Taoism does include many deities, but although these are worshipped in Taoist temples, they are part of the universe and depend, like everything, on the Tao. The Tao is not God and is not worshipped. Glimpsed only through its effectsĪ good way of avoiding the Tao-as-object error is to see the various concepts of the Tao as doing no more than describing those effects of the Tao that human beings are aware of. And if one does this one can translate 'achieving union with the Tao' into 'developing oneself so as to live in complete conformity with the teachings of the Tao' which is easier to understand, and closer to the truth. It might be more helpful to regard Tao as a system of guidance. That sort of thinking is misleading: Thinking of the Tao as some sort of object produces an understanding of the Tao that is less than the reality. They feel that using 'the' gives Westerners the idea that the Tao is a metaphysical reality, by which they mean a thing (in the widest sense) or an absolute being like a god.īut even the name Tao can lead Westerners to think of Tao in the same way that they think of objects. Although it gives rise to all being, it does not itself have being.Īlthough it's conventional to refer to The Tao, some writers think that the 'the' should be dropped because it isn't in the original Chinese term. It cannot be perceived but it can be observed in the things of the world. Lao-tzu refused to write down his teachings, but when he decided to leave his homeland for India, he was pressed by a border guard to share his wisdom. The Tao is not a thing or a substance in the conventional sense. According to biographies written centuries later, Lao-tzu (pronounced lao-zuh) was a sage-like archivist in the Zhou court who served as an early teacher of Confucius.

Tao tzu