[SA]
"Like Confucianism, Daoism was not solely a
philosophical system. In an interesting historical
accident, by the early third century B.C.E, perhaps
because the Daodejing had been drafted into the
service of Legalist thinkers arguing against the
Confucian model of statecraft, Laozi came to be allied
with Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, who was said to have
brought humankind not only military, magical, and
medical arts, but also statecraft modeled on objective
patterns in nature, not subjective morality. Thus, in
spite of the Zhuangzi's explicit denunciation of the
Yellow Emperor, late-Han Daoism came to be associated
with medicines, magic, spirit travel, and alchemy - an
association that persisted in and became a driving
force of the religious dimension of Daoism that
developed from the second century C.E. onward."
You see Krimel, if I'm not correct fill me in,
but I see you as Zhuangzi in this instance. Your
trying to uphold the Daoist tradition that Zhuangzi
and Laozi saw. You might disagree with Laozi and/or
Zhuangzi on certain issues, I don't know, but in this
instance above Zhuangzi (an originator of Daoism) saw
the legist and the Yellow Emperor as taking Daoism
somewhere Zhuangzi disagreed with. I don't know all
the details on this issue, but it would seem Zhuangzi
pointing at the daodejing saying to the Yellow Emperor
something along the lines of this helps relate daoism,
and the religious connotation that became associated
with daoism is something Zhuangzi was explicitly
against (again, there may be certain aspects of this
religious daoism that holds some goodness, I'm not
sure, but Zhuangzi was getting at something here).
[Krimel]
I am not very familiar with Taoist history and your use of the new fangled
spellings doesn't help. I assume you are talking about Chuang Tzu and Lao
Tzu. Chuang Tzu is usually described as Lao Tzu's St. Paul. In any case the
conflict you refer to is a common one so I am not surprised to hear that it
afflicted the Taoists. Pirsig mentions it in the conflict of the priests and
the Brujo. I have brought it up several times in the conflict between Jesus
and the Scribes. It si a running theme in the Old and New Testaments as the
rabbis and prophets of the northern kingdom fought it out with the priestly
class who claimed a monopoly on religious practices. The conflict between
the law written on paper and the law written on the heart is a common one it
would seem.
[SA]
These "what if" games, are these projections,
rationals that help encourage certain perspectives,
but are not to be taken too literal?
[Krimel]
Indeed! The search for truth is in some sense the quest for better
metaphors.
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