Understanding oriental culture is a must to do business in Asia.
While for Confucian thought the ideal man is the one who stands out for moral qualities and grows with study, who adheres to ritual norms and the role he plays in society, for Daoism the ideal man is the one who knows how to conform to natural course of things and rejects any practice that distances man from the original unity, thus placing himself beyond society and the series of norms it provides.
Two such opposite perspectives have not only been able to coexist, but have posed themselves as two complementary alternatives in the development of Chinese society.
Dao that as Dao can be taken, Eternal Dao is not, / [since] name that can be named, Eternal Name is not. / “Nameless” is, of Heaven and Earth, start, / “has-name” that that of the Ten Thousand Beings she is Mother./ So that, in the constant cessation of desire, one contemplates the prodigy of Her, / and in constant desire she contemplates the manifest feature.
Few works in the world are capable of making one savor so much meaning in so few lines. These verses, which appear so obscure and unattainable, seem to suggest that there is something that escapes understanding, that their true meaning is kept beyond words, in a dimension that they cannot tap into but towards which they can only “hint”. This further dimension is none other than that of the Dao (道), the ineffable principle and origin of all things, which the human perspective, by partial definition, cannot understand in its authentic nature.
To deepen this interesting reading by Sara Francescato, I refer to the source china-files.com.