Talk:Taoism/Archive 2

message: I took this text on Eastern philosophy because I think this level of detail belongs to [[Taoism] main article:
:Taoism's central books are the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi).  Tradition had it that the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu (Laozi) dates to approximately 600 BCE. Recent archeological finds have reinforced the scholarly argument that it was still being shaped around or after the time of Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi). The core concepts themselves may be much more ancient, incorporating elements of mysticism dating back to prehistoric times. 
:The traditional story: The Tao Te Ching was written by Lao Zi (Wade-Giles, Lao tse), a minor Chinese court official (and, according to Taoist legend, teacher to Confucius) who became tired of the petty intrigues of court life, and set off to leave China by the "Western Pass". He was stopped by a "keeper of the pass" who, noting that valuable wisdom should not be taken away, required Laozi to put his tao into words -- whereupon Laozi quickly jotted down the 5000 characters that make up the Tao Te Ching (which actually contains about twice that). 
:His Taoism (interpreted by some as a version of quietism) involved a slogan often translated (obscurely) as "action through inaction", wu wei. The "wu" is not problematic -- it's just "lack" or "absence." But "wei" has a cluster of meanings, including "for the sake of", "doing", and "regarding or deeming as." (A cognate wei means "to call or designate", and another works like the linking verb "is.") We can speculate that the whole idea suggests no actions generated by concepts. The closest familiar Western idea would be something like non-deliberative or sub-conscious action. This produces the familiar gloss in interpretations that one should effect changes subtly and without disrupting the natural flow of the universe, rather than by attempting to force change according to some conceptual norms (a for the sake of).
:A related core structural feature is the argumentative reliance on the dualism of concepts (names). All terms are discussed as paired with their opposites and rather than a model where names refer to objects, the text hints that the complementary concepts (names) map onto distinctions that we can draw in reality. (Mastery of language consists in correctly being able to distinguish using the names). Laozi links this learned capacity to learned (hence unnatural) desires which, in turn, lead to wei--action informed by names, learned patterns of discrimination, and associated desires.  
:The most famous example of this dualism is one only briefly hinted at in the text but which becomes dominant in the Han (220 BC-3rd centry AD) is the yin-yang dualism that dominated the cosmology of the traditional China. These symbolize the divisions of light and dark, male and female,hot and cool, dominant and submissive, upper and lower, stiff and yielding, hard and soft, active and passive etc. Where Confucianism "favors" the "good" yang, Daoism sees them as interdependent. One half is no better than the other, and indeed, neither can exist without the other, since each contains a small amount of the other. Ultimately, both are the same thing -- the great ultimate which a tao "carves" into two to guide action in some WAY. (The concrete -- pun intended -- translation of dao is "road".)
:Some time after the publication of the Tao Te Ching and another work by Zhuang zi (Wade-Giles, Chuang tse), Taoism developed its religious aspect, especially among the Chinese peasantry. Lao Zi and other famous personas were elevated to deity status among followers, and complex religious rituals involving alchemy, magic spells and symbology began to be practiced.
I will try to merge this in the article. gbog 16:18, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  To be merged 

message: A: The depiction of the Tai Chi is incorrect, it should be facing so that tha tails of the yin and the yang point with the little end counter clockwise of the big end. (I hope that was descriptive enough). Yin should be on bottom (preferably). Which Way Taichi similar link, only posted in case previous link fails Basically the reasoning can be boiled down to the direction the Chinese compass points (down) and the way the seasons flow. It can be argues that Yin on top is okay in America considering our compasses point up (i.e., away from the viewer). By having the tails point the way they do, however, makes the assumtion that Spring follows after Summer, the dragon is in the West, and that West is the direction of metal (an the dozens of other things mapped onto the Taichi).
B: Additionally I thought I'd comment on the spelling problem. I believe the NPOV clearly states that personal opinion doesn't matter. A simple google search will tell you which is more common (by a landslide). Dustin Asby 23:43, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. I call myself a "Daoist" and consider "Daoism" to be the more accurate term, but at the moment, "Taoism" is better-established and more recognizable. Remember wu-wei -- if "Daoism" is truly the better term (as I think it is), it will eventually exceed "Taoism" in usage on its own, and then we can change the Wiki usage without controversy. Until then, I think we should accept the current usage. A bunch of Daoists/Taoists trying to force change seems kind of silly to me. --Nat 02:52, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  discrepancies 

