What Is Tao?

Taoist stories are filled with accounts of the return of the liberated sage into worldly affairs.

enough to understand with our eyes and our feelings.

Every stream, every road, if followed persistently and meticulously to its end, leads nowhere at all.

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

trying to listen, tightening up his muscles and trying to look intelligent as he thought about paying attention.

In China the symbol in the center is also known as Tai Chi, the symbol for the two fundamental principles, the positive and the negative, the yang and the yin that are held to lie at the root of all phenomena in the world. The Chinese character for the word yang looks like a fish; it represents the light side, and means the southern or bright side

Instead we have forced our way of seeing these things to conform to an illusion that makes us think they are controlled objects, and in doing this we invariably set up a conflict inside the system. We soon find that the tension between our idea of things and things as they are puts us out of accord with the way of things.

If you look at what I would rather call the order of design, however, and not the order of words, you find a rather different situation because all of the elements of the design come at you together. They are, as we would say, “of a piece,” and you see their relationship to their context and meaning all at once, much as you see the image appear whe

And this is also why the Platos of the Far East so seldom tell all, and why they avoid filling in every detail. This is why they leave in their paintings great areas of emptiness and vagueness, and yet the paintings are not unfinished. These are not just unfilled backgrounds, they are integral parts of the whole composition, suggestive and pregnant