Why Laozi Choose Dao (道) To Represent His Idea?

Phil-291
Section: 13153 Horace Wang
Dao Paper Oct.10

Why Laozi choose “Dao（道）” to represent his idea?

Without any doubt, Dao(道) is the most important idea in the book Dao De Jing. However, it seems a little improper to use the character “Dao(道)” compared to many other better options to describe this power. In one explanation, Dao means the reason and order of the whole world. According to this argument, Laozi should use the characters that mean reason, like “理” or “序”. On the other hand, according to Laozi, Dao is the origin of the myriad things that exist now. In this way, Laozi should simply call this power “始”or “源”. Although “Dao” had been used to represent the ultimate truth in Yi Jing, or other books before, Laozi was able to choose any character he preferred, because the Daoism was original by Laozi. According to Laozi’s personality, he will not try to make the content more readable by giving up the accuracy of the language. In Chinese, Dao(道) also means the road or pathway. Laozi doesn’t give too much explanation about pathway idea in his book. However, Laozi chose Dao over other characters, so there must be another idea that Laozi doesn’t want to give directly to the readers. I will try to explain the

Dao can be also known as road or path. Laozi doesn’t like his idea to be fully understand by everyone. He says “道可道，非常道” (Dao De Jing, 1) and “下士闻道大笑之。不笑不足以为道” (Dao De Jing, 41). We can see clearly he doesn’t put all of his thought into a simple way. I believe the system of pathway is one of them. This tree model illustrates some key point of Laozi’s idea: Dao is everywhere; Dao is protecting us from misbehaving; We are all connected to the myriad things in this world through Dao; Dao has no specific body; We can reach learn the world by study Dao; We should minimize our desire, otherwise we will be too “heavy” and