dao night

night In the night's vast ocean, Sun, moon, and earth align, Pulling the earth out of roundness And making tides rage. Such is the power of night. Night. You are mother of all. You existed before all. You are the background, the fabric, the whole underpinning of the universe. In you is abstruse mystery, darker than the deepest water, blacker than the sleep of sleeps. You are an inconceivable fertility, a wild and uncontrollable realm from which strangeness and power and creativity and mutation and life spring. The miracle of birth comes from you. And the horror of death. That is why you both comfort and frighten us. Stars and planets are scattered through you like luminescent pearls. You string them on your current effortlessly, and the pull of syzygy is so tremendous that the birth shape of the earth is pulled out of roundness, the sea exceed their brims, and the heads and hearts of all the creatures on this planet are made to pound and wonder in dazzled confusion. When stars and novas burst, energy untold is unleashed — explosions of such magnitude that human intellect and instruments could never hope to measure even if made superior by a hundredfold — and yet these flames burn out, sputter, become mere dim coals in the supreme expanse that is night. Night. You are mother without a mother. You are mystery and power and ruler of all time. night 365 Tao daily meditations Deng Ming-Dao (author) ISBN 0-06-250223-9 duckdaotsu.org tao hub . (the word Laozi or Lao Tsu simply means "old man" I used the words "Tao bearer" to create this description in Chinese Portrait of Laozi Fachang Muqi (referred to in yesterday's comparison) (active 13th century Southern Song dynasty, 13th century Hanging scroll; ink on paper 88.9 x 33.5 cm Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art cat no. 1 thank you to the Art Institute of Chicago Taoism in Art exhibit and lessons As the legends surrounding Laozi developed in the Han dynasty, he came to be seen as not only a human sage, but also a divine being who appeared again and again in the world to guide the development of Chinese civilization. He was first worshiped as a god at the Han court in the second century A.D. By the Tang dynasty, he was seen as an imperial ancestor. At the same time, Laozi had enormous popular appeal, and the work attributed to him, the Classic of the Way and Its Power, was widely read, even outside Taoist circles. This painting is attributed to one of the most famous Chan (Zen) Buddhist painters, the monk Muqi. It presents Laozi not as the triumphant deity of religious Taoism, but as a world-weary scholar. Works in the style of Muqi were actually more popular in Japan than in China. This scroll bears the seal of the 14th-century Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, which indicates that the painting had already traveled to Japan within a century of Muqi's death. Because Muqi's style was favored by the powerful shoguns, many Japanese painters immediately began to imitate it. receive a full HTML copy of the daily meditation sent directly to your inbox, please send a note with the words "subscribe tao" in the subject line to duckdaotsu