index:
1 reading text i used at the UNiversity of Mexico
2 interrealations between Huangdi, Laozi and Kongzi
1 reading text i used for the lecture at the UNAM (mexico city) sept 2009
I feel honoured to have been invited to give you this lecture. I am grateful to my host Carmen Sanchez Mora who has been instrumental in making it possible for me to be here with you. I hope my work will satisfy you and do honour to Carmen’s generosity.
Welcome to this lecture. We have limited time and the main topic is “culture” seen from different perspectives. As we sit here we can speak from a large variety of cultural perspectives, some easy to address and others not. We are here in Mexico at the UNAM, what I hear the 2nd oldest university in the three Americas… and we deal as far as I understand in this country with issues of ancient Indigenous cultures that turned into Mexican cultures, Hispanic conquistadores who turned Mexicans, Americanism, and tonight my own input of Chinese and Dutch culture. Quite an interesting mix when seen from historic perspective.
I will take Chinese, and especially Daoist ways of reasoning as the foundation for the content of my lecture and this will cause some twist and reversals to take place from common viewpoints. Some you might like and some not. Please react on them any time. More to the end of the lecture we go to comparisons and some technical things related to the subject.
I will also talk in footnotes to explain some aspects of my general story in relationship to other cultural views that I integrate in my ideas, and that illustrate some inherent strangeness in the way I usually approach my subjects in the eyes of many westerners (people originating in European styles of thinking about reality) who have seen or hear me speak.
If in between anyone has questions, please ask them, per question we will see if I answer them immediately or later depending on the nature of the question. A lecture is an organic thing, and in essence I do not mind if we have to deviate from what I prepared. If I would maybe I should not be sitting on this side of the desk.
My specialty is transcultural interpretation and communication and I am still building on this on the basis of a study in health sciences, where history and cultural studies became my core focus in understanding medicine both in praxis as well as in wordview. I came to understand that medicine is at the core of understanding a culture’s worldview, science, religion and language, but also its more philosophical and even esoteric ideas about what is “reality”.
Likewise, this is an entrance in understanding many conflicts between peoples from different or nearly same cultures.
In his text I have in front of me i discuss what in China is referred to as the “value of names”, or the meaning of meaning . i aim to discuss here both daoist and confucian ideologies about truth and mirror these on western approaches to the same theme, what i might call the discrepancies between western:
- 'Ontologic sense of history' (all history starts at one point and therefore from understanding that point all can be clarified) and
- Chinese 'Vague thought on historical concreteness'. (history is seen as a metaphor for the present and can thus be used in different ways / there is also a bit of an irony here which will find clarification later on in this lecture).
It is based on a chapter from my PhD dissertation which is now being revised for presentation and accepted in essence for further graduation procedures. The content of the dissertation was suggested to me by my last year unfortunately deceased mentor.
1 introduction in the topic. What I will do is first read the core text I have prepared and after that I will highlight some issues for discussion and further explanation in the second part. In a third part if there is time we can reflect on further questions
Introduction: different cultures follow different truths and perceive different realities
My grandfather told me just before he was overtaken by Alzheimerian memory loss that from my father’s side my family descends from Gypsies roaming the area from Poland in the north to Hongaria and Romenia in the south.
From my mother’s side everyone seems descended from generations of Dutch people (who are mostly mixed with immigrants since at least 5/600 years ago). But both sides consider themselves all Dutch, not of mixed ethnicity.
Culturally they are like one but both my parents look very different in body structure, hair color/structure, eyes form/coloration, and so on.
Over time, if there was a need to be culturally identified to one particular group it seems that the dominant group of the “Dutch” overtook the culturally weaker “Gypsies” or the groups merged with my mothers family line. The cultural group the Dutch as dominant group seems in this modern time a bit of an ambivalent denomination, but there was a time when being dutch actually was valuable as a cultural predicate, not meaning walking with clumps (wooden shoes) while growing tulips and living in a windmill. If anything the Dutch were poor people with a particular brand of harsh and unforgiving Christianity, very much unlike Catholicism, who had its own forms of harshness and unforgiving-ness, ofcourse.
Mixing of races or tribes is something we see all over the world naturally occurring, unless when it becomes politicized because of religious or nationalist convictions. The causes are usually conquest, trade, natural disasters etc. people travel and seek better places to live. Migration is part of the human condition. The idea of national borders as developed in the last centuries stands in a harsh contrast with historical reality.
The mixing of people that commonly takes place is both racial, ethnical and cultural. In most cases the regionally dominant group overtakes the imported cultures and in some cases we see aspects of this imported culture absorbed, like here in Mexico which clearly has strong Euro-Latin influences [irony].
When I was writing my Master paper I showed in there how European Christianity became gradually altered due to continuous influx of eastern cultural information as well as Islam through the conquest of Spain. We nowadays see that Islamic Sharia Banking, one of the roots of modern capitalism , is gradually gaining more influence in Western countries. Modern capitalism would also not exist if it wasn’t for 19th century reading/interpretation of the Chinese text “Daodejing” and culturally transporting the typical Daoist concept of “wuwei” in to laissez faire banking/business.
Nowadays Islamic Banking philosophy can become more dominant because of its emphasis on safety in comparison to the economic turbulence created by American, Chinese and European Banking institutions. With its gaining of foothold it also introduces more common moral knowledge about Islam as a culture of thought and behavior. So we see even in modern western society that cultures are in constant flux due to outside influences. So: As a fundamental cultural premise we can consider change as normal and constancy as irregular .
The current worldwide process of mixing of races and cultures seems to have gone in a high speed since World War II. In essence our modern societies are seen as multi cultural, or multi ethnic, depending on to whom you listen. But this social configuration is the result of forced migration because of “decolonization”, by means of economic and political refuge, migrant labor and so on .
