This assignment asks you to write a 350 word or so essay that analyzes one of the following passages listed below. (Again, 350 words is not a word “limit,” but just a guideline, something to shoot for when you are writing.) In particular, examine one of these passages in light of the “foundational ideas and images” that were discussed in the “Study Guide and Study Questions” for the module. In addition, you must reference at least two other readings that were assigned for this module. In addition to the Chuang Tzu, the supplemental readings, and the initial Smith reading “Excerpts from ‘Taoism’” are also fair game and could be used to fulfill this requirement.
Here are the prompts:
Note: I’m including the study questions that are associated with each of these passages. You do not need to answer all of them or even any of them. The questions are meant to focus your attention on key ideas, all of which related to the “foundational ideas.” Do not get lost in the entirety of the story or in minor or confusing parts within them. Keep the focus on the “foundational ideas.” Looking at just one of these quotes in one of these stories, in depth, could give you more than enough to write about in a 350 word essay. Indeed, one can see the entirety of the Taoist teaching in any of these little quotes…
1. The Five Enemies 78
How do you understand that both the “robber” and the “respectable citizen” have “both lost the original simplicity of “man”? How do you understand this “original simplicity”? How do they lose it? How is this liked being caged?
(Note: Of course, the tree is an explicit reference to “uncarved wood”/original simplicity)
2. Great and Small 87
Why is it “in the light of Tao nothing is best, nothing is worst”?
Why is it “he who want to have right without wrong… does not understand the principles of heaven and earth”?
How is “the mind of the wise man” the “true conqueror”?
3. Confucius and the Madman 58
How do you understand the idea that “When the world makes sense/ The wise have work to do”? And, that “Never, never/ Teach virtue more”? (What’s the problem with teaching virtue?)
How do you understand that it is “useful… to be useless”? (Or, what is the problem with being “useful”?)
4. Tao 150
“To name a name is to delimit a ‘thing’.” How do names delimit things?
How do you understand, “Where there is no measure, there is no beginning of any ‘thing’“?
How do you understand that “Tao is beyond words and beyond things”? In what sense(s)?
How do you understand that “Tao is a name that indicates without defining”?