Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

Ready? Set, here we go again. 

“Pathways” (Dao道) in classical Daoist discourses, not really “ready-made,” tend to make themselves anew quite readily, all the way through; “way-making (dao) that can be put into words,” “eloquently couched” as such (信言不美 美言不信Daodejing 道德經CH 8), “is not really way-making” (道可道非常道), says the old sage (老子), who also says that “those who know will not say it, and those who say would not know it” (知者不言 言者不知). What is he saying? Dao is effable and ineffable. So what? What are we supposed to do?

Today, which GPS will take us to this Daoist “door of all wonders” (衆妙)? What kind of thresholding, not just gatekeeping, would be possible? Taking the auto-poetic generativity of such good old Daoist paradoxes and ironies as a philosophically renewable energy, this seminar, the first in the series, on the Daoist PhiloPoetics of transitive ambiguation introduces ways to reboot Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (庄子) translingually, focusing on their metamorphic — metaphorical and metaphysical — avant-gardism, their waiting (weiding未定 Zhuangzi 04) game.