On the Substance of the Way (Dao)
On the Substance of the Way (Dao)

Summary/Abstract: The philosophical analyses of the recently discovered two important ancient Chinese philosophical texts: The Guodian Laozi, (found in a tomb of an ancient Chinese aristocrat whose burial is dated between the mid-fourth and early third century B. C.), especially its third (until now unknown) part of Laozi’s Dao De jing, with its original "theory of creation", as well as The Huangdi sijing (also until now unknown text), found in an ancient tomb near Mawangdui, especially its fourth book Dao yuan (A Substance of the Dao), refute an assumption that the early Chinese taoistic texts are mainly an ethical and politico-logical, but not basically metaphysical texts. In accordance with it, the basic philosophical categories used in them, such as the Way (Dao), or its universal metaphysic substratum De, their cosmic and life energy qi, etc... have evidently a dialectic character of a non-immutable and non-homogeneous metaphysical substance which is in general an everlasting synergistic process of an unending bipolarly dialectic energy of being. This process is, in itself, immanently creating and liquidating whole Universe(=Heavens) on the base of Yin-Yang dialectic bipolarity of everlasing changes. The author of this paper wants to demonstrate it on some special examples from both newly discovered Chinese Taoistic texts and in accordance with it also the unique philosophical value of classical Chinese metaphysic in the history of World philosophy.

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