Daoism Explained: From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory

Ideas Explained, Book 1

By: Hans-Georg Moeller

Narrated by: Simon Barber

Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Hans-Georg Moeller has achieved the perfect blend with Daoism Explained. It is both a fascinating introduction on Daoist thought as well as an original and insightful contribution to Eastern philosophy. This book will take the place of The Tao of Pooh by Hoff. Like that book, Doaism Explained offers a comprehensive presentation of Daoist philosophy that is interesting and easy to follow.

The study sheds new light on many Doaist allegories by showing how modern translations often concealed the wit and humor of the Chinese original or imposed alien philosophical frameworks on them. It attempts to take away the metaphysical and Christian disguises with which Daoist philosophy has been obscured by Western interpretations in the past 100 years.

The book is published by Open Court. The audiobook will be published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2004 Carus Publishing Company (P)2019 Redwood Audiobooks

definitely worth a second listen

very well articulated, some ideas are easier to grasp than others, I'm just gonna listen more carefully a second time around, but very much a banger.

Fantastic

If the topic is of interest and you are comfortable with academic lecture type delivery it’s excellent on all fronts.

Re-Easternizing and Demystifying the Way

This is like sitting in on a university class with a professor very classically trained and practiced in using the voice. But that is about the only nod to Western classicism. In it's exhaustive clarity, this book divorced me from that, the mysticism and other notions that have grown up from the misunderstandings of various translators have inserted into their works. And I am grateful to Moeller. There are ideas I disagree with and that do not wholly line up with modern demonstratable knowledge, but that is okay within the daoist framework. Live with and use contradictions. Creativity is found in ambiguity. I am trying out the Taoist perspective because of Moeller's book.

I have downloaded audible and book of Ames and Hall's "Dao De Jing" as this, too, seems to aim at seeing daoism in a similar light, in a similar fashion.

A clarifying presentation of the Dao

Moeller’s book goes a long way in distilling classical Daoism from the usually poor western misunderstandings of it.

An odd work, plods, as it well might, but then...

... in fitting Taoist style, a much deeper journey begins to unfold. The odd part stems partly from the varied content here. We start with some scholarly-historic rendering of various writings, characters, and interpreters through the years. This is crisp and has a pretty conventional academic sound to it. Then, the book seems to change as the author holds forth on certain apparently personal (though highly informed and considered) interpretations of various texts. This can come across in a sort of monotone at times (which perhaps we can chalk up to the narrator). But then, and I would say very effectively in a specifically Taoist way (as I understand it), the meanings appear to me, almost, and forgive me this weird image of my own, like a sort of anagram emerging in my mind and understanding, against the odd intonations of this book. Much of this is authentic for me, and as a long-time student of Taoism, I find new insights, or new angles and depths to existing insights. But this all hasn't worked in the way I normally expect a book to "function" and neatly impart meaning to me. This is a little mysterious, and I'm sure it is not everyone's cup of tea. So if you have a fairly evolved interest in Taoism, and plenty of patience and open-mindedness, and you are ready to sort of let the mist of this coalesce while a sometimes seemingly plodding and maybe even dull recitation proceeds, check it out. I am bearing in mind the passages in Tao te Ching itself that talk about how the sage seems dull and aimless, and I was able to find a new sort of resonance with that here. But there is more elegance behind the words than I am imparting. I apologize for my inarticulation. If that makes any sense at all, perhaps this IS your cup of tea. It is an acquired taste, I am very happy to immerse in. It brought a new level of all this to me.

I would say this is about three books in one -- which I turn out to like just fine.

Brilliant

Somewhere in the middle of the book, for about 10 seconds, I started to think "now I'm not so sure about..." Then he clarified the thought and I said "ah."

condescending

It's as if I went and wrote a book about the Bible and intentionally left out God or actually explained why you thinking it was about GOD is stupid

not well done although somewhat informative

starting to see why most reviews are good considering the requirements if less than four stars