Interestingly enough we see that that in opposition to the ethnic mixing the core of modern society is an ongoing intellectual colonization where western (European) styles of thinking dominate even after dissemination in alien cultures such as African or Indian or offshoot cultures such as Anglosaxon U.S./Canadian and Latin Mexican-Argentinian. Only a few cultures have volunteered (to a degree) in an assimilation process, such as the East Asian cultural group of Japan, Korea and China. There reason came from recognizing a pre-existing technological disadvantage, while holding on to their national moral superiority. Modernization was therefore an act of defense against western incursion.
Myself, being part of a multicultural or multiethnic society I am naturally fascinated by how different social groups hold on to their cultural identity in conflict with natural tendencies when cultures meet. The holding on not rarely turns into a clamping movement. This Clamping into ones mother culture is aparently a sign of panic due to alienation and not rarely a sign of becoming a social underdog. I do not make here a division be upper class and lower class first in defining social underdog, but between majority and minority. In that sense I see a ruling minority still as a social underdog because it lives in a situation of tension.
From my personal observations over time I considered this process from different angles:
- it is silly to hold on to your own culture when you go live in another cultural region, which would imply for people from Spanish origin that they would adapt to the original cultures of Mexico: its religion, its ideas, ideologies etcetera. There is a saying about this in Europe: ‘when in Rome act like the Romans’.
- being an underdog in the host culture it forces the guest culture to strengthen its cultural boundaries
- cultural integration can only take place on the volunteering of the guest culture to change its identity
- cultural separation creates more lively cultural flow in a nation and when politics allows it cultural mobility
- contact with alien cultures keeps a culture vital because it helps the culture to re-identify with itself
and so on…
All these views have their merits and demerits but all of them can also easily be revoked. Strategies to make such views work in different European countries all seem to lead to no mixing and merging, but also not to just a livelier cultural atmosphere but also more social tensing. The reason for this is as far as I can understand it the forced proximity of cultural ideas mixed with inherent political agenda’s shaping cultural identities. Secondly we see many cultural identities not significantly differing from the dominant culture due to shared language caused by colonization and post-colonization processes, globalization in general and dominance of modern scientific culture in almost all aspects of life. In fact we see that science has become a political tool to continue colonization by means of letting every person of the planet think along same/similar lines of thought, and therewith confirming the mechanized views of science on reality which are typical Cartesian! (Christian).
This last one especially is important because to be able to grasp the “truth” of modern science one has to assimilate its core philosophy, which is orthodox Christian in how it defines things and reality at large in all but name. We see that modern science roots deeply in how define the difference between the Cartesian divine and the non-divine as part of the one freedom that also in Cristiantiy defines our political allegiances: you are either in favor of God or against him. Deciding against western science means choosing against “modernity”, “freedom” “equality” and so on. Concepts of science such as “logic”, “truth”, “individuality”, “freedom”, “origin-relationship” and so on all also stem from this dichotomy .
Seeing modern science in that light I redefined all science as cultural. There is no such thing as objective science since one’s culture preconditions the nature of the questions you are likely to ask, but also which answers you are willing to accept. An instrument seems neutral, but it was made from the background of a particular scientific ideology.
The above shows the conquest of the world by western cultures is an ongoing process, and this conquest also takes many guises where the topdog aims to convince the underdog its superiority by means of forces which we could call violent. As a result, I also then logically have to conclude that this modern world is highly intolerant to multicultural realities since it forces cultures to redefine themselves though western scientific language to find global acceptance
The irony of this is that the process naturally causes resentments, because some are forced to give up on their own values. For instance when the Australian aborigines became colonized they were forbidden to speak their own language but also to learn English. Latin Christianity forbade Mexican native cultures to express themselves freely, and therefore Mexican Christianity came to emphasize the roles of saints to a degree that they could also represent local deities and myths. This in turn causes a continuous cultural friction and resentment expressing in rebelliousness, crime, and other forms of disharmonious cultural violence of which both cultural trends take part in equal measure but which is primary caused by forced acculturation through forced assimilation of systems of knowledge or science.
When starting out in my studies of Chinese medicine I didn’t see things in this light. But this direction dawned upon me when my University mentor Jan Hakemulder suggested me to set out on a PhD paper making suggestions on how to introduce Chinese medicine the best way in Western and f.i. African cultural realities, which I happened to know little about.
To do so I set out to define cultural values inherent to Chinese medicine and am still busy doing so. We now have an office in Kenia, Nairobi and some of the class forms of mixing Chinese sense of morality and sports are becoming very successful. But the way people engage in these actions are very different, since we found their way of learning through the body is very different from Chinese ways of doing so.
The biggest hindrance in this learning process is my being westerner. My science is sometimes more in the way then me, since my science doesn’t accept either African nor Chinese values other then through western mechanics of thinking. But then, when observing Chinese colleagues struggling with the historical past of their culture I can understand that for them the problem is just as big: their cultural modes of thinking have in the last 300 years absorbed too many western modes of thinking and dissected their awareness of how the past defined things.
I think this is a breaking point in this lecture. from here things become more strictly defined as part of the first section.
I think we can graphically describe the differences between cultures with the wording “directionality of meaning” . This indicates that Cultures can use the same or similar words for an object but can at the same time mean something different with that. I think the more esoteric or metaphysical a word, the more likely the word will be different in meaning.
The western science Antropological subcurrent of Structuralist thinking believe that the underlying structures which organize units and rules of meaning into meaningful systems such as language and culture, are generated by the human mind itself, and not by sense perception. I tend to agree with this in that people commonly judge things in their value and meaning, not on the basis of their perception, but on the basis of the meaning-matrix a culture and its carrying language provides.
A culture, like its language, is a set of mutual agreements about common reality within that culture. In fact that means that culture dictates how we use our sense organs or any other measuring devise.
A person might develop new insight to meanings all his or her life while enculturating him or herself, but these meanings either confirm or contradict the culture itself by means of its language and possibly perception, and can therefore not escape its meaning-matrix. As such, our minds can be seen as a naturally unfixed but culturally fixed structuring mechanism which looks through meaning-units and files them according to rules designated to them by the cultural matrix. As a result different cultures create different rules and therefore direct translation from one culture to the next or from one language to the next is not possible.
