Creativity and Taoism, Chang Chung-yuan

• Carl Jung described the Tao as “the method or conscious way by which to unite what is separated.” He mentions the polarity of the conscious and subconscious, and how our lack of conscious understanding for our unconscious motivations cause much suffering. The path to self-enrichment must be done through a shining of conscious light on the unconscious, on the “union of opposites through the middle path, that most fundamental item of inward experience, which could respectably be set against the Chinese concept of Tao.”
• “When the artist reveals the reality concealed in things, he sets it free and, in turn, he liberates and purifies himself. This invisible process, fundamental to Chinese art, is the action of Tao.”
• The Chinese view bamboo as the symbol of a gentleman: upright and outward bearing, yet inwardly empty (humble)
• “My primordial nature has no liking for the life in the cities. To be free from the noise I build a little thatched cottage Far away in the depth of the mountains. Wandering here and there I carry no thought. When spring comes I watch the birds; in summer I bathe in the running stream; in autumn I climb the highest peaks; during the winter I am warming up in the sun. Thus I enjoy the real flavour of the seasons.”
• “Where things grow and expand that is k’ai; where things are gathered up, that is ho. When you expand you should think of gathering up and then there will be structure; when you gather up you should think of expanding and then you will have inexpressible effortlessness and an air of inexhaustible spirit.”
• “The wise follow the path of non-assertion and teach without words.”
• A Buddhist and Taoist idea is that “unity is within diversities and the particularity is identified with universality.” Interpenetration of one in all and all in one. One is all, all is one. Interdependence, inter-being.
• “The petal of a blossom never comes forth alone, but unimpededly takes in all related parts of the blooming tree and This petal must dissolve itself, thus entering into all and taking in all.” - Chang T’ai-yen
• “Why I like to divide things is because such division must be based on the totality of things. The creation of one rests upon the all. Why I dislike to complete things is because completeness means containing everything. Therefore it is isolated and self-sufficient, rejecting the relation to other things.” - Chuang Tzu
  • Notable divergence from some monotheistic thought, who claim their Gods are self-sufficient. Does self-sufficiency imply isolation? The God doesn’t need its constituents if it’s self-sufficient… Clearly, the Durkheim conception of god as society necessitates that Gods would be nothing without their worshippers (duh), but monotheistic have to do some inflating to make a case for a more formidable god.
• “The fishing net is used to catch fish; let us have the fish and forget the net. […] Words are used to convey ideas; let us have the idea and forget the words.”
• Chuang Tzu says “that which is one is one. That which is not one is also one.” Every number is contained in one, one, the singular whole, is the source of all things. This one is called T’ai Chi—or Tao.
• The Confucian Jen, or fellow-feeling, is a discriminatory kind of love. It orders whom we love by similarity—be affectionate towards family, love fellow people, and be kind to animals. But superiority and remoteness are correlated, so differentiating disconnects us from others and makes it more difficult to love.
• Tao means way or road, but its symbol is that of a road, below a head of a leader, and below that the foot of a follower. The symbol signifies a leader and follower united in finding their path.
• Opening line of Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told is not the real Tao and the name that can be named is not the real name.”
• “Those who speak do not know; Those who know do not speak.” - P’o Chü-i
• The uncarved block, P’o, means simple and plain, with no color or markings. The great unity. Men with P’o make no artificial effort towards morality or intellectual distinction. “He acts but does not appropriate; accomplishes but does not claim credit.”
• When one is transformed and at one with all multiplicities, he is not self-assertive but selfless, disappearing into all other selves. This makes one ignorant and obscure, losing oneself in the uncarved block.
• When we moralize and intellectualize, we divide the block, losing sight of the uncarved whole. “Only in the world of absolutely free identity does the great sympathy exist: the universal force that holds together man and all things.”
• The method of wen ta, or the Japanese mondo, used questions and answers to make an opening wedge in the personality through which enlightenment may pour.
• “If we speak of the one then the one becomes the object, with ourselves as the subject, and oneness exists no longer in its higher unity.”
• Lao Tzu claims the losing method is how to attain quietude, notably “The student of knowledge learns day by day. The student of Tao loses day by day.” This is also known at gradual attainment in Buddhism
• “The wild geese fly across the long sky above. Their image is reflected upon the chilly water below. The geese do not mean to cast their image on the water; Nor does the water mean to hold the image of the geese.” Eighth century Chinese poem. Our minds mirror Tao, reflecting the here-now of creation. Deliberate thought muddies the reflection, distorting it. This is what is meant by no-thought: the mind’s clear and pure reflection of Tao.
• Ch’i is a material cause, matter and energy. Li is an immaterial cause, a plan that organizes ch’i into a coherent and meaningful whole. “Before the cart, or the ship, exists, there already exist the principles of their being. Invention, thus, is merely the discovery of existing principle.”
