ABSTRACT
Dao is way-making–‘an easy flowing stream.’ Its emphasis, and hers, is process. Way and making are themselves dialectically related, with way and making two processes. The first is open and the latter closed, each giving way to the other. World is only notionally fixed for the moment. Every world has its way of being what it is, however provisionally, and every way comes momentarily complete as a world. Both processes happen without just happening; making happens by way of being made to happen. Way-making is an Eastern way of talking and world-making a Western way, but both ways pretty much say the same thing. The very term world-making gains much of its force by subverting this tendency. The language of doing and making is surely universally human, and so must the language of purpose, of goals and plans, means and ends. More abstractly, function links structures through processes; every ‘system’ is a world.
