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Uphold precepts, but be merciful.
Gradually absorb, until there is no need for law.
Gain wisdom beyond right and wrong.
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Luo Erchun 1987 Oil on canvas 72" x 63" Luo Erchun was born in Hunan province in South Central China in 1929 and graduated from the Suzhou Fine Arts Institute in 1951. He served as editor for the People’s Publishing House of Fine Arts and from 1959 to 1964 was an attending lecturer at the Fine Arts Department of Beijing Art College. He has lectured extensively on oil painting at academies throughout China and makes yearly trips to Paris to paint and plan exhibitions of his work. He is currently a professor in the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. Luo Erchun still prefers to paint scenes from his homeland, Hunan Province, even though he has lived most of his life in Beijing and sometimes in Paris. He feels a passion for this and is particularly interested in the color of the soil there which he still remembers from his childhood. “Festival is comprised of many faces and figure studies I did when I attended a minority festival in southern Hunan. I sketched the subjects and later put them altogether in my studio.” |
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Studies on Daoism Dao and Names: The Laozi or Daode Jing Laozi talks mainly of name (word) pairs — opposites. Naming is analogous to “carving.” (The symbol of the nameless is pu simplicity an uncarved block of wood.) When we learn the way to use a word (e.g. watching teachers “rectify” names) we adopt an institutional practice of “cutting” things and assigning names to them in acting. With the names we acquire a value or desire for one of the discriminants. The desires then shape our wei deeming:action. Much of the reasoning attributed to Laozi here follows that of Song Xing. The artificially created desires lead to unnecessary competition and strife. When we see that they are not natural, acquiring socialized desires (e.g. for status, reputation, for rare objects) starts to look ill advised. He hints at places that acquiring the system of names dulls our capacity for appreciation or reaction to nature (“the five colors blind the eye...”). And most important, acquiring knowledge in this way is losing the natural spontaneity and becoming subject to social control. The text, accordingly, entices us to free ourselves from this system signified by the slogan wu-wei lack-action. We are to set about forgetting all our socialization and return to the state of a newborn babe. The slogan is famously paradoxical and is even formulated in the text in a paradoxical way — “lack acting and yet lack ‘don’t-act’.” The bulk of the Daode Jing is thus given over to motivating this paradoxical attitude. Its essential strategy for doing this centers on the notion of “reversal.” In passage after passage, advice is given that reverses the values usually taken for granted in social (Confucian-Mohist) discourse — either rejecting the usual positive value term or motivating valuing the opposite (non-being, water, the female, the lower position etc.). The result is a fascinating exercise in normative advocacy even including a political theory — which you can find elaborated more fully in the main entry. Clearly, the advocacy is inconsistent with the meta-theory and its purpose must be indirect — perhaps to induce us to “see” one of the three negative positions considered above. Still it gives the text a tone that has come to be known as primitivism — nullifying socialization and cultivating only the “natural” attitudes and actions. |