From Daoism to World Religions: Light in Our Wisdom Traditions for Love Unity and Peace

• In Event: Peaceful Solutions to Challenges of Pandemic: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives From the East to the West

Abstract

This paper presents a view that there is an integral thread among world religions and cultures, from Daoism and Confucianism to Buddhism, Hinduism, Indigenous Spirituality and the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Although various terms are used, they all posit there is a vital energy, a spirit that is based on Love, that propels all life forms. All spring from this Love energy and are unified by this energy. During the Axial Age 2500 years ago, when humanity entered a very dark era with wars and disintegrating societies, major religions or philosophies as we know today appeared. Common among these traditions were revelations about love, unity, and peace, urging humanity to base its survival and prosperity on love, compassion, forgiveness, interconnection and cooperation. Sages or great spiritual teachers like Laozi, Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Jewish prophets and Hindu prophets who wrote the Upanishads, came to their revelations through inner work, by which they harbored great energy and dramatically expanded their awareness. They took exploring the self as a science and saw life as a journey to find Love and the higher Self. In their teaching, virtues are technologies for humans to establish a relationship with each other and nature, emulating the harmony of the solar system and the Milky Way. Today, science has discovered that atoms that make up our body have a similar structure like that of the solar system, and we are vibrational strings/energies connected to All That Exist.

Thus, we must find ways that effectively take us to embrace and embody Love, Unity, Peace and Hope. This requires a new form of education that greatly elevates our awareness and integrates our body, mind, heart and spirit. Through a cosmology of interconnectedness and an epistemology of embodied knowing through inner work, the new education revives our capacities for interbeing and resonance, opening ways for people to see each other as equal and sacred beings, and to tune into each other’s life force and embrace the perennial teaching of the sages which is what we do to others we do to ourselves, and that elevating others is to elevate ourselves.

Through inner work, we can, as Zhuangzi said, “connect and communicate with the Spirit of All That Exist in Heaven and Earth.” We realize we are connected to a divine force, be it called Dao or Brahmin or God or Allah or the sacred spirit. Enlightenment, as the ultimate pursuit in all religions, becomes literal when the golden flower hidden amongst the dust of time and mystical traditions is recovered through our turning inward. In the pursuit of enlightenment, Daoism stresses the simultaneous cultivation of virtues and our vital life energy Qi, and so do the other religions and spiritual traditions. In all, we are at a critical juncture in human history that requires us to harbor what a Confucian classic, the Great Learning, teaches us, that we should learn to love all, be kind and shine light of love and hope to the world.

Author

• Jing Lin, University of Maryland - College Park