The Centro Cultural de China in Madrid (General Pardiñas, 73) presents its 23rd meeting of the China Between the Lines Reading Club on Thursday 16 May at 6.30 p.m., with a reading of classical Chinese texts with Tao Te Ching, a compilation attributed to Lao Tse, one of the greatest treasures of the perennial wisdom of humanity.
The work and Taoism will be discussed with Mariola Moncada, an expert in Chinese history and culture. There are numerous versions of the Tao Te Ching in Spanish and to attend the session it is advisable to have read at least one of them, although we will use the one published by the Alianza publishing house in 2017 as a reference.
The teachings of the Tao Te Ching or Book of the Way and of Virtue, a compilation attributed to Lao Tse, belong to the vast store of ancient oriental wisdom. This splendid version of the work conveys to the reader in all its purity the spirit of the Tao, a system of thought, or rather, a way of conceiving the world and of being in it, which advocates a return to elementariness, to simplicity, to emptiness, to the balance of the complementary, to detachment, to surrender to the Tao, or absolute, through the abandonment of all concepts, judgements and desires; to stillness or non-action as the “mistress of action”, which, far from passivity, points to the conversion of the individual into a channeler of universal energy.
In these feverish times in which mind and will are privileged for the sake of the dubious effectiveness of an “always more” behind which perhaps hides a blind flight forward, perhaps it is opportune to open this book to any page and try, with an open spirit, not to read it and allow oneself to be impregnated by its powerful serenity. Version and presentation by Gabriel García-Noblejas.
