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THE TAO OF GENESIS

“In the beginning God created the Heaven and the earth.” –Genesis
“The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth.” --Tao Te Ching

INTRODUCTION
One of the first steps on the journey towards civilization is for a people to develop a story of creation: a tale of how this existence came to be, and what role we as individuals play in the grander scheme of the universe. Creation stories are the bedrock of every religion, and they can often provide some of the most profound insights into the inner psychology of a culture. In an effort to better understand the ideological differences which separate Eastern and Western civilization, this report will offer an ideological analysis of the biblical creation story of Genesis compared to the antithetical philosophy of no-creation found in the Taoist book of the Tao Te Ching.

In the beginning…
The universe of the bible began with the conscious act of an all-powerful god. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” An interesting point to begin this inquiry is to recognize that the Christian god existed prior to creation. This notion of a timeless entity responsible for all that will ever be may account for the only similarity between Christian and Taoist ideology. One of the salient characteristics of Taoist belief is that the universe was never created. In the words of the great scholar of mythology, Joseph Campbell, for the Taoists “there never was a time when time was not.”

Where Christians posit the act of creation onto a conscious entity, a god that predates the heaven and the earth, the Taoist recognize a timeless and unnamable entity that has existed for eternity. The closest statement of creation we find in the Tao Te Ching is this lone passage, “The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth.”

Division and unity
The god of Genesis created the heaven and the earth in six days, and his first task in this monumental undertaking provides a central breaking point between Eastern and Western religious thought: God started by dividing. “And God said, let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that is was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

The creation story of Genesis is about dividing and categorizing; about naming and defining the differences within creation. “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

This process, or even the concept of a universe divided, categorized, and named simply cannot fit within Taoist philosophy. The most popular symbol in Taoism, the Yin and the Yang, is a metaphorical representation of the inherit unity of opposites. Implied in the symbol is a belief that something cannot exist without nothing: man without woman, up without down, dark without light. They are all as one, essential aspects of the same universal force—which cannot be named.

The universe of the Tao Te Ching is an inherently interdependent organic whole, an uncarved block holding within it the unity of opposites. “The way is forever nameless. Though the uncarved block is small, only when it is cut are there names. Thus something and nothing produce each other.”

Continued on posting: The Tao of Genesis Part II