History & overview · every faith gets one
The Way that can be told is not the eternal Way.
The Chinese tradition of the Tao — the unnameable current the universe moves in. To live well is to stop forcing and start flowing: wu wei, effortless action. It gave China its counter-melody to Confucian duty, and the world the Tao Te Ching.
The founding
The story says a court archivist wearied of the state and rode west; at the last gate the gatekeeper begged him to write down what he knew. He left five thousand characters — the Tao Te Ching — and vanished.
Its founding is bound to Laozi (semi-legendary) — c. 500 BCE.
What it holds
Reality. The Tao — an unnameable current beneath all things.
The divine. The Dao itself is not a being and is not worshipped. Above it in the temples sit the Three Pure Ones, emanations rather than persons; below them a vast civil service of gods with ranks, jurisdictions, in-trays and the possibility of demotion, headed by the Jade Emperor. Ordinary practice is addressed to the ones with local jurisdiction — Mazu on the coast, Guandi in the shop, the Earth God on the corner, the Kitchen God over the stove. A priest addresses the high gods by written memorial, in the correct form, because that is how a bureaucracy works..
Death and after. Immortality sought — literal for some, alignment with the Tao for others.
The line
descent is public here — where it came from, what left itBranches:
The Attention Order — What you look at, you become.