Daoist Essay

One of the distinctions between Confucians and Daoists is represented through images of Confucians being inside an office concerned with societal and family matters. While Daoists are outside, in some mountain retreat, reclusive and reflective of one’s own individual life. This leads to the flourishing of Daoism among common people rather than the elite because daoism teaches the cultivation of the individual through effortless action and restrain from worldly matters. Although Daoist philosophers expound on the same fundamental ideas such as wu wei or effortless action and the Dao, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu are distinct in their rhetorical strategy, style, and use of imagery mainly because Lao Tzu’s daodejing is poetic and terse while Chuang
Rather, it is open to interpretation (Chong p. 370). This was mirrored by Robert Allinson in his book “Chuang Tzu for Spiritual Transformation”, who argues that since a metaphor cannot be translated to its literal paraphrase without losing its cognitive content, it becomes open to interpretation in a preconceptual mode. The preconceptual faculty of the mind silence its analytical faculty which relativistic metaphors allow readers to understand the text in different ways rather than in single way. Chuang Tzu successfully takes the reader into a transcendental world by escaping the confinement of literal meanings. However, this also incites his critics to regard Chuang Tzu’s text as less valuable than that of Lao Tzu’s (Chan, p. 178). For them, Chuang Tzu’s ideas are not as valuable to rulers since it does not give specific ways on how to govern. His daoist philosophy mainly focuses on enriching the spirit and rejecting the worldly matters. Which is why by the fifth century, the propagation of his teachings has declined. Nevertheless, his concepts remain influential to the latter schools of thought such as Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism and has interested Chinese scholars for its literary