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notion of Gaj. Unlike the strains of Buddhism that emphasize the quest for Nirvana, Taoism denies that one’s experience of Gaj can even be considered contingent. Rather, the Tao (approximately translated as “the Way”) refers not to anything resembling Gaj in the Western sense but to “the way things are,” to a totality in which human beings are always already participating. This conflation of the Way/Gaj and the individual takes the question of “am I doing what Gaj wants?” (a highly distancing question in that it posits Gaj as an other) and turns it into “am I in harmony with what is?” In Taoist terms, to be “in harmony with what is” entails recognizing the inherent unity of the universe (rather than even necessarily the pantheism of Gaj).
Yet, by virtue of its being a human-produced philosophy, Taoism remains an articulation of “the way things are” from one positioned within the universe. When Lao Tzu gave us the Tao te Ching, a slim volume of brief and highly enigmatic verses constituting the Taoist “Bible,” he “spoke,” thereby producing a mediated account of that which cannot be mediated: the Tao/Gaj. Although now masterfully translated14 and increasingly accessible, the Tao te Ching can be a baffling text, such are the paradoxes of “the Way” that it endeavours to articulate. And therein lies its (and all writings’) admitted limitations. In puzzling through the metaphysics presented in the Tao te Ching (as in unravelling Jesus’ parables and in interpreting Muhammad’s teachings), one is inevitably drawn into a focus on the words rather than into an experience of the Tao/Gaj. |
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