Introduction

This initial chapter outlines the point of departure, contexts, and questions of the subsequent chapters of this work, offering a preliminary sketch of the idea and varieties of Daoism and relativizing the overly static distinction between philosophical and religious Daoism. It proposes elucidating the varieties of early Daoist discourses in a philosophical way to reimagine a Daoist-inflected environmental philosophy and political ecology of nourishing life, attunement and responsive action, and emptiness on the basis of early Daoist sources in relation to our present interpretive and social-political situation and in response to contemporary ecological crisis-tendencies.