Wu Wei, Art Of Effortless Living, Alan Watts | Lecture
Hello and welcome to the audio download section and in this Lecture Alan Watts discusses the Teaching of Jesus Christ.
Alan Watts speaks about Taoism and its origins. He explains the philosophy of Tao as - The Tao is “The way of nature.” hence it is “The way”. The Dao de jing, which is the alternative spelling of the “Tao Te Ching,” The book of Tao, also refers to Tao as something that existed "Before Heaven and Earth," or another interpretation of the Tao is “The source,” or The Void, Nothing, Empty, Zero, or The Infinite. It is nothing but also the source of everything.
"When a fool hears about Tao, he just laughs and laughs. If he didn't laugh, it wouldn't be Tao." - Tao Te Chin
The spiritual ideal of wu-wei--literally "no doing," but better rendered as "effortless action"--in early Chinese thought. This concept of effortlessness, serves as a common ideal for both Daoist and Confucian thinkersand contains within itself a conceptual tension that motivates the development of early Chinese thought: the so-called "paradox of wu-wei," or the question of how one can consciously "try not to try."
Methodologically, this idea represents a preliminary attempt to apply the contemporary theory of conceptual metaphor to the study of early Chinese thought. Although the focus is upon early China, both the subject matter and methodology have wider implications. The subject of wu-wei is relevant to anyone interested in later East Asian religious thought or in the so-called "virtue-ethics" tradition in the West. Moreover, the technique of conceptual metaphor analysis--along with the principle of "embodied realism" upon which it is based--provides an exciting new theoretical framework and methodological tool for the study of comparative thought, comparative religion, intellectual history, and even the humanities in general.
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