Since this board (generally) ranks Taoism as the best religious belief can anyone convince me as to why this is the case?
I highly doubt anybody on this board has a solid grasp of Taoism.
>inb4 'i read the dao de jing and listened to some meme lecture by alan watts so this makes me qualified on complex ancient chinese religions'
>>720342
people don't know that much about Taoism.
Taoism in a nutshell: Don't cum. Fuck a lot of virgin girls. Eat a lot of peaches. Don't fucking cum! muh nature and shit. Gimme summa dat immortality, nigga. Do not freaking cum.
dude respect your elders lmao
>>720949
drink mercury man, it's good for you
>>720949
You forgot arrange house to channel energies.
>>721014
Predated Taoism.
Its based off the fact that Mercury is considered magical as it can melt Gold by Pre-Imperial Chinese.
>>720983
The tao that can be named Ain't the tao. The foundations of reality gotta be litterd with action through non-action. Kong QIU Fuzi aka "confuse juice" is not my shifu. he is hierarchical authoritarian and probbaly imperial bureaucrat as well :DD. YIN and YANG not filial piety and class harony ok. praise the vinegar.
>>720983
Isn't that Confucianism?
>>721086
The Chinese religious field is very complicated. Confucianism is seen as a philosophy, with Taoism as the religion. The two go hand in hand at times, even when Taoism in its original form could be seen as a reaction towards Confucian's social structure.
WITHIN THE BALANCE OF COSMIC ENERGY AND SPIRITS OF HIGHER DIMENSIONAL AND LOWER DIMENSIONAL ENERGY TAOISM IS AWAKENED. BUT, YAHUAH IS ALL. YAHUSHA IS OVER ALL FALSE IDOLS MADE UNDER MANS HANDS. MUCH LOVE
>>722081
>implying Taoist concepts of yin-yang energies cannot be synthesized into the Judeo-Christian framework of the material and heavenly
>why is Taoism the best religion?
it just is
>>720342
do lsd
>>720949
>Taoism in a nutshell: Don't cum. Fuck a lot of virgin girls. Eat a lot of peaches. Don't fucking cum! muh nature and shit. Gimme summa dat immortality, nigga. Do not freaking cum.
Can someone explain this? This sounds hilarious.
>>721190
Religion and Philosophy are Western ideas.
Ancient Chinese didnt categorize things like that.
>>722110
Google Taoist sexual practices.
>>722110
From my understanding, Taoist theory holds that ejaculating releases yang energy. If you fuck some broad, there's a positive exchange in energies. If you cum outside of sex you are creating a intentionally dangerous imbalance of energies in your body. In mythology, magic peaches are consumed by the immortals and likewise grant longevity to any pleb that gets his hands on one. The Jade Emperor has a lot of Immortal Peach trees in the celestial court, and puts on a big peach feast where he invites the immortals and sometimes Buddhist deities to join him.
Immortality is of course the goal for your average Taoist wizard.
>>720892
Enlighten us, o great wise faget
>>722088
No it fucking cant
>>722140
So I should be like the Monkey King?
>>722135
From wikipedia
>While Taoism had not yet fully evolved as a philosophy at this time, these texts shared some remarkable similarities with laterTang dynastytexts, such as theIshinpÅ. The sexual arts arguably reached their climax between the end of theHan dynastyand the end of the Tang dynasty.
>their climax
dat pun
>>720342
>can anyone convince me as to why this is the case?
Probably not
>>720342
It's improper to think in terms of "best", philosophical systems should be better understood in progressive terms of simpler to more complex and nuanced varieties that build on each other.
In the case of Taoism, we're talking about some of the earliest systematized thoughts of Chinese civilization.
What's most fascinating about them is their parallels to modern post-modernism. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao" is one of humanity's earliest understandings on the fundamental limitations of language to describe the human experience.
Of course like any forward thinking thought, the second generation of supporters took control without understanding what they had in their hands and turned it into a profit-making enterprise aka an organized religion. Daoist folklore is responsible for rare and irreplaceable animals going extinct because an illiterate superstitious Chinese farmers thinks that grinding its claws into a pill will make his penis hard. But its prominence in the far eastern philosophic tradition is difficult to overstate.
