Week 8: Research Report

Tao Te Ching   

   

                                 

                       Here is the link of my powerpoint. 

    The creator that I chose was Laozi. When I was doing google search, the first idea that came to my mind was "Tao Te Ching". I hadn't read this book before, so I spent two weeks reading both Chinese traditional and English versions. There are 82 chapters. Each chapter is quite short though. I took a lot of effort on understanding the traditional expressions in Chinese, and the "Tao" is abstract for me too.

    In my understanding, Laozi explains how everything works in its own way naturally, and how we can just let things happen without intentionally intervening them. It is called "wuwei" in Chinese (which means doing nothing). SO here is my thesis: things will develop in the opposite direction when they become extreme. I wrote this because people usually find that things will eventually go in an opposite way from what they expected when they are eager to do something. Like what McLuhan wrote about new technology that “Formerly, the problem was to invent new forms of labor-saving. Today, the reverse is the problem. Now we have to adjust, not the invent. We have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions” (McLuhan, 124). This is how things happen and revolve. We cannot avoid thinking about what is going on and what will happen next, but when we understand that things will eventually go to the end and trigger problems, we can predict the influences of it and maybe think forward to avoid those issues.