Template:Tao

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Tao Te Ching

Legend has it that Lao Tzu wrote the Book of the Way of Virtue, Tao Te Ching, and gave it away to buy a way through a narrow pass from his world to the west. When 24 Christian monks came from Persia to China in 635 AD they use the word "Tao" to express the Biblical concept of the "Word," or term "Logos" in the Greek.

Five centuries before Christ the Tao was considered to be the "mother of things". It was omnipoten, unchanging, and eternal. About the same time, the Greek philosopher Heracletus of Ephesus coined the word "Logos" which meant "word" to express not only "order" or "pattern" but to refer to "the underlying principle" or universal source of all things as an expression representing "the primal order" of the universe.

Lao Tzu saw the Tao, like the Logos of John as here from the beginning.[1]

  1. : Before heaven and earth existed
    There was something nebulous:
    Silent, isolated
    Standing alone, not changing
    Eternally revolving without fail
    Worthy to be the mother of all things.
    I do not know its name.
    I adore it as Tao.
    If forced to give it a name,
    I shall call it "breath."