toward a particular philosophy

bump

>not believing in divination

they are you massive illiterate, someone’s politics and philosophy are genetic

Different paths with the same objective. Survival. Taoists are of a mind to stay hidden. Those who follow Confucius prefer obsequious groveling. (which is a very effective survival strategy. The best way to honor one's ancestors is to perpetuate the line).

Is this bait? Do you understand how genes work?

does it matter if i use a digital copy of the ching? or do i have to use a physical one?

find a pdf, its only 16 pages

You can continue to be dismissive. I encourage it even. Your mode of thinking is why the future belongs to the East.

If it matters to you, than it matters. If it doesn't matter to you, it doesn't. People invent all sorts of rituals about it, or use traditional ones which were actually also invented along the way. There is no original ritual to replicate, so create your own, with whatever it takes for you to read and take the answer to heart. If the computer suspends your disbelief, buy the book. I personally don't mind.

But be careful of translations. There are many websites with shitty versions they got from coffee table books or something. The I Ching is a collection of texts with several authors. Translations to the west began in the 19th century. The most famous one is Richard Willhelm from 1923, which I still recommend if you only want a standalone book, but I advise looking into other translations of the same hexagram like that of Richard Rutt, Alfred Huang, etc

www2.unipr.it/~deyoung/I_Ching_Wilhelm_Translation.html
grichter.sites.truman.edu/files/2012/01/yjnew.pdf

so you read On Bullshit then?
or was it you who dismissed Bullshit

what is Buddha? hint: Buddha is a dried shit stick

Whose translation do you recommend for Tao Te Ching? Is Mitchell good?

I take it you're German? I'd say Ende is concerned with showing the necessity of a dialogue between art (fantasy, the branching out of thought into infinite possibilities) and philosophy (reason, self-reflection as return to unity with oneself), with Identity as a continual self-transformation in an organic process. Dude was a huge fan of Novalis and the romantics in general. The Neverending Story and Momo are his best, most most 'uplifting' adult fairytale-like works, while Mirror in the Mirror and Prison of Freedom are short story collections filled with some serious nightmare imagery and philosophical justifications for existential dread.

If you're reading Gulag Archipelago I assume you're into the Peterson memes, in which case I would also like to encourage you to give Derrida a shot. He's not at all the horrible pathological neo-marxist destroyer of western civilization he's made out to be - more of a post-hegelian neo-romantic Heideggerian or something along those lines. You jut have to keep in mind that his negations aren't destructive, but specific negations of certain elements of philosophical discourse.

>I used to openly tell people that socialism was the best ideology and that it's already being practiced by the elite
Tell me more about this.

Okay, I'm feeling very guilty and more than a tad racist. Time to end this farce. I've been larping as my room mate, a Han Chinese STEMfag who enjoys shitting on all things Western. Aside from the fact that I am not/ can not be a Taoist or a Confucian (per the roomie) I know fuck all about these two faiths/philosophies. As for whether or not biology dictates thought, I'm skeptical. If it's been demonstrated that the very act of thinking physically alters the brain, than it stands to reason that any "alien" philosophy can eventually be comprehended if you devout enough energy to it. I'm sorry for subjecting you all to what I've been forced to endure for the past four months, but I hope you've at least had some fun exploring the Tao. Please don't let me discourage you from continuing to study Eastern philosophy (or any philosophy for that matter. Fuck STEMfags). I'll go find another thread to shitpost in. Oh, before I go, don't drink that coke. I pissed in it.

Sorry, I don't know much about Tao Te Ching

You make awful little posts that everyone could tell you were joking and shitposting, then you feel guity and sad, tell us your life story and end your post in a cocky but beta joke.

You suck at trolling dude. And your Chinese roomate is probably right, but his arguments went over your head.

Jane English is good

But any translation will be like 75 pages, just read as many translations as you can.

You'll notice little differences in some of the passages, it may activate your almonds.

Keep feeding me those delicious (You)s, faggot.

Sure.

