Avatar - Season 1, Episode 4

Scenes from the Warriors of Kyoshi

Images credit - Avatar: The Last Airbender - Nickelodeon

​In this episode of Avatar, Sokka humbles himself and softens his rigid and narrow sexist attitudes when he meets the Kyoshi Warriors, who employ principles of Daoist martial arts.

​The article and video movie trailer below delve into the depths of Dao/Tao.

The Hidden Hierarchy of Existence [1]

By Kurt Almqvist

In 'The Encounter of Man and Nature,' Seyyed Hossein Nasr tries to show that, for a thorough understanding of the present disharmony between man and nature, it is not enough to have a detailed knowledge of the outward factors involved -- physical, chemical and biological processes, available natural resources, population growth, the economic distribution among peoples, etc. -- nor merely of man's egoism and lust for gain: the causes of disharmony lie beyond all material as well as moral factors. What we call "nature," i.e. our organic environment, is in its innermost workings something other and greater than the quantitative sum of its venous elements: these are held together and organized by a qualitative reality, which transcends it and is at the same time its common innermost life-marrow. In no other way can we explain the harmony of nature as a whole to which we -- consciously or unconsciously -- aspire.

This insight exists in all Eastern religions, as also among the so-called nature-people, for instance the American Indians, and it existed also in the West before the present age. In one chapter of the book, Nasr explains each of the great world religions from this standpoint. Most clearly do we find these connections in the spiritual traditions of China, Taoism and neo-Confucianism, through their concrete imagery: "The ways of men are conditioned by those of earth, the ways of earth by those of heaven, the ways of heaven by those of the Tao, and the Tao comes into being by itself," says the Tao-Te-Ching, the most important scripture of Taoism. Tao is thus the basic origin of all, and to preserve the harmony with himself and with the rest of creation, man must first see that he maintains his unity with this principle (also from Tao-Te-Ching.)

The World has a First Cause, which may be regarded as the Mother of the World. When one has found the Mother, one can know the Child. Knowing the Child and still keeping the Mother, to the end of his days he shall suffer no harm.

What enables man to arrive at this vision of oneness is the symbolic character in the elements -- forms, colors and appearances -- that go to build up nature. For all these qualitative elements have their essential reality and task in their ability to show us the way to corresponding elements of a "higher" sphere of reality with less rigid and confined boundaries than those of the physical-material. This sphere, in turn, has its analogical correspondences in a still higher one, and so on, all the way to the ultimate origin of all things, the unity of all, which the Chinese call Tao.

[1] The Hidden Hierarchy of Existence

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