Although I am not a Structuralist in my approach, I tend to see this Structuralist method of perception as meaningful since it allows differences between cultures and meanings to be meaningful. It also shows that cultures do diversify almost accidentally by means of historical, geographical, climatic and other differences. For instance “rice” which is not naturally growing in Europe will have different meaning-associations for Europeans then rice for a people where 200 different kinds of rice are known and have become part of their cultural mythology. The same can be said about “corn” in Mexico in comparison with for instance “Corn” in the Netherlands or China, where I found out many people there think corn is originally Chinese, because you can find it everywhere. Also many company names have a main office in China, because of this they are considered originating in China and making Chinese people proud they are so successful in the world.
These aspects are all important, because at the risk of being called a Buddhist, it means that the order that we perceive in the world is not inherent to the world, but is a product of our minds. This is also a generally structuralist idea. In structuralism it's not that there is no "reality out there," beyond human perception, but rather that there is too much "reality" (too many units of too many kinds) to be perceived coherently without some kind of "grammar" or system to organize and limit them. That is to my opinion what culture does, with language is its explanatory device of “reality”. In China this agent is called Dao, though. The agent preselects a pattern to our perception and preselects possible outcomes. An ‘open mind’ –seen by many people as elemental to their personality- as such therefore is something of a paradox, an impossibility.
I mentioned Dao before, and in Daoism it is explained that Dao patterns things, and our perception does so as well. The patterning of Dao precedes that of Peoples minds and sense organs as source for producing mind. Mind here is a result and therefore comes in different qualities, depending on the closeness and intertwinement with Dao.
So, in contrast, Daoism as a cultural sub-current of east Asian directionality of meaning, aims to root the person back to his or her perception of reality and undoing the judgment produced by mind and sense organs. It therefore claims by means of its great sage Lao Zi that the structure of reality is not the structure of reality as we judge it, nor is the meaning we give to it the meaning it has . Meditation, movement exercise and perceptual training allow us to peak into reality-as-it-is, without actually having a(nother) language to explain what we perceive then our cultural language, which has to be because of its natural/inherent judgmental nature a falsification of reality. As such I like to think Daoism and Structuralism share some tendencies in their ideas, even though for completely different reasons and purposes and also eventually leading to different methods and results.
Looking at these tendencies in my observations, I think I have to prove the importance of difference between cultures. To do so I have to both “translate” and “interpret” as based on my own experience and show that the difference allows for possible wider experiences of what reality is all about.
Western science as a tool to peek into reality and to say something about it, is due to its emphasis on ontological forms of reasoning and its need to force to take sides somewhat of a hindrance since it does as a general rule not willingly accept its own preconditioning as a result of culture, even though individual scientists might do.
As an example of difference between Chinese and my own European culture: Now living for ten years between the two cultures I recognize that western culture as a tendency craves the sensation of alienation in everything it does. It seeks variation upon variation and seeks to conserve all it finds to enhance the ability to experience more alienation. It therefore in many ways randomizes the importance of the form of its own culture without losing its core-meanings. That is why it seems to open up to other cultures as a means to redefine itself continuously as an effect of either Christian modes of thought or Colonialism, or maybe the lack of unification between nations in Europe’s history and thus the cultivation of separatism and externalized conflict.
Chinese culture on the other hand craves the sensation of cultural continuancy and permanence of being and sees only itself as a standard to understand reality. The Chinese are China-centric. As such Chinese culture seeks to continuously standardize and adapt to the common average of its meaning perceptions. Estrangement is seen as unwelcome, unless when it is done en-masse so that the estrangement can serve as a manifestation of continuance in its internal cultural unity, not much like the ongoing cultural revolution that started officially in the overtake by Mao Zhedongs communist party and now continues in centrally guided consumerism...
These two cultural methods of viewing themselves and each other seem mutually conflicting in every way possible. In this I connect well with Montesquieu, who suggested in his criticism on Chinese culture that there was too much difference between the cultures to understand each other properly. In extension I propose that we accept that no culture can be understood intellectually, because our sciences are to biased by our cultures. So understanding can only be achieved by being part of it, even if only for a while... Maybe that is the only way to comprehend why each culture is in fact a science and that being is manifested as being a cultural language.
In the second one i will continue on the discussion of Chinese and Western perceptions on what is reality, and from there continue with discussing why ecological science would not occur in china by nature, naturalism and pastoralism, ideas about nature and reality and so on.
II what is reality? The question about habitual modes of thought.
Welcome to this lecture. We have limited time and the main topic is culture seen from different perspectives. I will take Chinese, daoist ways of reasoning as the foundation for the content of my lecture and this will cause some reversals to take place from ordinary viewpoints. Some you might like and some not. Please react on them any time. More to the end of the lecture we go to comparisons and some technical things related to the subject. I will also talk in footnotes to explain some aspects of my general story in relationship to other cultural views that I integrate in my ideas and that illustrate some inherent strangeness in the way I usually approach my subjects in the eyes of many westerners (people originating in European styles of thinking about reality).
For the following I have taken the American Wikipedia text on reality as a starting point to discuss different modes of reality and explain some typical Chinese modes of thought about reality. I think what is most important to make a difference between cultural philosophy about reality and common acceptance of reality. For instance, Chinese culture accepts the cultural philosophy that all human beings by nature are immortal , but in reality people accept that people die because it is hard to achieve that state of perfection that makes us into actuasl immortals. Wikipedia states that Reality, in everyday usage, means "the state of things as they actually exist". In a sense it is what is real.
As a statement this is problematic since what determines what exists? For instance:
- Buddhism doesn’t accept anything outside mind/consciousness/Buddha-nature that is real. It is mind that unifies all and therefore determines reality. Gautama states in the diverse sutra’s that all we perceive is conditioned reality and therefore illusion.
- Christianity and Islam accepts matter as not divine and therefore as of a less important reality then the supreme divinity of God/Allah.
- Daoism accepts both tangible and non tangible realities and suggests that developing tools makes any kind of reality acceptable. It therefore says that reality is relative since it depends on the tools one develops. Something like virtual reality developed in computer science then eventually will become true reality for those living in it when they come to understand how to survive in that reality and flourish. An immortal can therefore not have an unsuccessful life and our suffering is sign of lack of perfection and commitment to the reality we live in.
