What is the difference between the i ching and the tao te ching

Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Prev NEXT. Eastern Spirituality. Cite This! Print Citation. Try Our Crossword Puzzle! What Is the Missing Number? Try Our Sudoku Puzzles! More Awesome Stuff. The temptation is to grasp at something tangible in the endlessly deceptive simplicity of the words… It is the profound modesty of the language that offers what so many people for so many centuries have found in this book: a pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part.

Can you keep your soul in its body, hold fast to the one, and so learn to be whole? Can you center your energy, be soft, tender, and so learn to be a baby? Can you keep the deep water still and clear, so it reflects without blurring? Can you love people and run things, and do so by not doing?

Opening, closing the Gate of Heaven, can you be like a bird with her nestlings? Piercing bright through the cosmos, can you know by not knowing?

To give birth, to nourish, to bear and not to own, to act and not lay claim, to lead and not to rule: this is mysterious power. Taoists gain their ends without the use of means.

That is indeed a light that does not shine—an idea that must be pondered and brooded over. A small dark light. Le Guin explains:. Autocracy and oligarchy foster the beliefs that power is gained magically and retained by sacrifice, and that powerful people are genuinely superior to the powerless. Lao Tzu does not see political power as magic.

He sees rightful power as earned and wrongful power as usurped. He does not see power as virtue, but as the result of virtue. The democracies are founded on that view. He sees sacrifice of self or others as a corruption of power, and power as available to anybody who follows the Way. This is a radically subversive attitude. No wonder anarchists and Taoists make good friends. People who treated the body politic as gently as their own body would be worthy to govern the commonwealth.

In the twenty-fourth chapter, for instance, Lao Tzu writes:. Knowing other people is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom. Overcoming others takes strength, overcoming yourself takes greatness. Naming is the origin of all particular things. We're accustomed to perceiving our world and all the objects in it by naming them.

But what if we stop obsessively naming everything and instead just - pardon me while I slip in to full on hippy mode for a moment - rest in awareness? What the Tao Te Ching does, time and time again, is attempt to show us how we might see things if we could spend more time in awareness, and less in naming.

Perhaps if we were more aware, we would worry less, and could see better what actually needs doing. But the central thing the Tao Te Ching asks us to be aware of is not the world, but our self. We all know the term, but do we really know what it means? What would it be like to care for all things as much as we cared for our self? In the words of David Foster Wallace , whose literary philosophy is a natural mirror of Taoist thought, the default setting for people is to be "uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out".

Not because we are physically alone, as we know loneliness hits heaviest in crowds. But because we are mired in a deep-seated and near-universal delusion. Despite knowing that we are part of a vast universe, on a massively complex planet shared with seven billion other human lives, we continue with the truly insane perception that we are the centre of the world. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised. If you don't trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.

The Master doesn't talk, he acts. When his work is done, the people say, 'Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!