But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. Taoist deities include nature spirits, ancient legendary heroes, humanized planets and stars, Hsien (humans who became immortal and achieved divinity through Taoist practices and teachings, see: 8 Immortals), ancestor spirits (see: Ancestor Worship in Taoism, Joss paper) and animals such as dragons (see: dragon dance), tigers, phoenixes, snakes (see: Animal symbolism) and lions (see: lion dance). All human activities—even such things as drunkenness and robbery—are represented by deities as well. A central concept in philosophical Taoism is that of wu-wei, a term which means “inaction” or “nonaction.” It is not, however, what it seems at first blush. A working definition might be as follows (and notice this is a reversion): wu-wei means inaction or nonaction, which is the Taoist action by which all things are accomplished and the world is conquered. We can learn more about wu-wei from chapter 22 of the Tao Te Ching: Before RZA founded the Wu-Tang clan he was sleeping on a boxing mat with his wife and daughter in a two-bedroom Staten Island apartment that they shared with 6 other people

The seven brightest stars of the constellation are Ursa Major, the Great Bear, also called the Big Dipper.Truth out of season bears no fruit" To me, that means two things. One: There's a time and place for every kind of knowledge to flourish. Two: The personal characteristics of great messengers are usually irrelevant.” Taoism gained official status in China during the Tang dynasty, whose emperors claimed Laozi as their relative. [34] The Gaozong Emperor added the Daodejing to the list of classics ( jīng, 經) to be studied for the imperial examinations. [35] This was the height of Taoist influence in Chinese history. Early versions of independent texts like the Neiye, the Lüshi Chunqiu, the Zhuangzi, and the Daodejing.

This religious and philosophical tradition of Taoism had its roots in the nature worship and divination of the earliest Chinese people. Schipper, Kristopher; Verellen, Franciscus (2004). The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago. Schipper, Kristofer M. (1993) [1982]. The Taoist Body. Translated by Duval, Karen C. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520082243. The Tao of the Taoist is the divine intelligence of the universe, the source of things, the life-giving principle; it informs and transforms all things; it is impersonal, impartial, and has little regard for individuals. . . . Above all, the one important message of Taoism is the oneness and spirituality of the material universe. [5] Note: Chinese Buddhism, which when first introduced into China, was largely interpreted through the use of Taoist words and concepts.)Not too surprisingly, the Tao is the center of Taoism, but as we shall see, it is indefinable. We get a sense of this from the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching. Another key figure, Taoist alchemist Ge Hong ( c. 283–343) was an aristocrat and government official during the Jin dynasty who wrote the classic known as the Baopuzi ("Master Embracing Simplicity"), a key Taoist philosophical work of this period. [3] This text includes Confucian teachings and also spiritual practices meant to aid in attaining immortality and a heavenly state called "great clarity", which had great influence on later Taoism. [32] Pu describes an aimless action, because with a goal, one would develop anxiety about this goal. Pu describes the ‘just being’ without the aim of being. As we have already seen, there are multiple spirits to worship in Chinese mythology. There are the gods of the earth or the village gods. There are also the family gods of the doors, wells, wealth, hearths, and kitchens. These can all be benevolent if treated properly with appropriate sacrificial offerings. As the emperor has official duties to his ancestors, so the average person has responsibility to his or her ancestors. While the emperor makes offerings at official shrines, the people may have ancestral temples or home altars where offerings may be made to ancestors. At the popular level, little has changed in three millennia.

In essence, water flows to the lowest places, which are antithetical to normal human inclinations. We want to reside on mountaintops, not in the lowest places, but it is in those low places that one is closest to the Tao through humility. We also read: The basement was flooded in 1996 and the studio was destroyed. Wu-tang would never sound the same again. Like the line from Shogun Assassin: "That was the night everything changed."And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:33–34) What happens is in finding the stillness within the constant flow, one disengages from actively participating in this flow. One lets the perceptions and thoughts go on their way without oneself being swept along with them. This is returning to the root or souce of awareness. It is the root of awareness because it is this state that allows us to see the workings of awareness. It is the root from which the ceaseless activity (luxurient growth) of awareness issues forth. This root is, as it were, a vantage point from which the other operations of awareness can be quietly observed. [17] Sima Chengzhen (647—735 CE) is an important intellectual figure of this period. He is especially known for blending Taoist, and Buddhist theories and forms of mental cultivation in the Taoist meditation text called the Zuowanglun. He served as an adviser to the Tang government. [33] He was later retroactively appropriated as a patriarch of the Quanzhen school. [36] You can break Ch’an Buddhism down to three basic ideas. One is that every person has an inherent Buddha nature inside—anyone can become enlightened. Two, there’s no one single path to enlightenment, everybody has to find his own way. Three, it’s almost impossible to reach enlightenment solely through the exchange of words.”

A fool considers himself a wise man, and a wise man considers himself to be a fool" to any man who claims they have reached true enlightenment, in my opinion, is painfully obnoxious and pretentious. This may be just my opinion, but I won't idly sit by and pretend that one of my favourite rappers isn't an actual... arrogant piece of work.One does not find philosophical Taoism practiced in China today. Certainly the Chinese have embodied some of its quiescence and peacefulness, but the form of Taoism that is practiced in Taiwan and mainland China is religious Taoism. Religious Taoism has in a way always been in China, for it encompasses all the elements of the ancient Chinese religion that were treated earlier. It is here that we still have the multiplicity of gods, reverence for ancestors, and divination.