Tao Te Ching

Keeping it completely honest, I gleaned just about nothing from the Tao Te Ching as a standalone text. I read some more about the border Daoist religion and the historical context of the Tao Te Ching, and I still felt pretty darn confused. Here’s what I got:

We should follow the Way (Tao/Dao), but the Way is indefinable: “A Way called Way isn’t the perennial Way.”

The Way is actually too simple to understand: “My words are so simple to understand and so easily put into practice that no one in all beneath heaven understands them.”

If you think you know something, you’re probably wrong and it’s the opposite of what you think: “Great perfection seems flawed, but its usefulness never falters. Great fullness seems empty, but its usefulness never runs dry.”

We can only really understand things through their counterparts: “All beneath heaven knows beauty is beauty only because there’s ugliness, and knows good is good only because there’s evil.

And we’re never going to get anywhere if we don’t stop trying so hard: “Work and things and you ruin them; cling to things and you lose them” and “If you aren’t free of yourself, how will you ever become yourself?”

I don’t know. Taoism/Daoism seems like that emo kid who just wants to contradict everyone just so they can say “nobody understands me”.

Book author: Laozi