>>721061
Somebody make Laozi edit with this
>>722110
Taoists refrain from cumming but engage in a lot of sex. Right before they ejaculate they transfer that energy to their forehead, which is why those Chinese statues of taoists have massive bulging foreheads.
fucking virgin girls extend your life. it's for longevity.
peaches look like a virgin girl's vagina, which is why you should eat them.
muh nature and shit, and immortality. self-explanatory. Longevity is the main thing in taoism
>>720892
>alan watts
lol what a gaylord
>hurr mushrooms are the key to enlightenment mannn
they break down mental barriers sure
but no
So Taoism is basically about fucking virgins and having a long life? This YOLO shit?
>>722665
Bumping for this as well xdd
>>722839
no. If I were to sum it up in a word, it would be balance. It is also concerned with the dependent nature of dual value judgement, if that makes sense. There can't be evil without good; people wouldn't steal if thy didn't value money and so on. One would ideally be content with the universe because that is how it is, and not be concerned with what it could be.
I feel like I'm explaining it wrong so I'll bring in the Vinegar Tasters allegory. Three tasters are around a pot of vinegar: Buddha, Laozi, and Confucius. Confucius tastes it and finds it sour; life needs rules to correct people and bring social harmony. Buddha tastes it and finds it bitter; life is suffering that must be overcome through right action. Laozi tastes the vinegar and is content, because it tastes as vinegar should.
>>720949
I just came. what do
>>722561
>implying it can't
>>720342
I'm Asian. Taoism is like some wierd Chinese Folk religion. Basically Chinese pagan practices to try to prolong your life and wierd shit like that. It's the same religion that says that if you fuck 40 women without cumming, you will be immortal
>>722604
Funny thing about that: what made Journey to the West so groundbreaking is that it was the first work of Chinese literature to explicitly reject the Daoist gods in favor of Buddhism.
The intro to Journey to the West is the story of how the Monkey King makes Heaven his bitch and causes the Chinese polytheistic pantheon collectively shit itself, and the only reason he doesn't end up completely ruling the universe is because he challenges the Buddha and loses, prompting Buddha to drop a mountain on him and leave him there to rot for 500 years
The problem is that faggots in /his/ look a taoism as a "religion" when there exists no such concept in China. Taoism is a weird mix of philosophy, religion, mysticism and folklore, and it is not any of that as well, since it is not an actual unified practice. What you could call "taoism" is a way of seeing the universe in a synthetic manner as to admit that comprehension is impossible, and unnecessary.
Eastern concepts can't be translated into western concepts, and whilst you may think taoism resembles a religion, it is not, at least not a religion as we understand religion.
That having been said, there are "taoist priests" and generally they work with various chinese folk gods, medicine and traditions.
>>723784
>implying he implied anything
He outright stated it, lrn2read you nigger
>>724699
This guy gets it
Dubs confirm
>>724699
But in a way, it almost perfectly mirrors the western polytheistic tradition, which evolved much the same way (local gods and goddesses syncreting as society grows larger and more centralized but with no unified narrative or dogma).
The primary difference being that for the particular type of monotheism that took hold in the west, their God is a jealous God who spurns those ancient traditions and his followers do as well. It may very well have been caused by blowback from the brutality of the Roman Empire and one aspect of people's collective sigh of relief when that cultural system started to crumble. It may also have be that Christianity's defining feature is its separation from "the old ways" of Judaism, which for early Christians was a matter of life or death in the aftermath of the Jewish war when Romans grew deadly suspicious of Jews.
>>724704
that was my joke, friend.
>>724699
That's void now, man. The whole world roughly follows the western interpretation of religion now. That's why there was five state "religions" of communist china. Without adopting a western perspective of it, they would not have thought to do this.
I am a secular anarcho-zen daoist.
>conscious was a philosopher that eventually turned into some sort of God-man because peasants can only understand things in base contexts
Could this be origin of many religions figures such as Jesus?
>>724930
Nope. Jesus did say he was son of god.
More like the Buddha. Taught a philosophy, ended up a paragon, then became worshipped by plebs.
>>724930
conscious?
>>724930
There were several competing theories about what he meant by son of God during early Christianity.
For instance we had adoptionism which implied that he was a mortal man that was invited into God's family (usually at the point of baptisism). Under this his title is something anyone can receive, ie when one is invited into God's family they are a son or daughter of God.
You had various priesthoods each pushing different agendas and different interpretations of Jesus.
What we got stuck with today is the weird version where he is his own father.
>>724939
The thing with Jesus is that the bulk of his modern worshiper were raised with a modified version of his works, which was modified to hell and back since the first edition to get more pagans into Christianity. The date of the birth of jesus christ, the virginity of mary, the trinity, what the lords are, that hell is a place full of flame where peoples get physical punishment for their sins, etc etc.
