Sospeso crosses paths with Lao Tzu when they perform the American premiere of Louis Andriessen's setting of his text in his work Tao on September 28.

Lao Tzu is regarded as the author of the Tao-teh Ching, the central text of Taoism, and as, with Chuang Tzu, the founder of this Chinese system of beliefs. According to his biographer Ssu-ma Ch’ien, writing around 100 BC, he was born in the state of Ch’u (modern Honan) and was appointed royal historian sometime near the end of the Chou dynasty (1111 to 255 BC); he is supposedly an elder contemporary of Confucius, who died in 479 BC. By all accounts, he was a reserved, withdrawn gentleman; the story of his impromptu composition of the Tao-teh Ching for a road guardian is probably apocryphal. There are, furthermore, doubts regarding Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s history, and Lao Tzu has been associated with such figures as the Emperor Huang-ti, Lao-Lai-tzu (a Taoist contemporary of Confucius), the astronomer Tan, or a group of poets collectively authoring the Tao-teh Ching.

The eighty-one paragraphs of 5000 characters in both text and verse that make up the Tao-teh Ching (The Way and Its Power) conceive of the Tao, or the Way, both as a moral standard, as in Confucius, and also as a complex metaphor with strong metaphysical and even mystical aspects. The book begins, ‘The Tao about which one may speak is not the real Tao;’ Confucianism’s practicality is met with a union with the absolute that is obscure, paradoxical, and nonverbal: indeed, part of the political philosophy of the book advocates a reversion to preliterate social forms. Material things provoke desire, which is ‘unnatural.’ If words for things—and even the words for being and nonbeing themselves—are unlearned, a purer behaviour (wu-wei) will emerge. The Tao cannot be directly sensed, but it manifests itself in natural change; a meditation on the perfect order of nature gives way to an intuition of the submerged source of all things that is the Absolute Tao.

Look! It cannot be seen—it is beyond form; 
Listen! It cannot be heard—it is beyond sound; 
Grasp! It cannot be held—it is intangible. 
These three are indefinable: they are one.

Confucianism and Taoism together form the major philosophical responses to the social and political unrest of the Chou dynasty, the former advocating a profoundly political regulation of society, the latter withdrawing from the will in a state of meditation—which paradoxically harnesses natural order and movement and thus power. Buddhism was first regarded as an Indian adaptation of Taoism; when Buddhism cycled back through China during the first and second centuries, it did so largely on Taoism’s terms.

Joshua Cody