Tao [antikvár]

IntroductionThousands of people nowadays know about the yin and yang as Chinese male and female sexual energies. Perhaps they use the I-ching, or Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese oracle text, without understanding how it is meant to work. They may not realize that Chinese art expresses the same sense of the mystery and coherence of the world as the I-ching. Taoism is the key; and art can give us perhaps the most direct approach to the strange universe of fluid energies which Taoism manipulated with its sexual and yogic practices.Life in China has always been appallingly dangerous, punctuated by episodes of uncontrollable and capricious violence. Invasions and rebellions repeatedly shattered whole provinces; massacres were common. In the country famine and flood were constant visitors. Forced military service repeatedly reduced the people to starvation. In the cities the powerful oppressed the less powerful; feuds resulted in entire families being murdered or destroyed, wives and children seized and enslaved. Legal punishments were hideous. Vicious intrigue and injustice surrounded the Imperial throne, for which merciless struggles were the rufe. Even official life was dangerous for civil servants. One of China's greatest historians, for example, the official Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-90(?) Bc), was castrated for writing an accurate but unwelcome memorandum. Such was the turbulent sea in which the Chinese had to swim. It is not surprising that many became hermits, and that the Taoist 'mountain man', wrapped in outer and inner peace, communing with nature and dwelling in a personal paradise, became an ideal figure on to whom eighty generations projected their fantasies.Everyone interested in art knows that the Chinese have one of the world's greatest and longest artistic traditions. Its treasures have been collected and imitated for centuries in the West. Our notions of aesthetic quality owe much to China. But despite