The term reality, in its widest sense, includes everything that is, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible. Reality in this sense includes being and sometimes is considered to include nothingness, where existence is often restricted to being (compare with nature). Some make a differentiation between human and other beings, or sentience and non-sentience, things as they are and ideas and so on.
In the strict sense of western philosophy, there are levels or gradation to the nature and conception of reality. These levels include, from the most subjective to the most rigorous: phenomenological reality, truth, fact, and axiom. We will discuss these in the light of Chinese culture as a philosophy/science in general and Daoism in special.
-A- Experience of reality
Human beings tried over time to create different authorities to determine what is real and what is not real. These thoughts we can summarize as systemic thoughts, trying to bring seemingly incomprehensible facts together into a unified system that was considered to explain the why of events and ourselves as well as what actions to undertake to achieve which goal.
Our current culture of determining reality is called science and focus’s on the use of measuring devices (scientific markers as tools) to determine the geographical dimensions of reality. Science therefore functions as a mapmaker. For this science the thing-ness of reality is essential and determines the content and value of the earlier mentioned concepts of ‘reality, truth, fact, and axiom’.
Buddhist sutras devote considerable space to the concept of reality, alternating between two major doctrines:
- the Doctrine of Dependent Origination (pratitya-samutpada) and
- the Doctrine of Cause and Effect (karma and vipaka)
through this Buddhism attempts to incorporate both the natural and the spiritual into its overall world view. While Buddhism discusses no prime force setting the universe in motion, no "First Cause", Buddhist teachings continue to explore the nature of the world and our place in it.
In Daoism people said that reality can be and is shaped by events and by means of manipulation of our senses, methods of thought and so on. The means of shaping our experience is done by conditioning. The weather as much as historical events of culture, humanity as well as private lives/ what type of body we have, and the will of heaven are usually described as the main shapers. In that sense of reality Gods and Humans equally try to shape reality, and Gods are just more successful in doing so, not infallible. Moreover, it is Dao that governs them all. Dao here is holy, but is not a deity: it has no life! Dao we could describe it as a mechanism of sorts, in a way self organizing and determined by the same reality it organizes. So: Dao does not exist independent from reality, just like we or gods do not exist independent from reality. As such, all there is… is … reality. We cannot separate Dao from reality. In an alternate reality Dao would function in the same capacity but would shape a reality belonging to the alternate reality already existent. Dao does so through patterning which for th daoist is a sort of natural occurring logic (li理) and when things go well, things are rather uneventful and unremarkable. In this they find perfection and have inherent virtue (de德) and Qi气. That last one is a mere indication of understanding what it does, like in gongfu and medicine. It says therefore in Chinese medicine that a healthy being doesn’t have too much self experience, but in a different way of someone who is sick. A sick person gets confused and therefore blocks out sections of possible self experience, while a healthy person experience an openness which allows clear perception when an event happens. As such Daoism uses health as a tool for perception... because it makes the senses less likely to be turbid’d in judging what is perceived.
What culture does in this context is a system of habitual judgement to make sure that some level of success can be achieved in dealing with what one perceives, in spite of possible handicaps. It helps one to maintain goal/direction. It explains why people following alternate cultures easily get into mutual conflicts
Phenomenological reality
On a much broader and more subjective level, private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological. This form of reality might be common to others as well, but at times could also be so unique to oneself as to be never experienced or agreed upon by any one else. Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality. From a phenomenological perspective, reality is that which is phenomenally real and unreality is nonexistent. Individual perception can be based upon an individual's personality, focus and style of attribution, causing him or her to see only what he or she wants to see or believes to be true. (This definition of phenomenological is decidedly non-Husserlian. Husserl's phenomenology is ultimately an analysis of the inner structures of consciousness which involves seeing the underlying nature of consciousness and many things outside of consciousness).
Truth
The term truth has no single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories of truth continue to be debated. Metaphysical objectivism holds that truths are independent of our beliefs; except for propositions that are actually about our beliefs or sensations, what is true or false is independent of what we think is true or false. According to some trends in philosophy, such as postmodernism/post-structuralism, truth is subjective. When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a particular event, a consensus about an event and its experience begins to be formed. This being common to a few individuals or a larger group, then becomes the 'truth' as seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people — the consensus reality. Thus one particular group may have a certain set of agreed truths, while another group might have a different set of consensual 'truths'. This lets different communities and societies have varied and extremely different notions of reality and truth of the external world. The religion and beliefs of people or communities are a fine example of this level of socially constructed 'reality'. Truth cannot simply be considered truth if one speaks and another hears because individual bias and fallibility challenge the idea that certainty or objectivity are easily grasped. For Anti-realists, the inaccessibility of any final, objective truth means that there is no truth beyond the socially-accepted consensus. (Although this means there are truths, not truth).
For realists, the world is a set of definite facts, which exist independently of human perceptions ("The world is all that is the case" — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), and these facts are the final arbiter of truth. Michael Dummett expresses this in terms of the principle of bivalence[2]: Lady Macbeth had three children or she did not; a tree falls or it does not. A statement will be true if it corresponds to these facts — even if the correspondence cannot be established. Thus the dispute between the realist and anti-realist conception of truth hinges on reactions to the epistemic accessibility (knowability, graspability) of facts.
Fact
Main article: Fact
A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle. It is rarely one that could be subject to personal interpretation. Instead, it is most often an observed phenomenon of the natural world. The proposition 'viewed from most places on Earth, the sun rises in the east', is a fact. It is a fact for people belonging to any group or nationality, regardless of which language they speak or which part of the hemisphere they come from. The Galilean proposition in support of the Copernican theory, that the sun is the center of the solar system, is one that states the fact of the natural world. However, during his lifetime Galileo was ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus about it in order to accept it as a truth[citation needed], and at the time the Ptolemaic model was just as accurate a predictor. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as compared to the many truths shared by various communities, which are also fewer than the innumerable individual worldviews. Much of scientific exploration, experimentation, interpretation and analysis is done on this level.
