Death in Classical Daoist Thought
Bernard Down explains how two ancient Chinese philosophers explored new perspectives on matters of life and death.
How convenient.
In other words, if someone is trying to grapple with the Dao so as to grasp its relevance to and significance in their own actual life and death, words are there only to reveal that anything exposed will always be accompanied by its opposite. Whatever that means.
In fact these are precisely the sort of words that [to me] configure the Dao into a psychologism. What counts with any words that you are able to come up with is not what they convey in the way of meaning but how the words convey a psychological reaction to the world instead.
Nothing can really be pinned down. But that’s the point. What you are experiencing instead is a “sense” of reality. And who can really probe that beyond the psychological sense itself. To me it’s not all that far removed from the opaque narratives of the New Age gurus.
As in, “we are all at one with the universe”? And, again, the beauty of descriptions like this is that they can can mean anything to anyone. You can’t get it wrong because there is no way in which to test your assumptions. There’s the universe and there’s you. And whatever happens between them is the embodiment of the Dao?
Which, from my own interpretation, means that, really, we can have any viewpoint at all. No viewpoint is the wrong one because it’s your viewpoint. We don’t know what we see out in the world with others. Instead, we see only what we already know.
Now, sure, I might be completely misunderstanding the Dao here. But that’s the point. Unless I can discuss the Dao with others as they actually experience it, not only might I be getting it wrong, it’s almost as though that is perfectly okay because in the end, I, like everyone, else am still at one with the universe.
Only what on Earth might that actually mean?
Or, for example, given the life that Daoists live, what does this…
…mean?
And then connect the dots from that to your own death. The ultimate “deconstruction” of a life.