Anything you recommend reading if I want to explore the intersection of Taoism and Marxism?
Can tell you that Mao created a Criticize lin, criticize Confucius campaign. Westerners take this as destroying eastern religions, but on the contrary it was designed to center Marxist aspects of specific religions in discussions and teachings. Essentially it was an extension of liberation theology
That sounds like a worthwhile read, is there a good starting point for that specific part of the topic?
idk if there are many english speaking texts relating to this. here is course material on this subject from beijing university. you could run it through a translator
http://www.shehui.pku.edu.cn/upload/editor/file/20220118/20220118160716_5274.pdf
here is a website that has the pdf if you wanna just use a browser’s translate option
Essentially it was an extension of liberation theology
that sounds like a really clunky metaphor that’s trying too hard to Christianise Chinese religion. They’re entirely different
im of the opinion that liberation theology is just interpreting any religion through a marxist lens, not just the natopedia definition that purely is about christianity. its a thing that happens a lot and to constrain the definition to christianity is weird
Honestly, I’ve just been reading the classic Tao texts. It’s been a personal project and I don’t think there’s much of an academic interest. At least until I saw this.
Best way would be to just read the Dao De Jing (essentially a short collection of poetic philosophical points), which is the core text, and then the Zhuangzi (a larger text created over centuries, expanding on the topic with various characters - quite humorous). With the latter, being the product of dozens of authors, in a few chapters you can feel the philosophy being bent towards “actually, political hierarchies and wealth disparity are natural law and therefore cool”, but they rather stand out.
Ursula Le Guin’s translation is my favorite, but the differences between translations are interesting - both texts have a lot of fun with the ambiguity of language.
