Lecture 1 · Introduction

General remarks on the course

The Tao is a seamless whole

• The Tao cannot be simply understood as the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi

This course explains Taoist thought, not the two books the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi

• The books are not what matters; they are merely descriptions of Taoist thought, thinking, and culture: Having read only a few passages of the Tao Te Ching, it is hard to connect it with real life, hard to know where the Tao actually applies in daily life and what use studying it really has

The first great principle of Taoism

Unity

• All methods return to one
  • In Buddhism this is called: the non-dual gate
    • On this point, Buddhism and Taoism are in agreement—more than 80-90% is shared: The Way of Heaven they realized is the same
    • What is the non-dual gate?
    • The entire world has only one set of underlying principles, only one “Dao.”
    • What is the core idea of the “Dao”?
    • Two concepts: reversal and return
    • “Reversal,” as in opposites
    • “Return,” as in coming back
    • One circle
    • The “Dao” encompasses everything; its scope is vast.
    • Although the essence of the Dao is reversal, return, and one circle, it can be applied to all things and is inexhaustible.
    • Ordinary people have no idea that the things they experience and the books they read all conform to the Dao.
    • “Examples of the Dao”
    • In school, you thought math textbooks were useless, containing only a fixed set of formulas, yet even after the teacher explained them, you still couldn't solve the problems.
    • Students who excel at math: Study only the textbook; the textbook is what matters most.
    • Average students: Think textbooks are useless and workbooks are the most useful because they contain many types of problems.
    • Looking back now, the textbook is the Dao: the simplest formulas already explain all the essentials.
    • What are the problems?
    • Countless examples from life throughout history, the intricacies of human relationships, family disputes, emotional conflicts, literary masterpieces, and philosophical principles.
    • In essence, they all come down to reversal, return, and one circle; they are all the Dao.
    • But if you don't thoroughly understand the abstract formulas, you won't connect any of these things with the “Dao” or recognize that they are all the same thing.

Where there is a root, there are branches.

• The root is the classics.
• The branches are the manifestations of the classics in all things.
• In life, the root is actually the branches, and the branches are actually the root.
  • The pattern of the Dao is two reversals and one circle. One of these reversals refers to opposites. This is the core idea: duality as a single whole.
    • The opposing sides of a thing are one; there are no true opposites.
    • So the root is also the branches, and the branches are also the root. Duality is always a single whole.
    • Being humble is also progress; taking a step back is also progress.
    • Being arrogant and placing yourself above others is a step backward.
    • Acquire immense wealth, and you end up held hostage by it.
    • Be destitute, yet find a simple life within it and realize the true meaning of life.
    • If everyone becomes overly fixated on the two books, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi
    • If you treat the classics as sacred treasures and worship them excessively, you’ll never realize how they can be applied to the little things in people’s everyday lives.
    • Over-sanctifying the classics and looking down on them completely have essentially the same effect.: The classics won’t be of much help.
    • There’s plenty to read in the classics, but there’s also a lot to learn from interpreting everyday life.
    • Which is fundamental, and which is secondary? It depends on the perspective.
    • From the perspective of studying traditional Chinese culture,: The classics are fundamental, while matters in everyday life are secondary.
    • From the perspective of solving practical problems in life,: The aim is to solve all kinds of problems in life, study, relationships, and so on. Solving problems is fundamental; books are secondary.

Practical examples

（1）

• Financial literacy education
  • How should we view money and develop a healthy attitude toward it?
    • Present it in the form of feel-good advice, then explore what that advice really means.
    • Feel-good advice isn’t bad. The problem is that people don’t understand its substance, so it can’t help them heal.
    • So they hear it and move on. They learn a lot of principles, yet still can’t live a good life.: It’s not that the principles aren’t good enough; it’s that people don’t understand their essence.
    • Money is the most useless thing in the world.
    • When you’re cold, you can’t wear money.
    • When you’re hungry, you can’t eat money.
    • When you have emotional needs and want to talk with a kindred spirit or a friend, money can’t keep you company.
    • Money can’t solve a single practical problem.: But nearly 90% of practical problems in life can be solved with money; you can use money to obtain services and goods that solve them.
    • So money itself is useless, but it can help people obtain most of the things that are useful.
    • Money is “nothing.”
    • The problems you want to solve and the specific resources you need—these are “something.”
    • Laozi said: “All things under heaven are born from being; being is born from nonbeing.”
    • Nonbeing gives rise to being.
    • To distill the idea further
    • The more empty it is, the more it can contain.
    • Why can a cup hold water? Because it’s empty! A lump of clay can’t hold water. The emptier it is, the more it can hold. In other words: nonbeing gives rise to being.
    • Once you understand the image, you gradually begin to touch on the philosophical logic itself.
    • All needs are met through these specific forms of “being.”: But some things are supported by “nothing” behind the scenes.

（2）

• Family relationships
  • The relationship between young people and their parents
    • Young people have a view: You can't avoid going home to visit your parents, but you also can't spend every day with them.
    • The best arrangement is to spend a few days with your parents every so often, then make a quick exit.
    • Why does spending a long time together create a generation gap? : The essence of a generation gap is that the closer you are, the farther apart you become. When people get close, their flaws are magnified and conflicts increase. So the closer you are, the farther apart you become.
    • When you're far apart, you miss each other and have many fond memories of the past.
    • When you get home, you realize how wonderful it is. But after two days, it doesn't feel so good anymore.
    • Life is spent wavering between closeness and distance.
    • This is Laozi's second “return.”
    • It's the kind of return that goes full circle and comes back. Once you go up, you have to come back down. That's how people keep wavering.
    • The relationship with your parents is about spending two days together, then parting, so you can maintain a relatively healthy family relationship.
    • In psychology, this is called having a sense of boundaries between family members.
    • A sense of boundaries is just a concept.
    • The closer you are, the farther apart you become; once you go up, you have to come down.
  • In his novel Late-Maturing People, Mo Yan puts forward this idea: people who mature late and retain an innocent, kind heart for a long time are most prone to depression.

