The Dujiangyan Dam

In the 20thcentury DDJ became much more accessible to westerners because there are high thinkers most of them started to paying attention to Chinese thinking Now there is one who has a big name and very hard to read German,the philosopher, Martin Heidegger who discovered the DDJ and revolutionized his thinking He was against western philosophy He said Westerners just try to think with their minds not with their whole person they do not look at the way people actually live He said we are thrown into this world we have to make sense of it And how do we do it not by understanding it with our mind so he rejects all the ancient Greek and western philosophers who have originated from the Greek saying life is not rational my friends.

life is a matter of surviving and thriving as best we can So we have to invent and reinvent ourselves Actually The Daoist philosopher would say we have to transform ourselves We have to keep changing we have to keep adapting And what we adapt to is the large forces of the Dao by paying attention to the Dao And it is significant that Martin Heidegger has actually used the key concepts of the DDJ for his work For instance, in his old age he came to hate not just dislike but hate that product of modern rationality, western rationality called technology We are all in the modern world we all love technology we are using it today, right But Heidegger said this was very dangerous It is taking away our most human qualities And I think I believe to him For instance he said look at the old technology, windmills as in the Netherlands they work with wind you can see the wind moving through them, right But he said look what is happening to the rivers a huge river Look at Yangtze you build the Three Gorges Dam the Yangtze is not any more the great mother of China it is now providing energy It is no longer a river it is a provider of technology for human beings That he said has corrupted our notion of what Dao is, what the river is because we have transformed it into a human machine instead of a huge force that nourishes China like the mother for centuries So he would not approve the present Three Gorges Dam but he would approve of this wonderful Chinese waterworks very ancient, at Dujiangyan.