Tao

Tao (Dao, 道, “Way”) is the central term of classical Chinese philosophy — developed most fully in the Daodejing attributed to Laozi and in the writings of Zhuangzi — and carries a semantic range no single English word can render: the Way of the cosmos, the path by which things come to be what they are, the originating principle behind all manifestation, the ground that is not itself a thing.

The opening line of the Daodejing — “the Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao” — names the fundamental apophatic register: the Tao is not an object of knowledge but the condition under which the knowable arises. The twin principles of yin-yang — receptive and creative, dark and light, soft and hard — are the two modes through which the Tao moves in the phenomenal world, and the sixty-four hexagrams of the [[i-ching-wilhelm-baynes|Yijing]] are the schematic of the Tao’s temporal configurations. For Jung, the encounter with the Tao through Richard Wilhelm‘s translations — the [[i-ching-wilhelm-baynes|I Ching]] and the [[secret-of-the-golden-flower|Secret of the Golden Flower]] — was one of the decisive moments in the formation of his mature psychology. See yin-yang and wang-bi.

Tao

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