This view of reality is well expressed by Philip K. Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
What reality might not be
"Reality," the concept, is contrasted with a wide variety of other concepts, largely depending upon the intellectual discipline. It can help us to understand what we mean by "reality" to note that what we say is not real because we see it through different perspectives, therefore there is no basis for reality. But usually if there is no original and related proofs, it isn't reality.
In philosophy, reality is contrasted with nonexistence (penguins do exist; so they are real) and mere possibility (a mountain made of gold is merely possible, but is not known to be real—that is, actual rather than possible—unless one is discovered). Sometimes philosophers speak as though reality is contrasted with existence itself, though ordinary language and many other philosophers would treat these as synonyms. They have in mind the notion that there is a kind of reality — a mental or intentional reality, perhaps — that imaginary objects, such as the aforementioned golden mountain, have. Alexius Meinong is famous, or infamous, for holding that such things have so-called subsistence, and thus a kind of reality, even while they do not actually exist. Most philosophers find the very notion of "subsistence" mysterious and unnecessary, and one of the shibboleths and starting points of 20th century analytic philosophy has been the forceful rejection of the notion of subsistence — of "real" but nonexistent objects.
Some schools of Buddhism hold that reality is something void of description, the formless which forms all illusions or maya. Buddhists hold that we can only discuss objects which are not reality itself and that nothing can be said of reality which is true in any absolute sense. Discussions of a permanent self are necessarily about the reality of self which cannot be pointed to nor described in any way. Similar is the Taoist saying, that the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, or way.
It is worth saying at this point that many philosophers are not content with saying merely what reality is not — some of them have positive theories of what broad categories of objects are real, in addition. See ontology as well as philosophical realism; these topics are also briefly treated below.
In ethics, political theory, and the arts, reality is often contrasted with what is "ideal."
One of the fundamental issues in ethics is called the is-ought problem, and it can be formulated as follows: "Given our knowledge of the way the world 'is,' how can we know the way the world 'ought to be'?" Most ethical views hold that the world we live in (the real world) is not ideal — and, as such, there is room for improvement.
In the arts there was a broad movement beginning in the 19th century, realism (which led to naturalism), which sought to portray characters, scenes, and so forth, realistically. This was in contrast and reaction to romanticism, which portrayed their subjects idealistically. Commentary about these artistic movements is sometimes put in terms of the contrast between the real and the ideal: on the one hand, the average, ordinary, and natural, and on the other, the superlative, extraordinary, improbable, and sometimes even supernatural. Obviously, when speaking in this sense, "real" (or "realistic") does not have the same meaning as it does when, for example, a philosopher uses the term to distinguish, simply, what exists from what does not exist.
In the arts, and also in ordinary life, the notion of reality (or realism) is also often contrasted with illusion. A painting that precisely indicates the visually-appearing shape of a depicted object is said to be realistic in that respect; one that distorts features, as Pablo Picasso's paintings are famous for doing, are said to be unrealistic, and thus some observers will say that they are "not real." But there are also tendencies in the visual arts toward so-called realism and more recently photorealism that invite a different sort of contrast with the real. Trompe-l'œil (French, "fool the eye") paintings render their subjects so "realistically" that the casual observer might temporarily be deceived into thinking that he is seeing something, indeed, real — but in fact, it is merely an illusion, and an intentional one at that.
In psychiatry, reality, or rather the idea of being in touch with reality, is integral to the notion of schizophrenia, which has often been defined in part by reference to being "out of touch" with reality. The schizophrenic is said to have hallucinations and delusions which concern people and events that are not "real." However, there is controversy over what is considered "out of touch with reality," particularly due to the noticeable comparison of the process of forcibly institutionalising individuals for expressing their beliefs in society to reality enforcement. The practice's possible covert use as a political tool can perhaps be illustrated by the 18th century psychiatric sentences in the U.S. of black slaves for 'crazily' attempting to escape. See also anti-psychiatry and one of its prominent figures, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.
In each of these cases, discussions of reality, or what counts as "real," take on quite different casts; indeed, what we say about reality often depends on what we say it is not.
Reality, Worldviews, and Theories of Reality
Further information: World view
A common colloquial usage would have "reality" mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality," as in "My reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."
Reality can be defined in a way that links it to worldviews or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a worldview (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts to describe or map.
Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with" (Robert Anton Wilson), and they indicate anti-realism - that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not. These topics will be discussed in greater detail below.
Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially. This idea was well elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
Philosophical views of reality
Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.
On the one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated. If — what is rarely done — a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw a distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it is not a property at all, though this view has lost some ground in recent decades.
On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable jargon, "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements, on up to the vague notion of a common cultural world view, or Weltanschauung.
The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism. More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism about" this and that, such as realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object the existence or essential characteristics of which is said not to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism about" that object.
One can also speak of anti-realism about the same objects. Anti-realism is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to realism. Perhaps the first was idealism, so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product of our ideas. Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. On this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since on Berkeley's view perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By the 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism. Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell, tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there is no mind or soul over and above such mental events. Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact.
A Correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to represent. For example, the scientific method can verify that a statement is true based on the observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to the Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and continues to exist even if no one is observing it or making statements about it. However, there is nothing that we can observe and name, and then say that it will exist forever. Eternal beings, if they exist, would need to be described by some method other than scientific.
2 The interrelation between Huangdi, Laozi and Kongzi
Laozi is in modern research often depicted as mythical personae of a doubtful historical existence. His existence is waved away in the many versions of the Daodejing archeologist nowadays find. Was the text from the historical transmission already divided in two main versions, Guodian, Mawangdui and other dig finds show many variations beyond the philosophical and technical content of the current versions in use.
The history of Huangdi is where possible even more complex, since he lived in pre-historical times, meaning in a time where his existence was not possible to be recorded, so everything attributed to him is nothing but hearsay anyway, similar like to the figure of Confucius who never wrote anything himself. All we know about him are legends which incorporate many elements that seem supernatural and mythological to people living in an age ruled by technology based mechanical thinking.
