Tao: The Great Luminant; Essays from Huai Nan Tzu

  These writings of the early philosophers of the Tao school are not easy to understand. They are characterized by freedom in the expression of ideas and by liberality of thought as contrasted with the recorded sayings of the Ju school represented by Confucius and Mencius; but their fundamental basis is a conception of nature, unknown to western philosophy. In all of the philosophies which have sprung from Egypt or Mesopotamia and been developed by Greece or Rome, the intellectual power of man has been projected into his conception of the deity. God is thought of as the All-Wise, the intelligent Creator of an intelligible universe. With the early Chinese it was the physical side of man, his power of procreation, that gave the first clue to the mystery of nature. Male and female among themselves, and in the animal life about them, were the source of new life; and it was only to them a natural extension of this known principle to an unknown material world which caused them to believe in the dual powers of nature, male and female, yin and yang. Spontaneity is the original law of creation. Male and female follow their own propensities, and new life is the resultant. This is a dualistic philosophy, but it is not the dualism of mind and matter, nor of good and evil, but of male and female. It is this fundamental p. iiidifference in conception as to the origin of things, between the Mediterranean schools of thought and the Chinese, that makes it so difficult, and at times almost misleading, to translate early Taoist terms into western languages.