The Tao........

The common, literal sense of the word Tao is a path or a way, but it is used in three ways:

1. Tao is the transcendent Way of ultimate reality - unnamable, ungraspable, ineffable. This is hinted at in the opening words to the Tao Te Ching: The Tao that can be spoken is not the true or eternal Tao. Huston Smith writes of this sense of Tao, "Above all, behind all, beneath all is the Womb from which all life springs and to which it returns." It is clear, quiet, eternally existing, yet beyond our intellectual grasp, so that words never quite reach it: "Those who know do not say; those who say do not know."

2. Tao is not only transcendent, but is the immanent, observable way of the universe, "the norm, the rhythm, the driving power in all nature, the ordering principle behind all life" (Smith). We see it in the yin and yang polarities underlying everything, in the self-balancing Organism of Nature, the flow of forces making up the universe.

3. Tao is also the way of human life when it flows in harmony with the way of the universe as described above. This life enjoys the supreme effectiveness of operating by Tao's power, or te.

There is a being, wonderful, perfect;
It existed before heaven and earth.
How quiet it is!
How spiritual it is!
It stands alone and it does not change.
It moves around and around, but does not on this account suffer.
All life comes from it.
It wraps everything with its love as in a garment,
and yet it claims no honor, it does not demand to be Lord.
I do not know its name, and so I call it Tao,
and I rejoice in its power ("te").

~Tao Te Ching 25, quoted in Huston Smith's The World's Religions