The Yijing Process Cosmology: The interpretive context (Part 1)

One very interesting thing

that we can say about the Dao De Jing is that the Dao De Jing has a philosophy of war. That it’s born in the Warring States period, and war is a very important issue during that time. But the strategy that the Dao De Jing has about war is that in the human experience,

maybe we can’t avoid war, and so we have to be prepared for war. But we also have to recognize that warfare is always a losing proposition. In this way, there’s—many scholars think that the Dao De Jing is influenced by the Sun Zi Bing Fa, by the Sun Bin Bing Fa That the way of thinking about warfare in these two texts is very similar.

That warfare is Bu De Yi That it’s something that we have that we can only appeal to as a final result, as a last resort, and then if we have to go to war, what we have to do is we have to still strive to minimize our losses and maximize our opportunity for restoring peace and tranquility in the world. And so even when it comes to something like warfare, this idea, this fundamental idea of He of optimizing the human experience, of maximizing the creative possibilities of the human experience, is central to the text. The worldview that begins from the discrete individual, individualism, the ideology of individualism asks the what question because we are nouns.

We are Ming Ci That and so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to find we’re trying to answer the question, “What is it to be a human being? What is the essence of being a human being?’’ But when we translate the Dao De Jing, the world of the Dao De Jing, we have to move from nouns to gerunds, from Mingci to Dongmingci that the human being is a gerund. Like in the English language, a gerund is always ends with an –ing. We’re not persons. We’re person-ing. The Dao is not a way. The Dao is way making. How do we make our way in the world?

And so to translate a worldview, a culture that is grounded not in a notion of a transcendent, perfect God, not in some antecedent metaphysical principles but rather in the book of changes, the Yijing The Yijing is the first among the Chinese classics and all of the traditions, the Daoist tradition, the Confucian tradition, the Buddhist tradition, really goes back to the basic ideas underlying the Dao De Jing. And the idea underlying the Dao De Jing is not natural science.

It’s not that the human being should try to understand a world that is independent of the human experience in some objective way but rather the challenge of the book of changes like the Dao De Jing is how can the human being use a vocabulary of images to find the best way for the human experience to coalesce with the natural, with the historical, with the cultural world. And so, there are many senses in which we can read the Dao De Jing as being derived from a way of thinking or at least being an extension of a way of thinking that we find in the book of changes, in the Yijing