Laozi's Journey

As I begin, I want to mention that I have disagreed with many of the things that PGL have said in The Path, but I was not in disagreement with them in this, the Laozi, chapter as much as I had been in earlier chapters. While they get much of the message of Daoism wrong, I do not believe this to be a result of an error in communication, as in previous chapters. However, despite not mistranslating the core philosophy, PGL miss the point of Daoism and somehow, wrongfully, arrive at the conclusion that we must craft our own worlds in order to access/revive the Way. To begin, I would like to go over the finer points of Daoism. In the first chapter of the Daodejing, Laozi opens with reference to the Way as being an enigma and saying “Within this enigma is yet a deeper enigma. The gate of all mysteries!” By these lines, it seems that he is suggesting that the Way is an intangible concept and that it is wholly impossible to reach it in its fullest at …show more content…
This may be related to the fact that humans are, by nature, “evil” creatures. Laozi alludes to this in chapter eight of the Daodejing when he says, “Water is much closer to the Way than humans. It resides in the places that people find repellent, and so comes close to the Way.” In this way does Laozi think people are so bad that they are repelled by places that are inherently good, places that water flows through all the time. Laozi proposes that the only way that people can get back to being on the path of the Way is through reverting to an earlier mindset. In doing this, Laozi says that people will learn the Way once again. I have a few thoughts on this concept, and I will do my best to discuss my two major grievances with this notion in the following paragraphs. If humans are inherently bad like Laozi says, why is he advocating for humans to “return” to some primal state in order to regain goodness that we never even