Dry Ice Factory

As it acts in the world, the Tao
is like the bending of a bow.
The top is bent downward;
the bottom is bent up.
It adjusts excess and deficiency
so that there is perfect balance.
It takes from what is too much
and gives to what isn't enough.

Those who try to control,
who use force to protect their power,
go against the direction of the Tao.
They take from those who don't have enough
and give to those who have far too much.

The Master can keep giving
because there is no end to her wealth.
She acts without expectation,
succeeds without taking credit,
and doesn't think that she is better
than anyone else.

-- Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

'Evolving simultaneously with these various currents of thought was that represented by the text presented here, the school known as Taoism. Like many of the other schools, it looked back to an ideal age in the past, but one that predated the dawn of Chinese history and written culture, a kind of dream of Neolithic simplicity and innocence. Addressing the ruler, as did many of the thinkers of the period, the Taoists counseled him to spurn both the earnest moral strivings of the Confucians and Mo-ists and the harsh and meddlesome measures of the Legalists and instead to adopt a policy of inaction, or laissez-faire. Speaking to the ordinary men and women of these troublous times [in the Warring States period], the Taoists instructed them how to survive by crouching low and keeping out of the line of fire. What in particular sets the Taoists apart from the other schools of philosophy is the marked strain of mysticism and quietism that underlies so much of their thought, a strain that seems to reach far back into the roots of Chinese culture. It is this strain that in a Taoist text such as the Tao Te Ching engenders its most potent symbols: water, darkness, the valley, the female, the babe.'

-- Burton Watson, introduction to Tao Te Ching (Shambhala Publications, 1993)

'Hereditary time is time structured in generational tiers: Confucian time, historical time, heavenly time, calendrical time. Dao time is seasonal and cyclical, collapsed into the dead and the living, and so past generations cannot reach across the limit of their life spans to affect the living generations, who have unmediated access to the Way. "[T]he ghosts of the dead shall have no force" (stanza 60). Having no parent, the Way is not parental and expects no ritual offering from its offspring. They have no debt to repay to a Dao that did them no favor in creating them. Neither does the Way reward or punish. "Heaven and earth refuse kin-kindness: / Treating all things as dogs of straw" (stanza 5). The Way is thus a concept devised to oppose and subordinate the traditional concept of a heaven reciprocally engaged with authorized descendants or, more broady, with human affairs.'

-- Moss Roberts, introduction to his translation of Laozi's Dao De Jing - The Book of the Way