The Dao De Jing, one of the main books of Daoism, has always appealed to hermits. In this article, we look at it through a hermit’s eyes and try to see why it has fascinated anchorites and recluses for more than two thousand years.
This article is part of a year-long series in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here. Find all articles about hermits here.
The first part of this series on Daoism is here.
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It is an impossible task to try and discuss the Dao De Jing in full within the length of one article, although the work itself is quite short. By the way, you may know it by a different transliteration, for example as Tao Te King; or by the name of its alleged author: Lao Tse, Lao Tzu, or Laozi. It’s always the same book, but over the centuries, different systems have been used to render Chinese characters in Western languages, and so we end up with all these variations in the English spelling, which really make no difference at all.
The main problem with the Dao De Jing, the “classic of the Way and the virtue” is that it is written in a highly ambiguous way: a sequence of 81 short paragraphs that resemble aphorisms and that can often be read and translated in wildly different ways. Even in the Chinese tradition, the book has sometimes been read as being close to Confucianism, and sometimes as being opposed to it. Sometimes as a religious text, and sometimes as a practical instruction book. It has inspired alchemists to search for eternal life (with the almost invariable result that they poisoned themselves, shortening rather than lengthening their natural life spans). It has inspired martial artists, Western writers and philosophers, and even Hollywood movies (much of the Force lore in Star Wars can be read as a variant of Daoist beliefs and practices). And it keeps inspiring, over thousands of years, hermits who leave society in order to live in the solitude of the remote mountains of China.
“The Daodejing often functions like a Rorschach test, in which readers find what they want to find,” writes Bryan van Norden, one of the best known Western teachers of Chinese philosophy, in his Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (p.124).
Just a quick Google search reveals that intellectuals as diverse as fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin, literary arch-satyr Henry Miller and soft-core sage Alan Watts have all written on the ideas of the Dao De Jing. Internet uber-professor Jordan Peterson (if you’re reading these posts for more than two weeks, you’ll probably be able to guess what I think of him), talks about it in an online …
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