Tao Te Ching Awe and Amazement Quotes

Talk about awesome and amazing... the true Tao is so great and eternal that there is no word that can possibly sum it up. Even the word "Tao," which we use to represent it, isn't enough. The nameless Tao is the great flow of everything there is, was, or will be, and our puny speech just isn't enough to nail it down. So should we have even have bothered to write the sentences we just wrote? Hey, you can't fault us for tryin'.

Okay, wait. How can something that doesn't exist create something that does? The thing is that Tao practitioners think of the Tao as encompassing both existence and nonexistence. But even the void isn't devoid of anything. They think of it as the "pregnant void," which is kind of a primordial soup of possibilities. In the Taoist mind, being and nonbeing flow back and forth. Everything is in balance.

So if the Tao gives birth to everything, what originally gave birth to the Tao? According to these lines—nothing. The Tao has always existed. It even came before the Emperor, which here could represent an earthly ruler, or even the Jade Emperor, an ultimate god-figure from ancient Chinese mythology.