Some Ways to Understand Dao: The Universe and Nature
If you haven’t gone and read at least a few chapters of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), you probably should do that right now before reading this article. There are a few free translations available at this website to get you started: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/_index.html
If you trust me to give you my personal understanding after studying, practicing, and living Daoist philosophy in my everyday life, then I’ll give you my Cliff’s Notes version of Dao.
First off, I wouldn’t call Dao the Eastern equivalent of what we call “God” in the Judeo-Christian view. I also would say that “Eastern” can be deceptive as it’s distinctly Chinese here, as the Indian and Vedic views are also quite different but have some concepts that the similar terminology used between Vedic, Daoist, and Judeo-Christian metaphysical views allow us to glean a little understanding amidst the muddle.
So let’s begin with what Dao is not: Dao isn’t a personification or deity that you worship—it is closer to the vast and mysterious universe that we are ever exploring and learning about, whether we send astronauts into space or we look under the microscope on our planet.
Sometimes, I use Universe and Dao interchangeably when trying to talk about the strange forces that guide us and influence our lives that feels as spiritual as Carl Sagan does when talking about the beauty of existence and reality, or even how proud Atheist Richard Dawkins feels reality is far more interesting than other-worldly fantasies pushed by religions that he sees as equivalent to Middle-Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works or Camelot of Arthurian legend.
At the same time, Dao is a living thing. It is alive in what I would describe as a perfect system that has a particular way of working, which, at its base form, Dao is something like your body’s immune system and an ecosystem in nature. If you skin your knee when you fall down while playing football, your immune system responds by sending white blood cells to fight off possible infections and platelets to close up the wound. This is a programed response, and likewise, there is cause and effect with how the Dao works, but it isn’t necessarily karma as taught in Vedic philosophy, although karma can be included in Dao as all is part of the Dao.
For an ecosystem, you have many organisms amongst the flora and fauna living together and creating equilibrium, such as plants for herbivores to eat and predators who feed on the herbivores. In this video about wolves in Yellowstone National Park:
A wolf pack was introduced and it fundamentally changed the environment. Due to the lack of predators, the herbivores were causing an imbalance due to the fact that they were overeating and resulted in less vegetation. Once the wolves came and helped control the population, it led to the return of many plants and trees, which in turn attracted more berries and bugs, then led to birds being attracted to the environment, and later on, attracted far more species, which the video expands on a lot more and is quite beautiful to see.
Daoism is very much a philosophy derived from the study of and meditations on nature, and so when one appreciates nature, one starts to get a handle on Dao, so long as they pull back and understand that what happens in the microcosmic universe also happens in the macrocosmic universe—that is to say, there is a perfect and natural response to everything that happens in the universe.
All things came from One, which is Dao, and the Dao is in all things, much like atoms and quarks are the Legos of our universe—which makes a lot more sense than some people who like to describe Dao as being analogous to the Force in Star Wars, which isn’t totally wrong, but it also focuses too much on what causes people to either be turned off by or become attracted to what is a fundamentally incorrect way to characterize Dao.
Like we discussed in an earlier post about demystifying Dao, there are times when exploring the mystery of Dao is fun, like the Force in Star Wars, but there are other times when you get too technical, the details confuse you and are not fun—especially if those details are outright wrong, just like the idea of the Force being midichlorians ruined what the Force was for some of us!
So what we can understand from this then is that Dao is a vast thing that is found throughout the cosmos, but it is also right there inside you. A poet or a spiritual person may see this as analogous to divinity like one sees God in all things and that they are made of God (or at least Christians might see it this way), a physicist repeats the idea that these are the atoms and quarks in the universe, and a biologist will see that we are the billions of cells and systems that make up our body.
A Zen story I enjoy talks about how a student asks his teacher how the essence of the entire universe can fit into a tiny sesame seed while the sesame seed also exists in the universe, and the teacher simply says that it’s about the same as how the student can fit so many books from a vast library into his tiny little head while also sitting inside the library.
Another one that really captures the essence of Dao: when a wave asked another wave what will happen to it when it reaches the shore and disperses, fearing that it will cease to exist, the other wave laughed and said that the wave is actually a very small part of something greater: the ocean. When it remembers this, it smiles with delight and knows that it was never separate, so it had nothing to fear.
One final aquatic story about how we know about Dao in the universe is the same way that fish don’t know that they live in water even if they are living in it their whole lives.
Thinking of all of these ideas to look at the vast but very simple thing that is Dao, it is not something that is terribly difficult to wrap your minds around, instead, Dao is a part of your every day life—you just don’t think about it that much because you’re living in it!