Honestly, modern Catholicism should be considered an offshoot of Christianity rather than a part of it so much it has changed overall and modified the original teachings. So much pagan influence everywhere, its absurd. Jesus would probably roll in his caves if he was still there.
>>720892
>I read the Tao Te Ching
Can anyone really just read the Tao Te Ching? A translation, even into modern Chinese, is going to be necessarily interpretive, so is virtually useless for gaining basic understandings of what the text actually encompasses. Reading it (or any Classical Chinese text, for that matter) in the original language requires a lot of time taken understanding each individual character (e.g., all of the meanings, why they were used over other, potentially synonymous-looking characters, usw) and placing them back into the wider context of the whole.
Anyone who says that they've read the dao de jing, or believes that someone can read it is full of bullshit.
>>724950
>What we got stuck with today is the weird version where he is his own father.
Not at all, actually, though I will be upfront by admitting that I am Catholic.
There were numerous competing theories on the exact nature of Jesus's divinity. Some, such as the Arian Christians thought that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were God's divine creations and ultimately subordinate to him as distinct entities. Others thought that Jesus was born a man and ascended to Godhood. Some believed that Jesus had always existed and simply incarnated into the universe at that particular moment, others thought he was created the moment he was born. The gnostics believed that there was a "secret language of creation" which, when known, would grant the knowers divine power, and Jesus was the guy with cheat codes to the universe.
The modern doctrine of consubstantiation is that father, son, and holy spirit are all different ways of describing the same thing, that there's a layer of metaphor which gets lost when we try to figure out what God literally is (or isn't), and that we can not really describe God directly as something with identity, but rather it is more appropriate to think of God like a force, whose exact nature can only be inferred indirectly as a function of a relationship. Sort of like how "gravity" doesn't actually look like any thing, and the most practical way to describe it is as a function of a relationship (the apple falls to the ground, the Earth orbits the sun, mass warps space-time, etc). So "God" in the trinitarian sense is actually the thing that unites all three separate concepts in order to describe something fundamentally indescribable.
Of course whether or not the unwashed masses understands this is a different thing entirely
>>725021
Yeah. You're kind of proving my point.
There was a guy who said some things that really shook people up. He was Jesus. But than some people got carried away and started declaring that he was a primal force of the universe. That's no more sensible than the Gnostic or Arians.
Put it this way. Do you think that Lao Tszu and Buddah really did all the miracles ascribed to them and really had mythical powers? Or do you think they were people that left a lasting mark and than legends were made up about them. This is a pattern that is repeated in all cultures all across the world and probably happened with Jesus too.
>>725041
Whether or not Jesus even existed is still an open question and if he did, he probably did not look like this
http://i.imgur.com/4eK8Pk6.jpg
but probably looked more like the kind of bum who you would probably step over on your way to work. He would have been dark-skinned (but probably not "black") from a lifetime laboring in the sun with his (step) father Joseph, crooked and wretched from a lifetime without access to healthcare or a decent diet, and he probably would have looked rather shriveled and ugly by our standards. Back in those days ugliness was considered a sign from God that he had marked you for the life of a religious service.
>Put it this way. Do you think that Lao Tszu and Buddah really did all the miracles ascribed to them and really had mythical powers?
Who cares what powers they did or didn't have? What matters is how well those stories resonate with you, how well they help you understand the world that YOU live in. The reason that we ascribe tall tales to these characters is because of the sheer number of people across generations who take inspiration from them
Our problems with Jesus, Lao Tzu, and Buddha always have more to do with their followers, who can't interpret religion metaphorically and have to take their faith as literal fact. Instead of using religion as an instrument for self-reflection, they turn it into an instrument for social domination. Against the back-drop of our modern conflict between religion and atheism it can be difficult for us to remember that "the laws of the gods" were at one point understood to mean the laws of physics, and the religion which can best predict them is the one with the most merit. "High priest of the Roman state religion" sounds really impressive until you consider that his primary duty was maintaining the calendar, which was serious business in those days.
I think that the stories we tell each other, real or fiction, are far more important than we'll ever give them credit for.
>>720342
>Since this board (generally) ranks Taoism
Who? When?
All I see is atheism and christposters
>>725123
I think he's referring to the Buddhism thread, where assholes constantly post "but Taoism is better" without further explanation.
>>720342
Isn't Taoism a thing essentially fitting for the Chinese only? Like how the Emperor interacts with the Universe or some shit?
