Where the Tao Comes From

[TaoSpring]

You know how in history, Taoism is often called the "Huang-Lao" school—"Huang" meaning the Yellow Emperor, the founding ancestor of Chinese civilization, and "Lao" meaning Laozi, the guy who left us the Tao Te Ching. Way back at the end of the Han dynasty, when Zhang Ling (the First Celestial Master) started the Taoist religion, he honored the Yellow Emperor as the original ancestor, Laozi as the Tao ancestor, and humbly took the title "teaching ancestor" for himself. And he put Laozi's Tao Te Ching right at the top, as the ultimate scripture.

So why do they lump Huang and Lao together like that? There's actually a pretty deep history behind it.

Chinese civilization runs way back. When people talk about where it all started, the first thing that usually pops into their head is the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. But culturally, there are four big, legendary books that go with them and the ones who came after—the San Fen, Wu Dian, Ba Suo, and Jiu Qiu.

Who were the Three Sovereigns? The human founders: Fuxi, Shennong (the Flame Emperor), and the Yellow Emperor. The books they left are called the San Fen. Why "fen"? It's got this vibe of dirt and stone. Back then, no printing, no bamboo slips—people carved important stuff right onto stone tablets or clay slabs. And in the ancient sense, "fen" also meant something huge, so the San Fen are books about the Great Way itself.

The Five Emperors? Shaohao, Zhuanxu, Gaoxin, Tang, and Yu. Their writings are the Wu Dian. "Dian" means standard or big volume. So the Wu Dian are books about the big truths, the regular way things work. The San Fen are about the Great Way that runs through heaven and earth; the Wu Dian are about the constant way down here—the rise and fall of things on the ground.

Now, one of those Five Emperors, Zhuanxu, he pulled off something huge. Like, world-changing huge. History calls it "Severing Heaven from Earth." He basically put up a permanent wall between the divine and the human. After that, gods didn't show up to people and people didn't see gods. Folks couldn't just touch the Great Way so easily anymore. So they had to go searching for it, poking around for clues. That's where the Ba Suo comes from—the Eight Explorations. The most famous part of that? The Yi, the Book of Changes. People trying to figure out the Way by tossing around those eight trigrams. That's where the Lian Shan of the Xia dynasty, the Gui Zang of the Shang, and even the Zhou Yi come from. And some people, well, they just started writing down what was happening in the human world. Back then, they divided the land into nine provinces—so they called those records the Jiu Qiu, the Nine Mounds.

These four collections—San Fen, Wu Dian, Ba Suo, Jiu Qiu—started coming together from Fuxi and the Yellow Emperor on down. They were treated like national treasures and passed along generation after generation. But since the Yellow Emperor was the one who unified the whole land, his influence back in those ancient times was off the charts. So out of the San Fen, the Yellow Emperor's Book just kept getting more and more famous. Eventually, people practically started using "Yellow Emperor's Book" to mean the whole San Fen. After Emperor Zhuanxu cut off heaven from earth, these four sets of books were locked up tight in the royal vaults, and regular folks weren't allowed to spread them around. That's how they got passed down.

According to the Lüshi Chunqiu: "When the Xia dynasty's Grand Historian Zhong Gu saw that King Jie had lost his mind, he grabbed the royal charts and laws and hightailed it to Shang. When Shang's Interior Historian Xiang Zhi saw that King Zhou had gone off the rails, he grabbed the royal charts and laws and hightailed it to Zhou." Fast forward to the Eastern Zhou, and the royal vault got its most famous librarian in all of history—Laozi. So it's a pretty safe bet that Laozi had read the full Yellow Emperor's Book as it existed back then.

Now, all four of those ancient books are long gone. Lost to time. A lot of people nowadays just assume the Tao Te Ching is all Laozi's own original thinking. But if you look at the scattered records about the Yellow Emperor's Book from other old texts and archaeology, you can see that a whole bunch of lines in the Tao Te Ching actually came straight out of that earlier work. Take Liezi, a Taoist guy who came right after Laozi. He definitely read the Tao Te Ching, right? But in his book Liezi, in the chapter "Heaven's Gifts," he quotes that famous line: "The valley spirit never dies; it is called the mysterious female. The gateway of the mysterious female is called the root of heaven and earth. Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there, yet use will never drain it." And he flat-out says, That's from the Yellow Emperor's Book.

Or check this out: at the Temple of Confucius in Qufu, there's this stone tablet with the Golden Man Inscription. That inscription is supposed to be one of six pieces from the ancient Yellow Emperor's Inscriptions. And the wording in it is really close to the Tao Te Ching. For example:

Golden Man: "Don't talk too much; too much talk brings failure." Laozi: "Too much talk brings exhaustion; better to hold to the center."

Golden Man: "The violent and aggressive don't die a natural death; the competitive always meet their match." Laozi: "The violent and aggressive don't die a natural death. I shall make this the basis of my teaching."

Golden Man: "The noble man knows he cannot be above the world, so he puts himself below; he knows he cannot be ahead of the crowd, so he follows behind." Laozi: "Therefore the sage puts himself last and yet is first; he remains outside and yet is preserved."

Golden Man: "Hold to the feminine and keep low; no one can surpass you." Laozi: "Know the masculine, but keep to the feminine."

Golden Man: "Though the river and sea are on the low left, they rule over all the streams because they are humble." Laozi: "The reason the river and sea can be king of a hundred valleys is that they excel at lying low."

Golden Man: "The Way of Heaven has no favorites, yet it can humble itself." Laozi: "The Way of Heaven has no favorites; it is always with the good person."

