I'm giving a talk on 'going with the flow' tomorrow evening, some of which comes out of my thinking around Taoism and the questions that asks of Pureland Buddhism. That raised some thoughts which I thought I'd share here.
The Tao is the mother of Heaven and Earth, and the ten thousand things, but it is not those things. It loves those things without possessing them. When things (and people) act naturally it leads to peace of mind, and being at ease. When we act against the Tao, it leads to trouble.
The natural world is seen to move with the Tao. Does this mean that without human interference (say) things will tend towards the direction of being at ease?
In systems theory, in the natural world, systems tend to move in the direction of, one the hand, homoeostasis, and on the other, into more efficient relationships with other systems (often through what appear to be unpredictable spontaneous changes. There are loops and disruptions, but as far as I know this is the sense of it.
This might mirror how things become more in tune with the Tao. We come to be at ease with our environment, and change often comes unexpectedly.
You could call this movement 'all things being loved'. Does that imply an inevitability about moving towards a state of ease? Certainly that we have access to it, if we stop defending against circumstance.
In Pureland Buddhism we know Amida loves us just as we are, and that the most we trust this, the more at ease we tend to be, regardless of circumstance. This sounds like a potential parallel.
However in Buddhism (Indian Buddhism, particularly) I have less sense of the whole world unfolding in this way - the natural order of things is one of impermanence and suffering - and the Buddha's light shines through that. So there is a different kind of duality here.
Which gives a different feeling, to me, between taking refuge in Amida, and acting in line with the Dao.
One way of resolving this is to understand Amida as a holy being coming to support us fools who can't become sages, but there might be other ways too.
What do you think?
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As I think Waley points out, different interpretations belong to different phases of history. The earliest phase of all this is probably the idea that there is the Way of Heaven and the ways of humans. Heaven, in China, originally simply meant the place where the ancestors (ti) live, under the rulership of the supreme ancestor (shang ti). To be a sage is to conform more to the former than the latter, but how is one to know what it is? This is where divination, mediumship, oracles of various kinds and the spirit journeys of shamans came in. As history progresses we see the idea growing that the Way of Heaven is no longer to be regarded as an expression of he whims of the ancestors and more and more the idea that "Heaven" is impersonal and can therefore be understood in terms of laws rather than less predictable but more humanly understandable interventions. Gradually, therefore, just as in the West, a more impersonal, quasi-scientific philosophy tends to take over. The Tao becomes some kind of univeral lawfulness in the universe rather than a matter of trying to understand that the ancestors are feeling neglected and that is why they have sent a plague so that more people die and go to join them, and so on.
Turning to the question of "going with the flow", whichever way one interprets the way of Heaven, we can see that there are two different types of flow that one might go with. If one goes with the flow that is the Tao of Heaven, then one is on the right track whereas if one goes with the flow that is one of the ways of humans, then one will get the kind of come-uppance that karma dictates. So, if we contrinue to muddle our cultural sources in this way, we can, maybe, say that when Shakyamuni Buddha says stand against the flow or cut across the current he is, perhaps, saying follow the Way of Heaven and not the ways of man.
So what is the role of Amida Buddha? Amida recognises that we are foolish beings caught up in the ways of man and rarely if ever really managing to follow the Way of Heaven, but he loves us anyway, and, perhaps, even more for our innocence and ineptitude, and so, as long as we are willing to let him do so, he comes and takes us to his Pure Land where we shall find learning all these hard lessons a lot more easy.
The Taijitu symbol expresses the dynamic equilibrium that fuels the Universe, is as you mention very similar to western Homeostasis concept, anything in the Universe tends to its minimum entropy state. The deep idea behind Tao is that Universe is one that becomes apparently dualistic, the dualism is the two faces of the same coin. We need to assume that nothing is pure, anything is yin in relation to something else but it can also be yang respect to another thing. So the moral is not fixed, depends on the given situation. It is the only way to justify the self-defense situations, a reason of the existence of the Taoist martial arts. My two cents
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