|
Place the word Tao
Into your heart.
Use no other words.
|
Wang Huaiqing 1985 Oil on canvas 51" x 26" Wang Huaiqing is from a family of artists and consequently began his study of art at a very early age. He was born in Beijing in 1944 and entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts Preparatory School at age eleven. From 1964 to 1966 he was a student of Wu Guanzhong's at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. Following the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) he resumed his studies at the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts, graduating with a Masters degree in 1981. In 1983, he joined the Beijing Painting Academy as a professional artist. In 1987 he came to the United States where he remained for a year. During this time he was an instructor in the Art Department of Oklahoma City University. Currently, Wang lives in Beijing. His paintings have been acquired by the China National Gallery and collectors worldwide. His daughter Tian-Tian is also an artist. "Artist's Mother" was made as a tribute to Wang's neighbor, Zhou Huaiming who was a well-known ink and brush painter. The subject was his mother, and she was 90 years old. Wang says the message of the painting is very Oriental and the perspective like that of traditional Chinese painting where you can see a subject from different levels and planes at the same time. He sees a connection between all of his work produced over the last ten years, and says if you look closely there are common elements in all of these paintings. |
| Stanford
Studies on Daoism Definition of “Daoism” The Origins of Daoism • Attitudinal Daoism I: Anarchism Pre-Laozi Daoist Theory (end) Why does Shen Dao think we should give up guiding ourselves by shared moral prescriptions? His stoicism and some of his reasoning suggests that like the Stoics, he was a fatalist. However Shen Dao's argument has no basis beyond simply logical determinism "what will be will be." The account above has no hint of a theory of causal laws, neither of predictability nor of knowledge of the future. It says nothing here about free will, but Shen Dao does advocate something like giving up moral responsibility. We should not make shi-fei this-not this judgments. Consequently, he can not be saying that we should follow the Great Dao, because that would be to shi this:right whatever actually happens. He avoids this inconsistency and thus is not committed to the Stoic view that the natural/actual course of events is rational or good. It simply is. In using the notion of the actual dao to motivate avoiding any prescriptive discourse, Shen Dao is saying to Confucians and Mohists, "if you are speaking for the nature of things, you need not say anything!" Nature does not prescribe. What about Shen Dao's naturalism itself, however? Is it not itself another guide, a doctrine that he has managed to put into yan language? And, is it not natural for humans to use language in coordinating and ordering their interactions, accumulating and transmitting knowledge? "Abandon knowledge" amounts to a prescriptive paradox. The concept of knowledge it uses is prescriptive knowledge. In form and intent, it is a prescription — a dao guide. If we obey it, we disobey it. This is our first example of Daoist paradox! Shen Dao's dao guide is a dao guide that can't dao guide us. The Zhuangzi history where we find this account of Shen Dao's doctrine, seems critical of Shen Dao's position along similar lines. Still, it moves from Shen Dao to Laozi in it's explanation of the evolution of thought that leads to Zhuangzi. Laozi produces a different line of reasoning for "abandon knowledge." He abandons the fatalist grounds — and implicitly, therefore, the concept of great dao as a guide (though he keeps a version of tiannature's dao). We can view Laozi as combining Song Xing and Shen Dao. His reason to "abandon knowledge" is that knowledge is a form of social control that instills unnatural desires, stimulates unnatural action and constrains and distorts natural freedom or spontaneity. The Zhuangzi ordering is theoretically coherent, though perhaps chronologically inaccurate. |