Word: taoism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...welcome awaits him. At the premiere of Dreams, the audience demanded 31 curtain calls. Critics raved about Yun's prodigious orchestral and vocal writing and his intuitive knack for fantasy. The first work, Dreams of Liu-tung, depicts the adventures of a frivolous student who is converted to Taoism when a magician conjures up four dreams that chillingly depict his fate. Butterfly Widow is a comedy about a high-court functionary, Chan-tse, who dreams each night that he is a beautiful giant butterfly. A philosopher tells Chan-tse that he was actually a butterfly in his former life...
...Hubbard blandly explains it, Scientology offers nothing less than "a philosophy by which a person can live, can work, and can become better." The philosophy that Scientologists are taught is billed as a sort of religion of religions, combining parts of Hindu Veda and Dharma, Taoism, Old Testament wisdom, Buddhist principles of brotherly love and compassion, the early Greeks, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spencer and Freud. Yet fundamental religious doctrines-the existence of God, for example-play no real part in the philosophy of Scientology, which is concerned solely with the here and now and is based on the twin...
This practical, moralistic code has encountered many rival teachings, chief among them mystical Taoism, which holds that Tao, or the Way, knows no distinction between big and small, high and low, good and bad. Through wu wei, meaning "action by inaction," man can achieve tranquillity in the midst of strife. As the sage Lao Tzu expressed...
These comforting paradoxes provided mental escape for the Chinese in times of stress. Thanks to the unique Chinese gift for blending all manner of faiths, Taoism managed to coexist with Confucianism over the centuries. A Chinese in power, it has been said, is a Confucian: out of power, he is a Taoist, and when about to die, a Buddhist. China absorbed Buddhism, too; in China, somehow, the evanescent idea of nirvana became transmuted into a far earthier notion...
This may look to Western eyes like abject submission; the Asian sees it as the only way to win. In Taoism, the symbol of strength is water, which conforms to the shape of whatever it touches yet in the end cuts its own path through rock. Jujitsu (literally, "give-way art") is the art of defeating an aggressor with his own strength...