message: I've been watching and thinking about this article on and off over the past couple of months, but haven't made any edits because I believe it needs a much bigger work-over than I have had time to give it. The fundamental problem is that the article fails to do justice to the fact that "Taoism" can mean radically different things in different contexts. Partly this is a translation problem, in that English uses a single word to translate both daojiao and daojia; more fundamentally, there is the conceptual problem that daojiao has generally been viewed in the West as simply a degraded version of the philosophical truths of the daojia. This makes any serious understanding of daojiao almost impossible, just as much as it would be impossible to understand the history of Christianity if we were to view it as a series of misunderstandings and perversions of the 'true meaning' of the Bible.
It is unacceptable that the discussions of daojiao and daojia are amalgamated into a single article just because the English word "taoism" can be used to mean either. I would suggest splitting the article into two, with headwords along the lines of "Taoism (religion)" (=daojiao) and "Taoism (philosophy)" (=daojia), with appropriate cross-references at the head of each article. "Taoism" itself would probably be best either redirecting to "Taoism (religion)" or as a disambiguation page, with enough information to let (potentially naive) users work out which one they want to look up.
A comparison with the Wikipedia treatments in other languages suggests possible ways forward:
* The Chinese and Japanese versions linked from this article both have daojiao/doukyou as headword.
** The Chinese introduction to daojiao explicitly describes daojiao as having developed from philosophical foundations in daojia by incorporation of popular religious beliefs about immortals, magical techniques, ghosts, spirits and divination. 
** The Chinese article on daojia gives a traditionalist account of the development of philosophical taoism; the information is useful but the article fails to point out the questionable nature of much of this material. It ends with a brief reference (and a link) to the development of daojiao.
** Entering douka (daojia) in the Japanese Wikipedia gives a redirect to Rou-Sou Shisou (Lao-Zhuang Sixiang), which has by far the most historically sophisticated discussion of daojia. It ends with a paragraph that discusses the (seemingly) stark contrasts between Taoist religion and the ideas of Lao-Zhuang. If anyone is willing to translate the Japanese article on douka into English, it would provide an excellent starting point for the proposed English article "Taoism (philosophy)".
* The French article "Taoisme" seems to suffer from some of the same problems as the English, especially in its overemphasis on Lao-Zhuang, despite giving daojiao as the Chinese for "Taoisme". On the other hand, it seems to have had suffered less from editors wishing to promote their own interpretations of "Taoist" concepts.
* The German article "Daoismus" gives a fairly balanced account of both Taoist religion and Taoist philosophy. It also contains an odd little paragraph decrying the 'eurocentric' dichotomy between religion and philosophy; I would argue that this is inappropriate here, since daojia and daojiao are quite distinct concepts in Chinese historiography of religion from a very early date (I can't say exactly, but certainly pre-Tang). Aside from this, the article contains much useful material that could be incorporated by a willing translator.
I've put all this on the talk page since the changes I'm proposing are fairly major, and writing the two separate articles will require a lot of work - I'd be happy if someone else would be willing to get this rolling! As it stands, the article doesn't do much credit to Wikipedia's ability to produce a coherent account of a fundamental topic. Trampolineboy 22:18, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This problem has already been discussed, see archived talk. I don't know much about Taoist religion, for my domain of interest focuses more on thought streams. A (weak) part of article has been moved to Taoist Doctrine and its  name could be changed to Taoism (religion). I don't oppose a split because popular Taoist pratices have a long history and deserves an article (even "sexual Taoist practices" deserves one, I'd say), but I do agree with those germans saying that our "religion" and "philosophy" categories don't help much, to say the less, to understand Chinese (Asian) realities of the past and the present. I do often use "practices" and "thought" (following some sinologist I like to read) instead but failed to impose those "categories" here. gbog 05:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for that - somehow I had missed that discussion. I don't entirely agree with everything that was said there, but I can see the point of having a single article on "Taoism", despite the multitude of meanings that this word can have. The article as it is doesn't really do justice to this range of meanings, but the issue isn't really one of organisation, it's more that the material on Taoist religion is essentially absent. For the moment I'll concentrate on getting the material onto the page, and leave any restructuring as a possibility for later. Trampolineboy 11:21, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sorting out the mess