Taoism 3
In an effort to decide how I wanted to approach this paper, I decided to search the Internet to see what today's world held for me on the matters of Chinese Philosophy. One quote describing Chuang Tzu, the topic of my research paper, stuck out. In describing what this person thought was the overlying teachings of Chuang Tzu he stated, "The individual could attain mystical unity with this One by achieving complete emptiness or hs� -a timeless state free of worries or selfish desires, open to impressions but transcending all individual material objects." This is what truly made the biggest impression on me from our seminar class. Now, I know that in the beginning of the class we were ...
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believe this, but some of Chuang Tzu's arguments have either made me strongly agree with what he was teaching, or go into the opposing view and really make me want to seek out more to life, than just my surroundings.
As a philosopher, Chuang Tzu has been under attack from the beginning. It has been said that "scholars at the time could neither figure out what to do with him nor overlook his caustic attack on their root assumptions."(Wu, 2) He has been misunderstood from the beginning. Critics are always condemning him, and not fully understanding what he is trying to hear. His critics can be often heard describing him as a "skeptic, nihilist, fatalist, relativist, and even an evolutionist...In other words, Chuang Tzu is a queer mystical negativist, an obscure prankster, who is not worth taking seriously." (Wu, 2)
Chuang Tzu from the beginning effected me greatly and made the world around me seem different. His teachings helped me understand a lot of the emotions that I had been ...
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things that is beyond them. This quote about the little quail states that the quail is perfectly happy in his own world, content in his belief that he lives the best possible way, and that anyone who reaches outside of that realm is foolish, that nothing could possibly be better than what he knows. This seems ignorant to me. Why should people stay within what they know, why shouldn't they strive like Peng to fly as high as they can, and travel to distant lands, nothing should seem unconquerable? This is where I find some weakness in his teachings. He sees this pride of not trying to go further as a positive thing, as in his quote "Therefore a man who has wisdom enough to fill one ...
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