The relationship between both is more than just superficial. The Neijing, like the Daodejing, has eighty-one chapters. The primary doctrines of Daoism, such as the Dao and Yin and Yang, are found throughout the Neijing. The principle of acupuncture is called Zhen Dao, or the Dao of Needling. And authorship of the Neijing, like many early Daoist books, is attributed to Huangdi. Just like the medical treatises of the Hippocratic canon, the Neijing contains a philosophical element. This medical masterwork is often used as a primary reference for the study of ancient Chinese philosophy, due to its development of the doctrines of Daoism.
Huangdi, (黃帝/黄帝) or the Yellow Souvereign, is a legendary Chinese ruler and culture-hero who is considered in Chinese mythology to be the ancestor of all Han Chinese. He was one of the legendary Five Emperors, the other four being Zhuanxu (顓頊); Kudi (嚳帝); Yaodi (堯帝) and Shundi (舜帝). He was mentioned in the Shiji by historian Sima Qian (145 BC-90 BC). Tradition holds that he reigned from 2697 BC to 2597 BC. His personal name was said to be Gōngsūn Xuānyuán (公孙轩辕). He emerged as a chief deity of Daoism during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE) developed by Zhang Daoling and his celestial masters.
Among his many accomplishments, Huangdi has been credited with the invention of the principles of Medicine. The Huangdi Neijing (黄帝内經) was supposedly composed in collaboration with his physician Qibo and follows the form of question and answer between king and his teachers. However, modern historiographers generally consider it to have been compiled from ancient sources by one or more scholars living between the Zhou and Han dynasties, more than 2,000 years later.
Legend says that Huangdi became the leader of his tribe which bore the totem of a bear (Youxiong 有熊, lit. own bears). His tribe went to war with a neighboring tribe bearing the totem of a bull, headed by Yandi. Huangdi, through his superior military and leadership skills won the war and subdued Yandi's tribe. The two tribes united and became one. Legend then says that the Chinese civilization began with these two tribes. Some sources name Yandi as a brother or half-brother. Huangdi's people were then threatened by a tribe under the leadership of Chi You, who was said to have magical powers and had 81 brothers, each having 4 eyes and 8 arms wielding terrible sharp weapons in every hand. Huangdi called upon 8 neighboring tribes to join forces with him and sent the combined army to meet Chi You and his brothers. The two great armies fought for days without a clear winner. Just as Huangdi's army began to turn the tide of battle, Chi You breathed out a thick fog and obscured the sunlight. Huangdi's army fell into disarray and could not find its way out of the battlefield. At this critical moment, Huangdi invented the “South Pointing Chariot”, and ordered its construction on the battlefield. It included a compass on a pole stick, allowing to always know the direction of south and therefore to not end up driving in circles. It is also said to be one of the origins of Fengshui science where it is said that reality is like a fog and that a good compass can clarify Dao in the confusion from foggy surroundings. The fengshui compass up to today points south, while western compasses turn north. In Daoist temples the direction south is dedicated to people, while the other directions are for gods. In indication of the daoist idea is that through perfecting our being human is the way to become an Immortal.
It is clear then that with the South Pointing Chariot, Huangdi was able to lead his army out of the fog. Chi You then conjured up a heavy storm. Huangdi then called upon the gods who blew away the storm clouds and cleared the battlefield. Huangdi then was able to defeat Chi You and his tribe once and for all. With this great victory, Huangdi not only safeguarded his own tribe, but the tribes of his allies. The 9 Tribes joined together as one tribe under the leadership of Huangdi. It is said that this myth reveals why the Chinese map contains still 8 diagrams (four directions and four pillars) while the earth (Huangdi) rules in the middle. It is also the foundation of the character of Qi氣 as we have seen earlier too, showing how Qi unites things/the earth as to achieve things.
Huangdi is said to have ruled for 100 years. He was said to have had 25 children, 14 of whom were sons. Of these 14 sons, 12 chose last names for themselves. It is also said that all the noble families of the first 3 dynasties of China, Xia, Shang, and Zhou were direct descendants of Huangdi. Another story states that when Huangdi had lived/ruled for over 100 years, he arranged his worldly affairs with his ministers, and prepared for his journey to the Heavens. One version said a Dragon came down from the Heaven and took Huangdi away. Another version said Huangdi himself turned into half-man and half Dragon and flew away.
Besides becoming god of warfare and medicine he is seen as a general culture producing hero, and culture therefore is associated with yellow and earth and royalty. Huangdi supposedly played a part in the creation of the Guqin, together with Fuxi and Shennong, and to have invented the earliest form of the Chinese calendar, and its current sexagenary cycles are counted based on his reign. In one legend, Ling Lun泠倫gave the emperor flutes tuned to the sounds of birds, which is said to be the foundation of Chinese traditional music. In another legend Ling Lun is the legendary founder of music in ancient China. In Chinese mythology, he was said to have created bamboo flutes which made the sounds of many birds, including the mythical phoenix. Huangdi is said to have ordered the casting of bells in tune with those flutes.
One legend tells that Huangdi one day captured the monster Bai Ze白澤at the top of Dongwang shan. Bai Ze (Hakutaku in Japanese) is a fantastic beast from Chinese legend. Its name literally means "white marsh". Bai Ze was encountered by the Yellow Emperor while he was on patrol in the east. After the defeat and capture of Bai Ze, the monster dictated to Huangdi a guide to the forms and habits of all 11,520 types of supernatural creatures in the world, and how to overcome their hauntings and attacks. Huang Ti's retainer recorded this in pictures, which later became the book Bai Ze Tu (白澤圖). This book no longer exists, but many fragments of it survive in other texts. It is mainly echoed in the Shanhai Jing 山海经 (weft of mountains and seas, another compendium of exotic beings in and around the early Chinese core lands.
