Customer Reviews

Creativity and Taoism

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I used to see Professor Chang doing Tai Chi Chuan very late at night on his front lawn in Manoa Valley (Honolulu), as he lived a few doors from the Friends (Quakers) meeting house. I took a number of his seminars, and still marvel at his thesis that the key to understanding Heidegger is to view his writings as fundamentally Taoist in nature. He was deeply erudite and a rather august personality in class. A fellow student in Professor Chang's graduate seminar on Taoism had the chutzpah to turn in a one-page paper; Professor Chang gathered himself up and stated in his heavily accented English that "even Lao Tzu managed to write 5,000 characters." I received a B, as I recall, perhaps because I went for a psychological rather than an ontological interpretation of Taoism. He always encouraged his students to study the Chinese language as an avenue of understanding Taoism's key concepts, and he would write out old-style characters (not the simplified ones) on the chalkboard with rapid strokes, while I dutifully tried to copy the characters.

This book is not an easy read, but there is much to ponder here on the Taoists' understanding of creativity and silence, emptiness, or the Void. It deepens any understanding of the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu's Inner Chapters.