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the tao, which held the key to ordering the world. Thus, a Taoist would
not rob or kill or destroy not because there were man-made regula-
tions against such behavior, but simply because he would feel or know
intuitively that such actions were against the dictates of the tao.For
Taoists, man-made laws and standards of behavior were undesirable
because they obscured or overlooked the tao. In fact, the appearance
of such laws and the moral and ethical teachings that inevitably
accompanied them were indications that the tao had already been lost.
Taoists believed that humankind had once understood the tao and had
lived in accordance with it, but had taken a wrong turn somewhere in
the course of history and lost track of it. Their hearts no longer felt the
tao, so they were left to their own intellectual devices, which produced
the chaos deplored by Taoists. Taoists longed to return to the golden
age of simplicity and harmony with nature and its tao.
What was this Taoist golden age? It was a time in human experience
right after people had discovered agriculture and lived in small,
isolated agricultural settlements. People lived in contentment with
primitive forms of agricultural technology and their unadorned
homes. Because they were simple and rustic and therefore in intuitive
touch with the tao, they were content with their lives and took no
thought of doing unnatural things like building large cities or raising
huge armies. Their countries (guo) were no larger than villages.
Just when and why did things go wrong? We might blame one
thing: ambition. Ambitious leaders lost track of the tao and this agrar-
ian simplicity and began to imagine how grand it would be if these
small villages and their populations could be gathered into greater
geopolitical units. Transportation and communication networks soon
brought people into greater numbers that were, for Taoists, unnatural
and contrary to the tao. As this trend continued, towns and cities
appeared, with their attendant needs for walled defenses, standing
armies, marketplaces, continuous food sources from the countryside,
and, perhaps most horrifying for a Taoist, man-made laws and ethical
teachings.
The Taoists, then, had a problem with nothing less than civilization
itself. For them, life in the cities, along with all of the artificiality and
obtuseness of intuition it implied, was the beginning of the end.
Humankind could never live in peace until it got back in touch with
the tao and returned to unadorned simplicity. As people were unnatu-
rally combined into progressively larger units, they began paying
more attention to each other than to the tao.Asaresultthetao was
gradually abandoned, and in its place appeared Confucian moral
teachings. For Taoists, any serious discussion of Confucian virtues
