The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014)
Lao Tzu may have been a real person, or may have been fictional, no one knows. He's credited with creating Taoism after writing the original Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching. According to the story, he lived in a walled city and asked the Guard to open the gates and let him leave. The Guard said he'd do this if Lao Tzu left behind some record of the knowledge he'd acquired. The old guy then did this by writing the Tao Te Ching on a series of bamboo slats, handed them over to the Guard, and left. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Like I said, no one knows.
The central conceit of both the Tao Te Ching and Taoism in general is all wrapped up in the idea of 'not doing anything'. That might sound like it lacks some kind of enlightenment, but a nice section to get this idea across is the part about the passage of water around a rock in a river: the water simply flows around the rock, it does not allow itself to become impeded. It does not waste energy pushing against the rock. It simply finds the quickest and best way to handle the situation, and deals with it. In the context of a river with a rock in it, it's extraordinarily simple. However, bring this to bear on your own life and you may see that more often than not you're simply repeatedly slamming your head into the rock, and complaining to all your family and friends about how unfair it is that there's a rock in your river.
There's some genuine meat in the pages of the Tao Te Ching, but more often than not it's treated glibly. People put the words onto inspirational backgrounds and stick them up on the wall and smile and look at them as something nice to help get them through the day. But it should probably be remembered that the Tao Te Ching has teeth. It's not trying to comfort you. It's trying to tell you that your entire experience of life, and way of dealing with problems, is completely skewed. It even tells you that you don't know how to talk properly. Go take a look. It's all in there.
This kind of misappropriation is no surprise though really. Taoism states that there is no deity, and yet a very large number of people have imposed deities onto it. Then there's the fact that Siddhartha stole all the Taoist ideas, but geniously changed the name to 'Buddhism' and everyone went coo coo for cocoa puffs over it. People steal stuff and re-use it for other things all the time. And that's cool because sometimes this mis/reappropriation is better. Arguably. But it doesn't really hurt to know what something was for in the first place. Especially something as vicious as the smiling assassin that is the Tao Te Ching.
A final thing to consider is that the reason that Taoism was originally so damn spiky was that Lao Tzu (real or mythical) was a bit of an 'upsetter'. He sounded, in a nutshell, like the kind of person who didn't suffer fools gladly. Confucius said this about him (and being that Confucius *was* a real dude, the fact that he said this either means that Lao Tzu was also real, or maybe he was just mythmaking, whatever it was, it's pretty interesting):
"The bird which flies in the air can be shot down with arrows. The beast which runs across the land or swims in the sea can be caught in nets. But there is one creature which cannot be caught, and that is the dragon. It rises up onto the clouds and dives into the oceans and ascends to Heaven: powerful, yet intangible. Today I met Lao Tzu, and he is like the dragon."
The central conceit of both the Tao Te Ching and Taoism in general is all wrapped up in the idea of 'not doing anything'. That might sound like it lacks some kind of enlightenment, but a nice section to get this idea across is the part about the passage of water around a rock in a river: the water simply flows around the rock, it does not allow itself to become impeded. It does not waste energy pushing against the rock. It simply finds the quickest and best way to handle the situation, and deals with it. In the context of a river with a rock in it, it's extraordinarily simple. However, bring this to bear on your own life and you may see that more often than not you're simply repeatedly slamming your head into the rock, and complaining to all your family and friends about how unfair it is that there's a rock in your river.
There's some genuine meat in the pages of the Tao Te Ching, but more often than not it's treated glibly. People put the words onto inspirational backgrounds and stick them up on the wall and smile and look at them as something nice to help get them through the day. But it should probably be remembered that the Tao Te Ching has teeth. It's not trying to comfort you. It's trying to tell you that your entire experience of life, and way of dealing with problems, is completely skewed. It even tells you that you don't know how to talk properly. Go take a look. It's all in there.
This kind of misappropriation is no surprise though really. Taoism states that there is no deity, and yet a very large number of people have imposed deities onto it. Then there's the fact that Siddhartha stole all the Taoist ideas, but geniously changed the name to 'Buddhism' and everyone went coo coo for cocoa puffs over it. People steal stuff and re-use it for other things all the time. And that's cool because sometimes this mis/reappropriation is better. Arguably. But it doesn't really hurt to know what something was for in the first place. Especially something as vicious as the smiling assassin that is the Tao Te Ching.
A final thing to consider is that the reason that Taoism was originally so damn spiky was that Lao Tzu (real or mythical) was a bit of an 'upsetter'. He sounded, in a nutshell, like the kind of person who didn't suffer fools gladly. Confucius said this about him (and being that Confucius *was* a real dude, the fact that he said this either means that Lao Tzu was also real, or maybe he was just mythmaking, whatever it was, it's pretty interesting):
"The bird which flies in the air can be shot down with arrows. The beast which runs across the land or swims in the sea can be caught in nets. But there is one creature which cannot be caught, and that is the dragon. It rises up onto the clouds and dives into the oceans and ascends to Heaven: powerful, yet intangible. Today I met Lao Tzu, and he is like the dragon."