Later on, they dug up the Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor from the Mawangdui Han tombs, and it's got a lot of the same kind of language as the Tao Te Ching. A lot of experts think those Four Classics were actually part of the original Yellow Emperor's Book. But since that's still mostly guesswork, we can't say for absolute certain that the Four Classics came before the Tao Te Ching. It's just more supporting evidence.

So what we can see here is a straight line—one continuous cultural inheritance—from the ancient San Fen to the Yellow Emperor's Book, and then to the Tao Te Ching. This all went on until the Eastern Zhou dynasty, 516 BC. That's when Prince Chao grabbed the Zhou royal archives (probably including the Nine Tripod Cauldrons and a whole bunch of other national treasures) and tried to defect to the state of Chu. But his timing was terrible. King Ping of Chu had just died, and the whole place was a mess over who was gonna take the throne. So Prince Chao never even made it to the Chu capital. He got stuck around the Nanyang area, and when he was killed in 505 BC, those treasures were never handed over. No record of where they went. The best bet is they just gradually leaked out into the general public. Four years after Prince Chao died, Confucius himself got a look at the Zhou Yi, and he was like, "Man, if I had another few years, and if at fifty I could study the Yi, I might avoid serious mistakes." After that, more and more people got their hands on parts of that treasure trove of knowledge. They started developing their own ideas and spreading them around, which is how we got that massive cultural explosion—the biggest recorded intellectual boom in history: the Hundred Schools of Thought. That's why Zhuangzi later said, "The Way was torn apart by the world."

Nowadays, when people mention Taoism, a lot of folks picture some hermit up in the mountains, far away from everything—like some quiet, kinda fringe movement that never really ran the show. But the truth? From the Yellow Emperor all the way to Laozi's time, Taoist thinking was the mainstream. It was the only game in town, the one and only orthodox view. There weren't any other schools to argue with, so there was no big debate to be had. Even during the Warring States period when all those other schools popped up, everyone claimed to have the real "Way" (the Tao). They all thought their ideas represented the true path. And later on, when the Jixia Academy came about—that whole thing was set up by the rulers of Qi because they were big on Taoism. At Jixia, among all those different thinkers, the Huang-Lao Taoists were the biggest, loudest group. They had the most people, the most clout, the most writings, the biggest impact. Guys like Tian Pian, Ji Zhen, Huan Yuan, Peng Meng, Wenzi, Liezi, Fan Li, Shen Dao, Jiezi, Song Xing—all Taoist figures. Not to mention all the ones who blurred the lines between Taoism and Legalism, Confucianism, or Mohism.

Sima Tan (Sima Qian's dad) summed up Huang-Lao Taoism like this: "Taoism teaches 'doing nothing,' but it also means 'leaving nothing undone.' It's easy to practice but hard to put into words. Its method takes emptiness and nothingness as the root, and following along as the function. It has no fixed form, no constant shape, so it can grasp the true nature of all things. It doesn't push ahead of things or lag behind them, so it can be the master of all things." And he added that Taoism "follows the grand flow of yin and yang, picks the best from Confucianism and Mohism, grabs the essentials from the School of Names and Legalism, shifts with the times, adapts to changing circumstances, sets customs and gets things done—always fitting. Its principles are simple and easy to apply; you get a lot done without a lot of fuss."

These days, when people talk about Huang-Lao Taoism in the early Han dynasty, they often think it's just pre-Qin Taoism that got tweaked and mixed with all that harsh Legalist stuff from the Warring States. But they've got the story backwards. It's not that Taoism absorbed Legalism. Legalism grew out of Taoism. What's the Tao? It's the source of everything, the fundamental operating system of the universe. Legalism was just people trying to copy heaven and earth and set up some rules for the human world. That's why, if you look at all the commentaries on the Tao Te Ching from the Hundred Schools, few get it as well as the Legalists did. Han Feizi's chapters Explaining Laozi and Illustrating Laozi are still some of the sharpest interpretations around. That's why in the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian stuck Laozi and Han Feizi together in the same biography. And those Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor from Mawangdui? They feel like a Taoist-Legalist blend, sure—but that's because that's exactly what early Taoism was.

[Amor]

For what it is worth:

- Fuxi and Nuwa, brother and sister, depicted as part serpent part human, sometimes holding square and compasses

- Osiris/Asar and Isis/Ast, brother and sister, depicted as part serpent part human, with Ast being the Widow of Freemasonry.

Are they the same entities establishing civilization in various parts of the world?

The part serpent, part humans are called the Naga by the Hindu.

[TaoSpring]

For what it is worth:

- Fuxi and Nuwa, brother and sister, depicted as part serpent part human, sometimes holding square and compasses

- Osiris/Asar and Isis/Ast, brother and sister, depicted as part serpent part human, with Ast being the Widow of Freemasonry.

Are they the same entities establishing civilization in various parts of the world?

The part serpent, part humans are called the Naga by the Hindu.

According to Chinese legends, the world likely shared a common origin; however, due to certain events, it subsequently fragmented, and thereafter, an increasing number of ancient civilizations lost their cultural heritage.

[Amor]

... an increasing number of ancient civilizations lost their cultural heritage.

I wonder if it is possible for a cultural group to grow out of their heritage.

As a youth I grew out of quite a lot of taught beliefs and patterns

[TaoSpring]

... an increasing number of ancient civilizations lost their cultural heritage.

I wonder if it is possible for a cultural group to grow out of their heritage.

As a youth I grew out of quite a lot of taught beliefs and patterns

Once you have encountered an ever-increasing array of perspectives and differences, you will naturally begin to question and reflect upon the ideas that were previously instilled in you.