How to Live
the ethic — what it asks of a life
The hundred and eighty precepts.
Attributed to Lord Lao and binding on clergy from the fourth century. Alongside the expected prohibitions on killing, theft and abuse of office sit clauses forbidding draining marshes, burning wild country, felling trees without cause and disturbing birds and animals in their season. They are genuinely ancient, and Taoist environmental argument has leaned on them heavily.
held by most
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Keep the Three Treasures.
Compassion, frugality, and not daring to be first in the world — Laozi's entire ethics in three items, each a form of yielding that outlasts force.
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The ledger of merit and demerit.
A printed book with a scoring system: saving a life is a hundred merits, speaking harshly to a parent is a demerit, and you total the day before bed. It was a mass practice among the late imperial gentry. Its own compilers raised the obvious objection — that scoring corrupts the act — and answered that the habit outlives the motive.
⚖ contested within
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The account outlives you.
Chengfu, inherited burden: unresolved wrong is passed down, so present misfortune may be an ancestor's debt rather than your own fault. It is a theory of suffering that does not blame the sufferer, and it also makes the living permanently responsible for the dead, which is why so much of the practice is funerary.
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Two clergies, two rules.
Quanzhen clerics leave the family, eat no meat, drink nothing, marry nobody, own nothing and never cut their hair. Zhengyi priests marry, eat meat, live at home and hand the office to a son. Both are fully Taoist, both have been for eight centuries, and neither has conceded anything to the other.
⚖ contested within
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Do not be first.
Take the low ground, do not contend, prefer what everyone else has passed over. The complication is that the Daodejing is addressed to rulers and reads as statecraft — the one who does not contend ends up unopposed — which makes the humility strategic. The text is quite open about this.
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Nourish life.
Sleep, breath, diet, sex and temper are religious matters, and neglecting the body is a fault rather than a discipline. Taoist medical and religious literature are the same literature, and figures like Sun Simiao are simultaneously physicians and saints. This is the clearest line between Taoism and the ascetic traditions.
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