From all the sources it becomes clear that Huangdi aimed to know the internal and external realities of his existence and from their function as a teacher to all human beings. And although his legends incorporate what we in the 21st century call the mythical and fantastic, they all take ethics as its core subject just like the Daodejing and the teachings of Kongzi do.
When we look at Laozi, we see that the earliest reliable reference (circa 100 BC) to Laozi is found in the Historical Records (Shiji) by the same Chinese historian Sima Qian as where we find material about Huangdi. Sima said that Laozi lived in the 6th century BC and worked as the Keeper of the Archives for the royal court of Zhou. From this statement it is always assumed in Chinese history that Laozi, like Huangdi is a real person and therefore he has relevant historical relevance, being confirmed by the many commentators throughout history who used their work to found their ideologies and science on.
The point in question is that transmission and use of the Daodejing –like the Neijing- in the two historically transmitted versions and the commentaries intertwined deeply with all of Chinese culture and officially takes Confucianism as its root and starting point while making addendums to it as to complete the Confucian worldview into a cosmological worldview, including everyting. Here it echoes the intentions of Huangdi the most, and therefore underlining the importance of the reality of Huangdi implicitly, without ever having to mention him, but allowing for later Daoism to elevate both Huangdi and Laozi into deity-hood.
People usually refer to Kongzi as the teacher of the Chinese people, a major founding father for Chinese culture. But what was he teaching? He was not teaching anything separate from Chinese culture, to respect the roots of culture and to implement the wisdom of the ancient in daily life, to develop oneself and aim for perfection and optimum civil behavior, and be generous in admitting you are wrong when wrong. The root of Chinese culture we find in the Huangdineijing: it is Chinese science. Chinese science starts with ideas about health, life, death, what lives around us and inside us. Laozi likewise teaches us that people are part of their environment, that they are not only the product of it, but cannot be separated from it. Both teach that we are the world mirrored. It is therefore that laozi was called Laozi: where Kongzi was the Teacher, Laozi was the Father. That is also what Laozi as a word means for the Chinese: father.
A real or not real person, historically having been placed in the function of historian at one of the major courts in pre-Qin China allowed him broad access to the classical works of the time, and therefore suggesting an all-knowing insight in how things came about, leaning on the purpose of Huangdi as said before, but also a theme we also find back in the Huangdineijing. Being all knowing (as much as possible) or being learned is the goal of every parent, as to serve their children well.
The Huangdi neijing expects from the reader knowledge of health as to understand the concept of disease and cure of disease as a sidetrack of ethical behaviour. It also explains the name for Laozi when rooting so deeply in Huangdi mythology. Like earlier explained the name Laozi is an honorary title for “The Father”, while Kongzi’s title was “The Teacher”, showing the changing importance between fatherhood and the development of the social class of teachers of which Kong was part and of which Laozi also became a rationale for its existence. Huangdi was the forefather of all the Han, the great ancestor. Here Laozi is made descendant of Huangdi and family of all Han/people, while Kongzi is a bystander given the honorary title of teacher because of the wisdom he represents in aspects of what is important to people.
There are numerous variations of a story depicting Confucius(551-479 BC), the venerable philosopher who was born a generation after Laozi, consulting Laozi about rituals. Whatever the truth, Daoism and Confucianism have to be seen side-by-side as two distinct responses to the social, political and philosophical conditions of life two and a half millennia ago in China. Whereas Confucianism is greatly concerned with social relations, conduct and human society, Daoism has a much more mystical character, greatly influenced by nature and its influence on personal life. Both thinkers aim to develop the individual toward a form of perfection contributing to a greater whole and putting their sense of “self-importance” aside. In the hthe text Neijing Suwen attributed to Huangdi we find the same idea back as causes of disease by means of developing too much attachment to self and selfish desires, fears and anger. These fears, angers and desires are said to causing disruption of the continuance of natural selfness and therefore harming the fullness of construed existence. Translated that means the body structure weakens, summarized under the concept of Jing经/精, the main concept discussed in all Huangdi medical treatises.
The Daodejing is concerned with both Dao (道) and De (德). Laozi believes that Dao is the single source (the One) of all existence (as coordinated and interrelated, like in Jing) and Qi is its primordial natural force in the world, which is in turn governed by Dao, in this way often compared with natural law, but not entirely the same in its intentions.
A common mystifying aspect of the Daodejing is the mystical description of the Dao by Laozi. Chapter 14 for instance states Dao is:
- - Devoid of form
- - Devoid of image
- - Devoid of sound
- - Devoid of name
In fact, Laozi attained his understanding of Dao by detailed observation of the world of Heaven, and the Below Heaven, and profound experience of the human condition and that what is shared between people, sages, immortals and other supernatural entities. According to a well-known saying of Confucius:
“The benevolent delight in mountains and the wise delight in water” (仁者乐山，智者乐水)
As one of the wisest persons in the world, Laozi deeply loved water and used as we observed above the theme frequently in his text.
De德, literally “virtue” or “power”, refers to ethics or morality as an empowering force as we also saw before. It mainly empowers Dao and (human) conduct. It actually signifies the full embodiment of the Dao. After all, acording to the Daodejing, humans have no special place within Dao, being just one of its many ("ten thousand") manifestations. Humanity, Earth, and Heaven are all modeled by Dao or natural laws/principles (li理) (ch. 25). A person with “superior De” (shang de上德) definitely acts in the way Dao operates. And people can also exalt their morals by exploring and mastering natural principles. As the character of water conforms to that of the Dao, Laozi suggests that the morality and conduct of the perfected human being should resemble the excellence of water, that is, one should be steadfast and persevering, bestowing rather than extortive, humble and honest, while surrendering to the common good.
Some principles stand out in the Daodejing:
1. Ziran (自然)
Ziran as a concept stands central in Daoism. We find it also in Zhuangzi and even in modern Yangsheng (养生) practice it is the core of any positive achievement. It should be noted though that natural in the meaning of the daodejing is not the natural we associate the word with in modern times. Literally means “self (zi) become (ran).” The term ziran is often understood as nature, naturalness, spontaneity, and currently as self-becoming. It refers to the natural state and process (wei为) and principles (li理) of Dao within and around us rather than the natural world, which is referred to as big Zi Ran (大自然) in modern Chinese, or impulse based behavior.
