who is tao? by Jane english, PAGES

Jane English - excerpts from the Introduction to the book, A Rainbow of Tao

Here in the West, language structures our world into objects and actions. We have nouns and we have verbs. Among the nouns we make a distinction between the “whats” and the “whos,” between inanimate things and living beings.

Translations from Chinese usually treat Tao as a noun; however, Tao cannot be so neatly categorized. It is both noun and verb; it is neither noun nor verb. Nor is it easily classified either as a “who” or as a “what.”

A defining statement of our Western culture is found in the Gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word . . .”

Yet Tao Te Ching begins with a starkly contrasting line that roughly translates as,

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao.”

Mindful of the paradox of using words and images to approach Tao, I invite you to enter this book with a spirit of adventure. Explore with me this Tao that has over the past few decades come from the Far East into our Western world.

When I first heard of Tao, I did not know what the word meant. Having now lived more years of my life with Tao Te Ching than I did without knowing of it, I still have difficulty defining Tao.

Sometimes it is written as Dao rather than Tao. The correct pronunciation is said to happen when you place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth partway between the “t” position and the “d” position. The sound then produced has no equivalent in the English language, but is close to the Chinese sound.

During the fifty years since Gia-fu Feng and I created our version of Tao Te Ching, the awareness of Tao has made its way into all corners of our culture, as evidenced by the proliferation of books whose titles begin with “The Tao of . . .” The first such book I knew of was The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, which I encouraged the British publisher of our Tao Te Ching to publish, even though it had by 1974 been rejected by a dozen other publishers. After that came my friend John Heider’s book, The Tao of Leadership, followed by The Tao of Pooh and others.

Out of curiosity I googled “The Tao of” and came up with over thirty books, a true rainbow of Tao.

Why is Tao suddenly so popular? What treasures does this Tao from the Far East bring to our Western culture?

The only way I can attempt to answer this with integrity is to show you some of my own experience with Tao, which I offer first with words in this introduction, then with a dance of my images and words along with text from Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tsu, and finally with the story of how Gia-fu and I made our books.

Then you, the reader, can notice where this resonates in your own being, can see what is awakened in you. Each of us must find Tao in our own unique way.

My Journey with Tao

As a child I felt at home with nature in the woods and fields behind our house and, though I couldn’t put words to it, with the vast realm of spirit toward which the huge elm by the house seemed to point. The human realm was more problematic. The rightangled human-made form of the house was both a safe haven where I slept, ate and played, and a limitation on nature and spirit. This ambivalence seems to be essential to human existence, the ongoing dance of freedom and constraint in the three worlds spoken of in traditional Chinese writings: heaven, human and nature.

One seemingly small event that had a large influence on my life was my picking up a copy of a book by Alan Watts in the late 1960’s during the years I was

doing graduate work in physics. In this book I found discussions of various Eastern mystical traditions and was struck by the same paradoxical logic I had found in my undergraduate quantum physics texts. I read every book I could find by Watts and participated in an informal course on mysticism. I also bought a small paperback copy of Tao Te Ching.

One day as I was reading a book by Watts, something fell apart. I realized that I could not find a resolution to my confusion in that book, or in any book. I tossed the book across the room in frustration! I didn’t know what to do.

In retrospect, I see that what I did was to increase my photographic work and my inner explorations. I sensed that the answer to my confusion was in nature and within myself.

While I was with Gia-fu during the early 1970s, I photographed intensively, delighting in creativity, my own and nature’s. I was young and did my photographing in innocence.

I especially liked creating photographs that teetered on the boundary between being and non-being — tree branches that delicately merge with the sky, fog almost obscuring a mountain, details of shells or grass that are almost unrecognizable. For me this was a way to go beyond the too-static “thingness” of ordinary consciousness. It was a doorway to a vastness that felt like my native land.

I was reaching for a truth that seemed to reside in nature. Perhaps I believed that what I was searching for could be photographed. Through my photography I was intuitively going beyond words. I was seeing the ineffable, sometimes called Tao, through nature.

Tao confounds the adversarial mind and is friend to ambiguity. —natalie ednie

yes, this is a color photo! -- the pond behind my Vermont home