Tao · 道 · the Way

The Way — the source and course of everything, and the book's first word about it is that no word reaches it: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. It is not a god, not a person, not a thing; it is the nameless out of which the named ten thousand things arise and to which they return. This is the door's deepest rhyme: the Kabbalah's Ein Sof, the Without-End, is likewise beyond every name and attribute, the silence behind even the letters of the Name — and its nearer face, Ayin, the divine Nothing, is the very emptiness the Tao makes its home. Two traditions a world apart, each beginning by refusing to name the beginning.