The Sacred Chao Te Ching

[Bu🤠ns]

   

Well, i really did want to contribute more.

EDIT: FYI i messed up #6 and had to go back and modify it.

[the last yatto]

Confucianism is ELITIST

[Bu🤠ns]

I just wanted to add this bit in relation to the title.

There are a lot of descriptions regarding the way the title is translated. Superficially, it could be translated as "The Wisdom Book of the Flow of the Virtue of Things". Unfortunately many can't find terms that really explain what that means without going into explanation.

So...

Tao: Often described as "The Way of things" or "Great Integrity" or "The Flow of Things".  Or, according to Kerry Thornley in his Zenarchism "Natural Law".

Te: I think "virtue" is the closest.  By 'virtue', I think it should be mentioned, isn't necessarily the moral or virtuous person sense of the word (although that might be an effect of living in harmony with the Tao) but more so in the sense of the quality or virtues of a thing.  Alan Watts would use "The grains in wood" or "the markings in jade" as an example.

Ching: Simply Sacred Book or Book of Wisdom.


Our version of the CHAO te ching, i think, lends itself quite usefully to our adopted translations because Chao, or the dialectic of order and disorder, seems to be the root of our interpretations.  Things like, nonsense as salvation, Lo5s, etc spring from this dialectic in a natural way that, without necessarily taking the 'meaning' of Chao in to consideration while writing our interpretations came on its own accord.  How perfect!

ANYWAY what I think I'm trying to get at here is when editing these interpretations, one possible approach is to take the passage in terms of the book title.

Ask: What are the virtues of this passage that best describe the Chao or Tao?

Are there any other main questions that you folks think that all of these passages should be examined under to help express our ideas most clearly?

[Requia ☣]

Is there a non scribd version of this?  That site drives me nuts.

[Iason Ouabache]

It's possible to download it as a PDF or a TXT from Scribd. Just click on the "Download" button.

BTW, is this the final version or is someone else going to reformat it?

[LMNO]

It's actually not done yet.

We added Burns' suggestions, and need to do some more refining.

I really want to reformat it and make it look nice, when it's done.

[Cramulus]

BUMP


PDF updated, still unfinished:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14714852/Sacred-Chao-Te-Ching

[LMNO]

I'm currently scrubbing it for a third time.

[Bu🤠ns]

Anything I can do?

[LMNO]

Grab the PDF, and dust off your editing pencil.

[Cramulus]

particularly, the later stanzas need a good squint

I reccommend starting at the end and working towards the beginning

[Requia ☣]

Was this ever finished?

[Wondering Monk]

If it wasn't i would love to help finish it, i came into discordianism from zen so this is right up my street.

[Cramulus]

current status:

LMNO and I made a bunch of revisions. He said "Hey can you whip out a new PDF?"

I said sure.

Then I got distracted and didn't do that.

So the text currently on the wiki is the most current version, whereas the scribd one is very slightly outdated. There are still 10-15 chapters which need clean-up.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about the text. If there are any chapters you'd like to draw attention to, we can discuss them.

[LMNO]

I'm slowly going through the whole thing again, trying to tighten it up.

When this gets finished, I'd really like to get a hardcover version of it.  Could we go through Lulu?