The Dao

I am now going to begin my discussion of the Chinese model of nature known as the Dao.

The Dao is a model of nature that explores and explains the structure of the world as reflected through the grammar of the Chinese language.

The Dao is analogous to science and religion, which are 2 models of nature that explore and explain the structure of the world as reflected through the grammar of the English language.

English is a subdivided language, and the grammar of English reflects 2 completely different and seemingly completely incompatible models of nature. Chinese is a unified language, and the grammar of language reflects only 1, unified model of nature.

The goal of each of these models, religion, science,and the Dao, is to enable speakers of these languages to understand the nature of the world, and to become aware of relationships that exist in nature.

An exploration of the Dao, as we will do here, will not only help us to understand the beauty inherent within this model of nature, but it will also help us to understand English models of nature, science and religion, much more deeply. It will help us to expand our context of understanding, from the context of a single language group, the group that includes English, to a broader group that includes Chinese. Ultimately, we can broaden our context to include other representative languages of our species, and by understanding the similarities and differences in models of nature constructed by the various members of our entire species, as reflected through the grammars of the languages that our species has evolved to speak, we can come to understand ourselves at a much deeper level.

In this section of the blog, I will begin by presenting some background concepts that we can consider in order to set the stage for recognizing where our current understanding is now and the nature of the understanding that we hope to evolve to with a greater understanding of the Dao. We will examine and make explicit some of our current Western understandings that we take for granted, so that we can recognize the differences with the Chinese model when we encounter them. And then we will discuss the Dao, and see that although it is quite different from science or religion, it is quite profound and makes a lot of sense when examined in the isolated context of itself and the grammar of the Chinese language.