（3）

• Psychological issues
  • Why are kind people prone to depression?
    • Because kind people received a good education from a young age.
    • What does “good” mean? Parents teach their children:
    • Whenever you make a mistake, first look for the cause in yourself.
    • When you have a conflict with someone, look inward and find the cause in yourself.
    • Why do good people get no good in return? : Because when good people are excessively good, they get no good in return; the more useless money is, the more useful it is.
      The closer you are, the farther apart you become.
    • The more you look inward and blame yourself, the kinder you become, and the greater the evil that arises.: Once the accumulated emotions finally erupt, the result is severe depression.

（4）

• Social issues
  • Why do ordinary people like to curse at experts?
    • Because an expert's specific knowledge in a particular field absolutely surpasses that of 99% of ordinary people—there's no doubt about that.
    • Experts' knowledge exceeds that of the vast majority of people.: But why can’t experts solve problems? Because they’re too obsessed with knowledge, and that actually prevents them from solving problems. When they put too much faith in knowledge itself, they get trapped within its academic framework. They lose sight of the fact that the world beyond knowledge is the real world, and separate the two.
    • Lu You of the Southern Song dynasty
    • If you truly wish to learn poetry, the work lies beyond poetry itself.
    • If you really want to learn how to write poetry, you can’t master it just by studying specific things like composition, diction, and meter.
    • You need to experience nature, life, and the human condition; gain all kinds of life experience and enrich yourself.
    • The more fixated you are on poetry itself, the farther you get from poetry. : The less useful money is, the more useful it becomes; the emptier a cup is, the more water it can hold; the closer you are to your parents, the more problems the relationship has; the more you’re kind and turn inward, the more likely you are to become depressed.

Top-level thinking, underlying logic

That is the Dao: the formula for life and all things, the top-level logic underlying everything.

• A single sentence could make it clear, yet people insist on sorting things into categories and creating countless branches, each vying for a piece of the pie: education, psychology, financial literacy.
  • In essence, they’re no different at all—they’re all the “Dao.”

Life is full of endless troubles that are hard to resolve.

（1）

• There is no such thing as endless troubles.: There is only one thing: failing to understand the great Dao underlying the nature of the world. We mistake one thing for a tangled web of countless issues.

（2）

• Why can’t we resolve our troubles?
  • Because we try to solve them from the perspective of slices at the bottom of the pyramid.
    • The bottom layer is vast, with countless bricks stacked above it.: Which brick should we deal with first, and which one next? They’re unrelated to one another and belong to different disciplines and fields. What do we do? We only make things more and more confusing.
    • If you have top-level thinking and reach the apex of the pyramid, everything is completely different.: Grasp that apex: the apex is nothingness, the Dao. It can give rise to and encompass all things. Once you understand this way of thinking, every problem is solved.

The more you put your faith in knowledge, the more problems knowledge creates.

Zhuangzi: “Our life has a limit, but knowledge has none. To pursue the limitless with the limited is perilous.”

• Life is finite, while knowledge is infinite. It’s dangerous for experts to pursue limitless scholarship and knowledge with their finite lives.
  • Why is it dangerous? : Because it becomes detached from reality and can’t solve practical problems.

Example

The principle behind all this is that the more upright something is, the more it turns into its opposite; the bigger it is, the smaller it becomes; the longer it is, the shorter it becomes; the higher it is, the lower it becomes.

• Chapter 2 of the Dao De Jing: : Being and nonbeing give rise to each other; difficulty and ease complement each other; long and short define each other; high and low incline toward each other; notes and tones harmonize with each other; front and back follow each other. In other words, opposites are one and dualities coexist; two opposites make a circle.
• Being and nonbeing, high and low, long and short, big and small
  • Any pair of opposites will do; the principle is the same.
    • Yin and yang
    • The Book of Changes says: “One yin and one yang make up the Dao.”
    • The opposite of positive is negative; that is yin and yang.
    • The more yin there is, the more yang there is.
    • Original text of the Tao Te Ching: All things bear yin and embrace yang; through the blending of their vital energies, harmony is achieved.
    • Taijitu (Yin-Yang Diagram)
    • A circle is just a loop: along its path, it goes up and then down, then up again, Famous line from Chapter 25 of the Tao Te Ching: “It circulates endlessly and never ceases”; the Tao is always moving in a circle, without growing weary or stopping.
    • The Taijitu has a circle around the outside, with one half yin and one half yang, one half black and one half white: duality.
    • Embrace yang and bear yin.
    • Why is there a black dot in the white, and a white dot in the black?
    • Because yin contains yang, and yang contains yin.
    • Yang is what is useless; yin is what is useful.What seems most useless is the most useful; the emptiest is the fullest, the least is the most, and the people closest to their parents are the farthest away.

Life’s problems cannot be solved not because we have heard too few principles, but because the principles people hear are not fundamental enough.

The highest Tao is the most practical.

• What seems most useless is precisely the most practical.

The core ideas of the Tao Te Ching

A principle derived from the character “opposite”

Everything is a unity of yin and yang.

• Where there is yin, there is yang.The most yin will become the most yang. So in how we conduct ourselves and deal with others, we should not reach an extreme of yin or yang; we should not let things reach the point where they turn into their opposites. We should remain in the middle. This wisdom is called “the Doctrine of the Mean,” a Confucian idea.