with all obvious caveats of course—i think part of the reason why i can give myself that permission (and this applies to the whole daoism thing in general) is the anecdotes and ideas are not easy to stereotype or reify in a way that is distinguishable from like, a totally vulgar conception of Zen Buddhism or whatever—at least in the western world i've experienced. so instead all the disappointing distillates end up elsewhere. not only does the text fundamentally and constantly attempt to stop you from doing that reification, from the idea of textual or conceptual authority altogether (of course this isn't unique to daoism), it doesn't even give you the chance to carelessly go in and strip it until it's just hollow, disjoint impressions or aesthetics, if that makes sense at all.
to me, a lot of western "new age" movements (to cast a worryingly wide net, hopefully the category makes sense) and thought seems like it wants to engage in a revolutionary, transcendent pantheism to transform the self, but ultimately just ends up conceptualizing one giant, chosen, Plato-and-Abrahamically-tinged Cartesian Individual. taking "eastern" ideas of understanding the world in terms of relation rather than in terms of substance, and accidentally just making "relation" an ur-substance to worship. maybe that's where a lot of orientalism comes from, or maybe i'm off-base, but i think it's been worth me thinking over and making these judgments, never having felt like i had the permission to engage with this sort of transcendence-tinged stuff before like i said. maybe Zhuangzi (and hopefully work it's influenced, excited to get into that) has a knack for preventing those sorts of reified conceptions in my mind. and it makes me feel like learning is possible, that all the bespoke lived experiences haven't already been experience for me, that this is something that is for me if i want it.
another thing, it doesn't feel like all the material—text, practice, and otherwise—has been totally hollowed out and metabolized by moths decades or centuries before i was even born. it doesn't feel like entering a reliquary, a reconstruction, or a ruins, it feels like i can engage with it from where i am on my own terms.
and if you want the flashy surface elements, the surrealism, the social contrarianism, the poetry, everything has a punchier analogue elsewhere. or it's just happenstance and/or the Daode Jing just happened to take up all the space in the long-term western zeitgeist first.
