Taoism Responses

1. Where Taoism remains much different from other religions is that, in the early stages of the religion, they did not work to spread their faith to other people. Other faiths, Christianity and Islam come to mind; spend much of their efforts on mission trips to spread the word of their faith to new territories (The Crusades could be thought of as just a very long and violent mission trip).

2. The Tao, for me, is not Taoism’s version of a God, but rather their recognition that there is a force greater than us in this universe, which could be the universe itself. They do recognize that there is a certain order to the world that we see demonstrated in nature that exists without human intervention, and they take this to be a reason for us to believe that there is a way to the universe that does not revolve around us.

3. I always am amused whenever I see a running class on “how to run with proper chi”, because chi is simply the way your body was designed to move. The Taoists simply attached a name to it, but chi in the western world is simply attempting to live as healthy as a lifestyle as possible.

4. No, I don’t believe that anything magical or mystic can be man created – if it is really so magical, then how can a human control it? If there is such a thing as miracles, they don’t come from man and cannot be harnessed by them, because then they would just be a resource and not a true miracle.

5. The literal translation of Wu Wei is “without action.” To me, this means that one cannot actively pursue Wu Wei and one’s Chi and find it – you will find it without finding it. It might not make a lot of sense, but the more you search for it the harder it will be to find; it must come naturally and without much thought or pressure.

6. Yin and Yang are the opposites in found in every living and nonliving thing that creates a balance in this world. To define masculine as the positive and feminine as the negative is, I think, simply a reflection of the time when Taoism was founded and that those who decided to follow Lao Tzu likely lived in a male dominated society and wanted to present themselves as a positive influence. This likely deterred women from taking up Taoism, and I honestly believe it would be ok to describe the negative and positive traits as just that, and not have to assign masculinity or feminism to either.

7. One’s background and perspectives will affect what is right and wrong in every life; there are no set good or evil actions, and every good action will have some negative to it and every negative action will have some positive to it.

8. In a running book, that I read once, a description of how training and progression was made. I can’t quote the book exactly, but it read something like: “most people think that training and progress is a straight line up. I like to think of it as a never ending spiral; some parts will bring you down only to bring you even farther than you were before. Sometimes you’ll train your butt off and not make progress, and other times you will do hardly anything and make progress.” I think the same concept applies to life. Sometimes you will be moving backwards, sometimes you will be moving forwards, but you will always be moving, and the goal is to finish more forward than when you started.

9. No, Taoism is the most “chillaxed” religion that I know of.