At the very heart of Daoist philosophy is belief in the inevitability of Change. When asked what is the only thing they can be certain of, most Western people would reply “Death”. The Daoist, in contrast, would say “Change”. Change is the bedrock upon which the whole of Daoist philosophy is built. Change means movement, progression, going forward. In other words, the opposite of stability, permanency, and inertia. Moreover, Change goes hand in hand with Time, so Change and Time together are Dao.
Dao is Change
Change is Time
Time is Dao
What is Dao? In dictionaries Dao is translated as Way, or road, but it makes sense to me to infer that The Dao is also Change and Time. I would argue that the ancient Chinese character that represents the meaning of Dao (see Fig. 1) certainly supports this interpretation. The character is in two parts: the section on the right can separately be understood as Head, whilst the section on the left indicates Movement.
Fig. 1
Dao is a pure energy – something like an electric field, which is immensely powerful but cannot be seen, heard, touched or smelled. Thousands of years ago the Chinese realised that this Dao is the force that is responsible for our entire world. We still do not know what electricity is, but we now know that it hurtles through the nerves in our bodies with enough speed to light a hundred watt bulb. Electricity is all around us, and has been since the earth began, but we knew nothing about its qualities until its discovery by Western scientists in the mid nineteenth century. In the twenty first century electricity is the power that keeps our world running, yet we still don’t have the means of storing it in large quantities.
In practical terms, Change means that everything is moving – even the ground beneath our feet. Second by second, minute by minute, everything around us is changing. We too are changing as we age, day by day.
In the 19th century when Charles Darwin proposed the process of evolution, his publications referred only to the non-human world. It was not until the mid-20th century that scientists showed that this continual process of change is happening in humans too. Evolution, the process of mutation, natural selection and adaptation, is part of the whole unified process of change affecting all life on our planet. Moreover, evolution can never be controlled by man. Mutation, which results in alterations in the genetic blueprint of all living things, is inevitable. Furthermore, we cannot predict the consequences.
During the last fifty years there has been extraordinary progress in our knowledge of how the world works. This has come about as a result of the age of technology we have now entered, and especially with the extraordinary growth in the power of computers and satellite equipment. Technology allows us to observe, measure and gather together huge amounts of information that computers can analyse. It is, therefore, possible to both understand the past and predict future developments. We now know that our planet is four and a half billion years old (g4.69) [A billion is represented as having nine noughts, as in Europe, rather than twelve noughts as in Britain] yet only four hundred years ago most Western intellectuals thought that the world began on 23rd October, 4004 BCE.
It was during the 18th c. that a Scottish doctor and farmer, James Hutton, showed us that our planet is unimaginably old by demonstrating that the rocks beneath our feet are in constant movement and evolvement. He examined the cliff face near his home on the south east coast of Scotland and saw that it was formed of rock and sand layers that were not evenly laid, as one might expect, but so highly convoluted that older rocks were lying on top of newer ones. From this he reasoned that the time taken for these strata to evolve had to be considerable (see Fig. 2).
Yet even Hutton, who is recognized as the “father of geology” and “the man who discovered Time,” could not have imagined, as we now know as a result of computer simulations, that around five hundred million years ago, Scotland was part of a landmass called Laurentia floating in the sea close to the South Pole. Moving northwards at a speed of roughly two centimetres a year, this landmass collided with another landmass that included an area that would become England and Europe. Together, they drifted slowly northwards past the equator and into the area that they now occupy on our globe. Their history has been pieced together by geologists examining the rocks that make up the British Isles.
With the help of modern technology geologists predict that the British Isles will continue on their northwards journey – just as all the other continents and islands on our planet will move ceaselessly onwards. Moreover, cameras in space satellites can map and measure so precisely that we now know that the British Isles and North America are pulling away from each other; Iceland is splitting apart; the Red Sea is opening wider; whilst the Mediterranean is closing as it becomes narrower. The first person to suggest that the continents are in motion was a German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener in 1912, but his theory was initially ridiculed by scientists, who described them as “delirious ravings”. He proposed that a super-continent had once existed, which he named Pangaea, and that Pangaea had broken up to become the seven continents we now know.
To completely understand the concept of Change it is vital to understand the role that Time has taken in the story of our planet and how the world works. Even James Hutton could not comprehend the vastness of time involved in the movement of the continents. When modern scientists worked out that the planet is four and a half billion years old, it was just a number – albeit a very large number. but we need to fully engage with this number if we are to accept our place in time. For instance, if you start out on a walk and count each one metre stride as a million years, then you will have to walk for four point six kilometres before you have made a live demonstration of the age of the earth. Again, if you think of the age of our earth as resembling the height of the Empire State Building, then the time that humans have been here can be compared to that of an eyelash placed on the building’s surface. Palaeontologists have evidence that during the vastness of time that has preceded us, there have already been five mass extinctions of life on earth. They could have been caused by climate changes, sea level change, continental drift or other reasons such as an asteroid strike. It took millions of years for the planet to recover from each of these extinctions and, when it did so, life looked very different. Knowing that our earth is constantly on the move can be extremely unsettling for us humans. For all of our short lives we long for stability and security – not least in the world around us. Yet our increasing knowledge, and the wisdom of the Dao, tell us that humans will march onwards until we become extinct.
At present it is believed that the earth is only half way through its life. eventually our planet and our sun will reach the end of their cycles and burn up to become dust before eventually bursting forth again, doubtless in a different form.