The Ethics of Laozi: the Concept of Ziran and Zi 自 in the Laozi
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Speaker: Mr GUAN Yinlin 管銀霖 (Edinburgh): y.guan@ed.ac.uk
The common view of the ethics of Laozi is, broadly speaking, that it is merely encouraging people in general terms to live detached lives and to act with the flow. Some scholars (such as Livia Kohn) even go further to argue that there is no attempt at ethical discussion in the Laozi. They argue thatthe book is mostly written for rulers or emperors in order to dissuade them from engaging in war which would in turn plunge the people into misery and suffering. However, if we read the Laozi in detail, and carefully, we can see that (based on a contemporary understanding of ethics in general) the Laozi contains ethics to help people understand how to live happy lives. We can also obtain that there are many ethical discussions scattered throughout the chapters, which look into and detail how people can live happy lives by following the Dao, the De and have well-being in society by practicing Wuwei and living according to Ziran etc. It is true that there is no explicit and obvious ethical system of Laozi based on any systematic doctrine; more likely, it always distracts sight from systematic ethics to specific concepts such as Ziran , Wuwei which, whilst being relevant to the ethics of Laozi , due to its writing style makes it seem that they are not related to any ethical discussion. In this paper, I will draw a full picture of the ethical concept of Ziran in Laozi by going through the connotation of Ziran and the concept of Zi 自 in detail and propose that Laozi is not only a book for rulers or emperors, but also for the ordinary people to lead them to fulfilled lives and well-being in according with the imitation of the self-movement of the Dao which connotes the concept of Ziran. Theconcept of Ziran also connotes the concept of Zi 自.