CHAT!: Tao Te Ching (was Re: (OT) Morality (was: Re: aesthetic evaluation (was: RE: (OT)

In a message dated 06/17/2002 05.20.07 AM, the Highly Esteemed John Cowan
(jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM) quotes & writes:

>Andy Canivet scripsit:
>
>> Yeah - I remember hearing a joke in my Taoist philosophy class - if Taoism
>> is all about wordless teaching, why did they need to write the book of a
>> thousand words (the Tao Te Ching)?
>
>Because it is poetry and not philosophy, religion, or ethics.  (The same
>can be said of the Bible, or much of it.)
>
>"[The TTC] is the most lovable of all the great religious texts, funny,
>keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing.
>Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water.  To me, it is also
>the deepest spring."
>        --Grandmother Little Bear Woman
    Who is Grandmother Little Bear Woman? She a Native American wise-woman?
or a New Ager?  0_o?  ::tickled pink to hear such words of cultural praise
from a person from a somewhat different-but-possibly-"linked" culture::

Hanuman Zhang
---------------------  - - - - - - - - - -
    "We Chinese . . . are obsessed with the totality of things . . . That is
why we often fail in the specific and practical. We see cause and effect as
but two of several aspects of the paramount drive and purpose of life. Cause
and effect to us are really by-products of the ultimate purpose which causes
and effects all. Chance or what you call 'luck' is another manifestation of
the same thing, not just an accidental occurrence unrelated to the general
order of events, but also part of a fundamental law of whose workings you are
either painfully ignorant or arrogantly contemptuous. We, however, have
profound respect for it and are continually studying it and devising methods
for divining the nature of this law. We do it instinctively. You see, it is
precisely the togetherness of things in time, not their apparent
unrelatedness in the concrete world, which interests us Chinese." - Laurens
Van Der Post, _Flamingo Feather_

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