• The image of the geese reflected on the water is done completely without intention. “Such spontaneous reflection is the creativity of the Tao.”
• The creativity aspect of Tao is that it contains the potential to unfurl all outcomes, and as such contains all multiplicity of possibilities into a single unity. It is the great mother.
• “Sympathy moves from all to one, creativity moves from one to all.”
  • Sympathy is like awareness to relationship? Creativity unfurls relationship?
• Chinese buddhists: “The lion with all his hairs, taken together, is at the same time found within a single hair.” Kuo Hsiang: “A man is born but six feet tall. …However insignificant his body may be it takes a whole universe to support it.”
  • Unity within multiplicity
• The Zen who, lifting his finger, perceives the universe to move with it. “The lifting of a finger is the slightest of gestures, but when it is viewed from the vantage point of the absolute moment it generates the power of the divine and blossoms into creative vitality.”
• “The Sages contemplate ten thousand years and conceive them as a pure complete oneness.” - Chuang Tzu
  • Talks of change and changelessness. This quote represents the changeless. Kind of like the boundary of the whole remains changeless, but its internal landscape always moves.
• Interfusion and identification between self and nonself is the source of all potentialities. “When man is in this creative process he is truly egoless: as egoless as the Moon and the stars.”
• Confucianism sees an emphasis on rationality and analysis as a route towards enlightenment, working with effortful conscious knowledge to gain an understanding through differentiation, dividing the world into parts and understanding those parts
• Taoism sees an emphasis on unconscious effort, intuition, believing that discrimination obscures the truth. “According to the Taoists the analysis of things succeeds only in separating object analyzed and subject analyzer. When the analyzer and the analyzer are two, the ego persists in its function of differentiating and prevents the emergence of the great self […] The Taoist sees the ego as a hard core, which can be broken only by the energy of the unconscious, which penetrates it, turns it inside out.”
• “Those who can reflect freely and purely as nature reflects the passing moods of the day are those who have achieved the light of Tao as the great creativity.”
• Walk across the river without wetting one’s feet. We flow through a river of experience, Tao, but to connect with Tao we mustn’t attach ourselves to it, we mustn’t wet our feet. To feel the action of the Tao requires non-action from within.
• While the picture in a painting may not be particularly beautiful, there is an expressive wholeness that overflows it and removes the mutually exclusive opposition between painting and observer. “Thus we throw our whole being into the beauty and move along with it.”
• “What [the painter] puts into his work comes out from it and flows over into our minds; and we recognize something which cannot be called intellectual only, sensuous only, or emotional only; it is wholeness of spirit which goes out, free and unafraid, into wholeness of universe.” - Laurence Binyon
• “Our habitual mind is overdevoted to thought and analysis. Our thinking process tends to dissect reality in order to better understand it. Even though these dissections be reassembled into a whole, they can never regain their original inner unity. They are no longer part of the same oneness.”
• “It is only when oneness—‘one thought’—is reached that we have enlightenment. […] Intellection is necessarily dualistic because it always implies subject and object.”
• “To a man who has achieved the self of non-self, all music, whether from pipes or flutes or the wind through nature’s apertures, is heavenly music. But to the man who has not achieved this non-self, these sounds are still heard as the music of man and the music of earth.” - Yao-Nai
• “The genuine meaning in the fragrance of blossoms and the Patriarch’s teaching in the melodies of birds are there all the time. But a man whose mind is shut up is not aware of it. But a man whose mind is prepared will be awakened by the fragrance of the flowers and the melodies of the birds.”
• “To achieve the Middle Path one must free oneself from being and non being, life and death, construction and destruction.”
• “The third dhayana requires man to free himself from the two forms of nonatmaness (ego of persons and ego of things), in order to achieve oneness.”
  • We attribute egos to things too. But things are truly without ego, are empty. We label them based on the conditional emotions they provoke on us, but those labels are not real except in our consciousness. Same goes for people. For yourself. And we litter each of our selves with conditional emotional labels in the same way.
• “Be like the newly born calf, gazing but not seeking anything.” - Pei I
• Yoga, in Indian philosophy, is a way of samadhi (abstract meditation) and prajna (transcendental wisdom)
• “Let hearing stop with your ear, Let the mind stop with its images. Breathing means to empty oneself and to wait for Tao. Tao abides only in the emptiness. This emptiness is the fasting mind.”
  • The fasting mind.
• “A poem should not mean, but be!” - Archibald MacLeish
• “The writing of poetry is not primarily a cause of joy to the poet, rather the writing of poetry is joy.” - Heidegger
• The best poetry is a pure reflection of objective reality, like how water effortlessly reflects the image of geese flying overhead