What is the Tao Te Ching and what role has it played in the Taoist religion?
The Tao Te Ching is like the Bible for Taoists. Its title means “the classical book about the way and its power.” The short book consists of eighty-one short chapters, and deals with politics, ethics, and metaphysics—”the study of what is genuinely real.” Throughout the book, there are references to the Tao, or, if translated, “the way.” The Toa, however, is nameless, formless and indescribable. It cannot be put into words, so the appointed author of the book, Lao Tzu, used brief, paradoxical poems to write of the Tao. I have heard that one can read it in an hour or a lifetime. The Tao Te Ching goes on to say that not only is Tao the origin of everything, but also, “all individual things are ‘manifestations’ of the Tao. We may be inclined, then, to think of Tao as “God.” This does not, however, mesh with Taoist thought, which believes that Tao “does not have a personality.” Human beings are given no favored status by Tao, but were simply produced “along with the rest of nature,” and ar