There are two groups who currently have large social networks, the deeply religious and the elite.

The elite pool their resources together and function more or less as a single cohesive group.

>Hedge funds
>all of the high level corporate/wall street social structures
>The Rich get richer etc
>literally everything to do with "finance"

If your interested in any of that, one of the airs to the Johnson and Johnson fortune does a documentary on wealth discrepancy in america, and takes his camera to all these money events
wherein they basically assure you that your next 7 generations will be free from the burden of work.

youtube.com/watch?v=eiInW0DYw_A
In my early 20's a close friend convinced me that, there is no reason here in america, the wealthiest nation on earth, any one should starve.
He then followed this logic to convince me the social safety net be large enough to encompass every one, and that of course is
full blown communism, so my younger self, not really knowing anything about Soviet Russia, or Maoist china, or any of the other millions that starved to death Under communism
was convinced socialism was the best ideology because it would reduce the number of people that starved to death. Then of course, hammers find nails. I found a lot of support for my ideology on line
but I do not prefer mental masturbation and reading things I agree with over and over does not challenge me, so I try to mix up my readings. And I am happy I have. Stopped reading fedora core teir and picked up Paradise Lost.

But I digress, of course communism is being tailor made to sound cool to kids and has been for a while now. But the destruction of major European cultures due to the """refugee crisis"""
>Sweden
>France
>England
>Germany

got me thinking about how great a boarder-less world would really be. And this isn't the only board I frequent on this basket weaving website....
That along with my propensity to find and read serious arguments from the other side, I want my opinion challenged, not reinforced. This lead me to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the Gulag Archipelago.
And now Communism just makes me angry to think about.

But the Toa does usually make me feel better. All know good as good only because there is evil.

Favorite taoist parables? I'm partial to the 'tigers and the strawberry'. tfw 'King of the Hill' was your introduction to eastern thought.

I thought this was shel silverstein

It was appropriate for Bobby though.

Not Taoist in particular but still good;

One day, while user was living in a hut in the mountains, a strange neet visited him.
user greeted him saying, "Please make yourself at home," and then left to work in the fields.
The stranger cooked a big meal for himself, threw out the leftover food and broke the utensils, and went to sleep, When user arrived home, hungry and tired, and stretched himself out to sleep, the stranger got up and left.
Years later, user told this story to his disciples, commenting
>he was such a good neet, i miss him even now."

Can't quite rap my head around that one.
Was he "good" in the sense that he was a good example of a NEET?

This ones a zen koan and the original translation uses the phrase "strange monk" where I used Neet

Can be viewed in a number of ways,

It can be interpreted to be about the folly of inviting strangers into your home, and suggesting they treat your place as their own. And possibly the lesson Annon learned from this.

imagine a situation where Annon would be telling this story to a group of disciples, and commenting how good that strange monk was, maybe their such fuck ups that he uses this as an example to show them where they are.

When I first read it I laughed out loud.

Obviously me explaining it has ruined it to a degree.

Not the user you are talking to.

I find it funny that you interpret that story that way, user. But you are thinking too highly of yourself to think you explained it.

Koans are problems without answers. They are created as such. People give answers, monks give answers to one another, after meditating on each problem. They talk to each other like that for decades, answering koans, sometimes with an action, with something that also needs to be meditated about later. There are famous answers by well known monks, but just because they are so great no one came up with a better one and things seem to settle, not because anyone reached anything at all. Even if you read the famous answer to a koan, that answer might fly over your head and you'd think you'd be getting its point.

Sometimes they turn into whole little stories with a couple of turn of events in the middle to which you can meditate about. All the bizarre feelings it create on you and that you can use to work with in meditation. Sometimes they are stories about in which circumstances a certain monk was enlightened and it's usually mundane and even ridiculous scenarios.

well what did you get out of it?

Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.

>what should i read after these?

Heh, now I have this vision in my head of feudal era lords using the parable to justify the "GAIJIN GET OUT!" mentality.
I wonder how much influence zen had over policy making at that time. Does it have any influence now?