Radical Concreite Particularity: Heidegger, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu

Circumscribing the place of taoists in Chinese society is not straightforward for any period: honored by emperors and members of the nobility, they were scorned, as a rule, by literati-officials and treated with a mixture of reverence and familiarity by ordinary people. The paradoxical strength of passivity, the power of compliance, and the endurance of the peripheral already form a central theme in the mystical writings gathered in the fourth and third centuryb.c.Lao-tzuandChuang-tzu. The Taoism of these ancient texts advanced a doctrine of liberation through submission, of control by means of noninterference, and of transcendence as a result of physiological and mental regimens. The ideal of liberation from the physical, epistemological, and social constraints of the human condition in time translated into a quest for immortality which, by the Ch'in unification of the empire, became quite explicit. Huang-Lao thought, named for the Yellow Emperor and patron of the immortals (Huang-ti) and Lao-tzu, dominated court politics from this period through the middle of the second centuryb.c.

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The Pervasiveness of Wisdom in (Con)texts

The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190661267.013.19 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 300-318

Author(s):

John Ahn

Keyword(s):

Near East ◽

Chinese Philosophy ◽

Far East ◽

Ancient Near East ◽

Lao Tzu ◽

Chuang Tzu ◽

The Analects

Wisdom as a distinctive category has been challenged. This piece further challenges and opens up the geographical, ideological, and contextual contexts of sapiential texts found in various cultures with written scribal traditions. The Hebrew Bible’s Wisdom texts are primarily studied and situated in the ancient Near East and Egypt. Here, these texts are directedly placed in dialogue with authors and texts of the ancient Far East. For example: Proverbs and the Analects, Job and Buddhism, and Ecclesiastes and Chinese Philosophy (Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu). As Wisdom authors and texts hardly reference divinely sanctioned prophets or revelatory laws, the content and message with emphasis on humanity, propriety, consciousness, and jen (virtue, steadfastness, justice, affection, and righteousness) offer a fresh new breath of distinctiveness, which was pervasive in the Greco-Persian context.

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Evidence for stages of meditation in early Taoism

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies ◽

10.1017/s0041977x00036405 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 60 (2) ◽

pp. 295-314 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Harold D. Roth

Keyword(s):

Lao Tzu ◽

Chuang Tzu ◽

Meditative Practice ◽

Mystical Traditions ◽

Breathing Meditation

The role of some form of breathing meditation in most of the world's great mystical traditions has long been known, but few have seen much evidence for this in early Taoism. By ‘early Taoism’ I mean the formative stages of the tradition, from its mysterious origins to the completion of the Huai-nan-Tzu (139 B.C.). Perhaps scholars have seen so little evidence of meditative practice in early Taoism because they have tended to focus almost exclusively on its famous foundational works, Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu and have, furthermore, tended to treat them as works of abstract philosophy. In my research I have been particularly interested in the experiential basis of the philosophy found in the Lao-Tzu and the Chuang-Tzu and in a variety of other related texts that have hitherto been generally overlooked as sources for early Taoism. In order to clarify the context for the present investigation of meditative stages, I would like to present briefly the most relevant hypotheses from this research:

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