Foundations of the Tao: An Introduction to Taoist Thought

Welcome. My name is Sifu Michael Johnson, and I am the founder of the Cloud Forest Martial Institute. I have spent most of my life on a training floor, first as a student and later as a teacher, in a lineage that traces back to Grandmaster Wei. At our school we teach Guardian Fist Kung Fu and the Taoist internal arts. People sometimes ask me why a kung fu school would offer a course on Taoism, of all things. The honest answer is that the internal arts grew out of this soil. The breathing work, the standing practices, the softness inside the power, all of it comes from a way of seeing the world that is well over two thousand years old. If you train the body without ever touching the root, you are copying shapes. This course is about the root.

So let us start with the question that gives this lesson its name. What is the Tao? The word itself is humble. Tao, sometimes spelled Dao, means way, path, or road. Every school of thought in ancient China used the word. Confucius spoke constantly about the way of the ancient kings and the way of the gentleman. What set the Taoists apart is that they reached for the word to describe something far bigger: the way of everything.

Think of it like this. Water flows downhill without being told to. Seasons turn without a committee meeting. Your heart has beaten all day without a single instruction from you. There is a manner in which things move when nothing interferes with them, a grain in the wood of the world. That grain, that current, that pattern beneath all patterns, is what the old masters pointed to when they said Tao. It is not a god who issues commands. It is not a law written in a book. It is closer to the way itself, the flowing that everything is already doing.

Here is the famous difficulty, and I want you to meet it in the very first lesson. The moment you pin the Tao down with a definition, you have missed it. A definition is a fence, and the Tao is the whole landscape the fence stands in. This is not the teachers being mysterious for fun. It is an honest warning: do not confuse the description with the thing. You can read a menu all day and never taste the meal. Taoism keeps insisting that you go taste the meal.

That is why I tell my students that Taoism begins with noticing, not believing. You are not asked to sign up for a doctrine. You are asked to pay attention: to water, to breath, to the way a skilled person makes hard work look easy. In the martial arts we know this feeling well. When a technique is truly right, it feels like almost nothing. The effort disappears into the movement. Taoists have a name for that quality, wu wei, and you will hear it again and again in this course.

WATCH: Taoism Explained

In the video below this lesson, a channel called Cogito, which makes careful animated introductions to the world's religions and philosophies, gives one of the clearest short overviews of Taoism you will find anywhere. Before you press play, here are three things to watch for. First, notice how the narrator wrestles with the exact problem we just discussed: every definition of the Tao falls short, and he admits it openly instead of papering over it. Second, pay attention to how often water shows up as the image for the Tao and for the person who lives by it. Third, listen for the term wu wei, often translated as non-action, and notice that it does not mean doing nothing. It means not forcing.

I agree with almost everything in this video. The one nuance I would add is that Cogito is describing Taoism from the outside, the way a good historian should. In this course you will also work from the inside, through practice, because that is how this tradition was always meant to be met. Watch the video as a map. The weekly practices are the territory.

THE READING

Each lesson in this course closes with a short passage, from James Legge's 1891 translation, lightly modernized. It is only right that we begin where the book begins. The Tao Te Ching opens like this: "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. Nameless, it is the beginning of heaven and earth. Named, it is the mother of all things."

Read those four lines again, slowly. The very first thing the book does is warn you about itself. Here is a book about the Way that opens by saying the Way cannot be captured in words. That is not a contradiction, it is instruction. Lao Tzu is telling you how to read everything that follows: hold the words lightly, and keep looking at what they point to. It is the same warning Cogito gives at the start of his video, and the fact that a modern educator and a text from over two thousand years ago begin at the same place should tell you something about how sturdy this teaching is.

THIS WEEK'S PRACTICE

Three times this week, spend ten unhurried minutes watching something move on its own: a stream, rain on a window, wind working through trees, even the flow of people through a busy store. Do not judge it, do not narrate it, just watch how it finds its way. Afterward, write one or two sentences in a notebook about what you saw. That notebook will travel with you through this whole course, so pick one you like.

That is our beginning. You now know what the word Tao points toward, and you know the first rule of this study: the pointing finger is not the moon. In the next lesson we will meet the old master himself, Lao Tzu, and I will tell you the legend of how this strange little book came to be written at a border crossing in the western mountains.