Pondering Chinese Taoist and Arab/Persian Sufi ideas of individuality and immortality.

“Tao is forever and he that possesses it, though his body ceases, is not destroyed.”


Before straying too far into this, pondering these ideas does not imply that I necessarily subscribe to, or believe in, the symbolic or literally stated import of all of these ideas. I do, however, find them highly interesting on a philosophical level.

There exists remarkable concordance between aspects of the Chinese esoteric tradition – in particular Taoist streams – and aspects of esoteric Islam, in particular Sufism.

Both schools of thought are concerned with the unification of opposites, mainly on a higher plane of “ascent”, as well as in daily human affairs, be they commercial, sexual, familial, or social. Both also see a general ‘fall” of mankind not so much as in a negative light, but more as a necessary and inevitable process that can be reversed.

Both are interesting systems of thought that see polarity and opposites as being important, but constantly looks for harmony, unification, and the complementarities of such opposites. Both cultivate the realization that every set of opposing things resolves itself on a different level, while seeing the importance of such opposites in their own light.

In ancient Chinese thought Phenomena are the “ten thousand things”.

Descent into the phenomenal world, for the Chinese sage, implies also a possible ascent into a “higher” world – and the very path of return to this higher world, the world of our origins, is the path of immortality.

Man, he is the individual being that emerges into the world by birth, you and I, as human beings are individuals.

The personality (from the Latin word persona – or the face) is the most outward aspect of our true individuality.

While Western Christianity is mainly concerned with “saving” the individual being after death, and the Western Atheist believes the individual being ceases at death, the Chinese sage was concerned with preventing the decay of the individual state, after death, and with preserving the most essential aspect of it. This idea is philosophically interesting to me.

Some schools of Chinese thought believe that the being of an individual man is at one with “life” (Ming) and “human nature” (Hsing) prior to his being born.

Hsing is the source from which man’s innate spiritual consciousness emerges – its very origin.

Ming is the source from which the “life-energy” (ch’i, or qi) is produced – the very “substance of life and death.”

Ming is life, and it is identified with a descending trajectory. Think of it as an animating force.

Hsing however is a human’s inner nature, and is identified with an ascending trajectory.

With Ming we have a “descent” which is involuntary – it is a “fall”.

With Hsing’s we have an “ascent”, one that is controlled, however.

Before your birth, Ming and Hsing are connected, and form what the Chinese call a “wheel of unity”.

After your birth, Ming and Hsing are separated.

Within the womb the developing human embryo moves outward and its initial environment is torn. The Chinese description of this act is “as if a man lost footing on a high mountain”.

Thus a fall occurs: “with a cry the man plunges down to earth”.
This is to say, birth itself is seen as a fall from a primordial state of unified non individuation.

It is at this point that human nature can no longer see life, and life can no longer see human nature.

Uniting human nature and life is of supreme importance in some schools of Chinese thought.
The resulting unified human entity reentering “the womb” to gestate further as an embryo – a spiritual embryo – is of supreme importance.

The Tao Te Ching states:
“The Tao gave birth to the One;
The One gave birth to the Two;
The Two gave birth to the Three;
The Three gave birth to the myriad creatures.”

The Tao is the source of Heaven – T’ian.

T’ian, while being impersonal heaven, and a non anthropomorphized conceptualization of reality’s absolute principle, is also roughly equivalent to the idea of a godhead. The proof for this follows.
That the notion of “Heaven” is essentially the closest concept to “God” one can find in early Chinese thought can be noted in early texts, and it’s parallels common to Turkic and Mongol thought. The Mongol and Turkic supreme God is etymologically related to T’ian, which also illustrates the distant relatedness of these languages and races. Even today the word for God used by modern Muslim Turks is “Tani” a cognate of the Chinese term.

Early Chinese thought did not see an anthropomorphized deity in the notion of “heaven”, but their notion was very similar to the impersonal, beyond manifestation, formless notion of “Allah” that many Sufis hold. Western Christians with a particular conception of “God” often find aspects of the Muslim God difficult to understand. Allah in Islamic thought, and in particular in Sufi thought, certainly has a personal aspect, though Sufis note that in reality people tend to worship a God of their own making, a reflection of themselves in a sense, but beyond this Allah is more of a supreme principle of being.

For the Chinese, the Tao has two aspects: a Tao of Transcendence called “wu-wei”. In the Tao Te Ching it is simply referred to as “Tao”, and a Tao of Immanence called “yu-wei” or “t’ai-chi” which is referred to as “the One.”

This is similar to the Sufi notion of the “names of Allah” emerging from an unmanifested state along two trajectories “Jalali” – transcendence and severity, and “Jamali” – immanence and mercy.

Wu-wei, the Tao of Transcendence is associated with a primal generator that sits unmoved in its generating of things, and it is not at all identical to the objects it generates.

But t’ai-chi, the One and the Tao of Immanence is chaos itself, and out of chaos is born “the Two” principles which are yin, by quiescence and yang, by movement. ”

The emergence of the cosmos with its myriad phenomena and creatures stems directly from t’ai-chi, yin and yang.

The Chinese sage sought, through alchemy, to reverse this process of generation and move backwards – from myriad creatures and spirits to a primal state of simplicity – which was t’ai-chi itself.

At that point once has the potential to stand before the Tao of Transcendence – which is absolute – this potency can be clarified, the process of generation thus reversed and a sort of “immortality” of the human being as an individual may be attained.

The myriad things returning lead to the Three,
The Three to the Two,
The Two to the One,
The One to the Tao of Transcendence.[xix]

Alchemy is the process, to the Chinese sage, of refining, through physical chemical operations and corresponding subtle and spiritual operations on the individual man, certain elements of his being as a Microcosm – a miniature universe whose elements have correspondences with elements of the larger macrocosm universe around us, of refining these elements into their macrocosmic elements.

The Sufis were also concerned with alchemy, not so much physical alchemy but using the metaphors of alchemy as specific psychological operations – or so they say.

However, like the Taoists, many Sufis were operative alchemists, as well as being involved in other natural scientists. Several renown early opticians, physicists, and astronomers, were Sufis. The practical aspect of natural philosophy/natural science were often practical supports to inward operations.

Interested English language readers are referred to the works on Hermetic Alchemy of Titus Burckhardt and Julius Evola alike, and to Rene Guenon’s The Great Triad (which also contains a fascinating early description of the Chinese Triads) – references to other works to consult for an account of these processes in Western philosophic thought, are also available.