Life, Liberty & the pursuit of Happiness

By way of an exploration of Taoist notions of Life, Liberty & Happiness, Sam Crane offers us something like a Taoist 4th of July. Beginning with "Life":

As for Life, the "Te" (or "De" in the Pinyin transliteration) of the Tao Te Ching, denotes the integrity of each thing in the larger context of Way (Tao). As such, I take it to imply a recognition of the value of each thing in itself, each life in itself ...

For "Liberty," he draws from Burton Watson's introduction to the Chuang Tzu, which emphasizes the theme of freedom in this classic Taoist text:

"Freedom" here means, for Watson, "free yourself from the world," but it is not incompatible with other notions of political liberty that might be celebrated in the US today. For Chuang Tzu, governments should not interfere in our pursuits of freeing ourselves from the world.

For "Happiness" he points to the humor of Chuang Tzu, and the happiness of a life lived via the principles of wu wei:

... we might find happiness precisely in that process of detaching ourselves from worldly worries and desires and embracing "nothing's own doing" (wu wei).

I love this translation of wu wei as "nothing's own doing"!

Almost As Good As Fireworks

Booster Engines & Causeless Happiness
Aimless Wandering
Space Travel

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