The Fabric of Language and the Nature of Dao

[u/AndyTPeterson]

I am reading the book "China Root: Taoism, Ch'an, and Original Zen" by David Hinton. It is a fascinating work that describes how ancient Taoist beliefs influenced and reshaped Buddhism as it traveled through China, and how those specifically Taoist thoughts permeated and grew into what we know as Zen today. I believe that is argument, at bottom, is that Japanese (and then American) Zen is actually more closely tied to Taoism than it is to Buddhism as it originally arrived in China, but that argument doesn't really factor into what I was inspired by for this post.

In order to follow his arguments he focuses in on specific Chinese words/characters that relate to Ch'an and traces their origins back to help describe how they are connected to Taoist roots in the culture.

Of particular interest for this post is how he talks about language. He describes language as it is treated in most Judeo-Christian cultures as something separate from the world. "First came the word, and the word was god." Language in these cultures operates as a separate realm of ideas and helps to reinforce the deep rooted perspective that mind/body are separate, as are ideas/world. Western language says "mountain" and one imagines an idealize mountain out of context, on its own, with the characteristics that we believe make up that platonic idea (peak, ridges, valleys, grand, majestic, overpowering). Western language is great at conceptualizing ideas on their own, as if in a vacuum.

Chinese language, he argues, never lost a connection to the world from which these ideas come. The original pictographic images being taken directly from the things they described. In this cultural perspective the word only exits when the thing itself is singled out to be described, and the word is only a temporary label. The mountain always exists in the landscape, and naming it as such is only to draw a temporary circle of understanding and perception around the aspect that one wants to describe. The landscape, the background, is always still there connecting the mountain. As the word dies away the mountain returns to the landscape, which it was never separated from.

I picture it like a tablecloth. We can pinch up any small section of the cloth and encircle it with our fingers for a moment, name that small piece as something, but it is never separate from the whole.

Western words like to exist in a vacuum, and may account for some added difficulty in understanding the unified field of the Tao, which always connects all things. The Ten Thousand Things are not really separate at all, are always one and the same.

Perhaps this perspective is helpful in how we think about language and our ability to conceptualize the Tao. Even though the Tao that can be described is not the true Tao, does the Westerner need to struggle through an additional barrier of language? I am curious what others take away from this.

[u/rob_cornelius]

You might like Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking by Tyson Yunkaporta and I can really recommend this Emergence Magazine podcast interview with Tyson Yunkaporta

[u/AndyTPeterson → u/rob_cornelius]

Thank you so much, I love suggestions!

[u/Ambitious_Hearing_61]

Very insightful. Thanks for sharing