It is Laozi who first coined this concept and used it to describe the workings of Dao. According to the Daodejing, Ziran encompasses two aspects:
- ziran of the physical world, considered to be the embodiment of the Dao or natural laws, for instances, the cycle of day and night, and downward flow of water;
- ziran of human actions conforming to that of the physical world, for instances, working from dawn to dusk (or the sunrise makes, the sunset but the rest), and dredging or diverting water to flow naturally downward.
In the second aspect, Ziran is closely tied to the practice of Wuwei. When someone acts on a way that is in accordance with the natural laws of the physical world, he acts in wuwei, as if he is being acted without creating action because of thought process or decision. The action is naturally so appropriate. While any effort contrary to that of the physical world is youwei, or taking inappropriate action, for instances, working from dusk to dawn and diking a river to obstruct water flow. Laozi uses Pu朴(unhewn log) , Su素(undyed silk) and Chizi 赤子(newborn baby) as metaphors for Ziran. As forms they are all three simple, pure and unaltered. A child with open-seat (or split) pants makes no distinctions between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, high and low. He has no desires and is free from learned labels and definitions, and therefore feels unrestrained to pee wherever and whenever he wants.
2. Wuwei (无为)
Wuwei literally means "devoid (wu) action (wei)." According to the Daodejing, wuwei is not meant as "non-action" but rather as "taking no action that is contrary to Dao", in other words, letting processes take their own course. It is often expressed by the paradox wei wu wei, meaning "action without action". It became a central practice in Daoist monk studies of life and Taijiquan martial studies. Modern Daoism incorporates many forms of Zhang Sanfeng’s Taiji ideology insofar as it goes back on Laozi for its explanations in learning Taiji-skills as a means for understanding Dao eventually. The practice and efficacy of wuwei are fundamental in Daoist thought. Daoist thinkers and religious figureheads propose that the universe works harmoniously according to its own ways (i.e. Ziran). When someone exerts his will against the world, he disrupts that harmony. The Daodejing intends to lead people to a "return" to their natural state, in harmony with the Dao. Laozi teaches that all straining, all striving are not only vain but counterproductive. One should endeavor to discern and follow the natural forces -- to follow and shape the flow of events and not to pit oneself against the natural order of things. In this sense the Daoist doctrine of wu wei can be understood as a way of mastering circumstances by understanding their nature or principal, and then shaping ones actions in accordance with these laws. When someone has arrived at this point of non-action, there is nothing that he does not gets done.
3. Xuxin (虚心) Empty/clean heart
The heart, called xin (心) in Chinese, is according to the Huangdi Neijing the abode of Shen神 (awareness/alertness). It is a long tradition that people all over the world have considered the heart as the source of mental activities because of the direct impact of events on the feel of one’s inner chest. In China it was not associated with blood flow untill relative recent times, but primarily with the reception of the impressions of the rest of one’s body and the inhabiting entities/spritis. When someone for instance is excited, the Xin will palpitate. By contrast, when one is depressed, he will experience pressing discomfort or even coldish pain in his heart area. These are seen as signs of turbid Xin, causing deviating forms of decision making as a result of obscured Shen. Tranquility is the natural required state of both Xin and Shen; it should be as quiet as the unruffled waters in a lake. Restlessness or even craziness will occur when excessive desires such as for fame, wealth and power occupy the mind. Laozi therefore asserts that one should “empty out ones desires” to “empty/clean Xin” and attain the profound tranquility (ch. 3 and 19). He even teaches us a practical remedy to approach to the objective. The method seems simple and easy as being “content with one’s lot” (zhizu 知足). Laozi describes his notion in opposite ways, “No disaster is worse than being discontented” (ch. 46), and “He who is satisfied with his lot is rich” (ch. 33). More important, only those who are with “empty/clean heart” are able to contemplate and approach to Dao.
4. Law of paradox
Laozi maintains that every phenomenon has its contrary, and at the point of ultimate development, will transform into its reverse. Ofcourse this is the foundation of yinyang theory, also exemplified in the Yijing. Laozi suggests that the average person usually recognizes as valuable only the superficial or so-called good or yang aspects, for instance:
- - being
- - happiness
- - hardness
- - highness
But Laozi emphasizes the deep or often called bad or yin aspects, such as:
- - non-being
- - suffering
- - softness
- - lowliness
As non-being gives birth to being, happiness may change into suffering, softness can overcome hardness (as dripping water wears through rock), and lowliness is the basis of highness. As such in comparison with the teachings of Huangdi, we see that Acupuncture is a typical paradox of harm and benefit. Needling is injurious, but its effect is beneficial. As Laozi says:
"When doing harm, there may be benefit; on the contrary, when doing beneficial, there may be harm. Other people instruct me, so I will teach others" (ch. 42).
With this doctrine in mind, nobody will refuse the minor injury of needling in order to achieve the major benefit of curing disease.
The Daodejing acquired its “classic” status in the Western Han dynasty (206 BC-24 AD). According to Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shiji, 49.5b), the Empress Dowager Dou, wife of Wendi and mother of Jingdi (r. 156-141 BC), was a dedicated student of the Daodejing. Later sources add that it was Jingdi who chose the doctrines of Dao instead of those of the Legalists as their ruling ideology. Politically, Daoism advises rulers to engage in wuwei. This philosophy is completely opposite to that of the Legalists. We see the current Chinese government often practice Wuwei. It started reform and increasing the national BPG, but also a process of creating international dependency. After China has gained prominence it is so more easy to let nations follow your wishes. You don’t need to talk much to get your way. We see that the adoption of Daoism as the State ideology of the Western Han Dynasty not only alleviated class contradictions but also promoted the development of natural sciences and Waidan alchemical practice -the making of immortality pills, and therefore the practice of medicine with ingestible substances, eventually leading to the production of the herbal works by Tao Hongjing as part of systemizing the teachings of Shangqing Daojiao in the Ben Cao Jing.