Nature - The Way of the Tao

Cheung Lap had the following article in his Hong Kong Economic Journal column on 25 February 2009.

When the pendulum swings right, it embodies and saves energy to swing to the left. At the highest point in the right, it turns toward the left. It does the same in the left and finally settles in the middle.

Let’s look at breathing. When we breathe in, we embody and save energy to breathe out. When we breathe in to the maximum, we breathe out. The Buddhists say when we breathe in and breathe out, we include the whole world.

Why do the Taoists, the Buddhists and the Confucians interpret the law of “opposite and complementary” from different angles? It is because the person who tries to attain religious virtue understands this rule of the universe through self practice. If the solar system has the process of “formation, solidification, corruption and destruction”, and the earth’s climate has “spring, summer, autumn and winter”, then how can an individual, a race, an empire … escape this rule?

At its peak in the 19^th Century, the British Empire was described as the empire where the sun never set. At the end, the sun set. Upon the collapse of the empire of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, everyone thought that the pendulum of socialism had ended. Little did we know that when the United States became the single most powerful nation that could not be struck, it struck itself and the pendulum of history swung to the opposite direction.

An opposite force is hidden in any kind of force. Many people laugh at the middle way, considering it a useless, regressive philosophy. Little do they know that the vision of the wise men in the past surpassed victory or defeat and extremism, and was a thinking that transcended humanism. If there are reasons for a tree to exist for a hundred years, how can a race that has persevered for a few thousand years, died but is not dead, have nothing outstanding?

In the hundred odd years since the Opium War, the Chinese were struck to the point of silliness. They learned from the Communists and the West, tried this and tried that, until they discovered that the most practicable way was the way of their ancestors.

The Chinese Communist Party got its breath of life only when it returned to Chinese culture. This was the basis of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening. Get rid of any form, destroy any stubbornness, return to the natural state of things and follow “nature, the way of the Tao”. This is the core thinking of the Tao Te Ching.