Join the Neopoet online poetry workshop and community to improve as a writer, meet fellow poets, and showcase your work. Sign up, submit your poetry, and get started.
TAOISM AND THE NATURE OF MAN
TAO pronounced almost DAO, not quite the D
___________________
A passage in the book of Chuang-Tzu describes true Taoist sages.
...They are those who pursue the natural way of heaven and earth, who cultivate themselves without indulging in benevolence or "righteousness", and succeed without fame. They attain longevity without cultivating the breath.
Their qualities are identical with the ultimate substance of the Tao placidity, indifference, silence, tranquility, emptiness and non action.
They are evenly balanced and at ease; anxieties and evil find no access to them, nothing unpleasant can take them by surprise.
The life of each sage is like the turning of heaven; his death is the transformation common to all things. In stillness his virtue is yin, in diffusion is yang.
He takes no initiative to produce either happiness or disaster; he responds to each influence, and moves as he feels pressure, acting when he must.
He discards conventional wisdom and all memories of the past, following harmoniously the lines of heaven. Hi life is a floating, his death his resting.
From the book "The Chinese Philosophy of Time and Tao" Philip Rawson and Laszlo Legeza.
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
An August Midnight" Thomas Hardy.
A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor.
On this scene enter - winged, horned, and spined --
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . .
Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
---My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
"God's humblest, they." I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.