Taoism, Sufism, and Western Thought(2025)

A wondering conversation between Toism, Sufism, Jacque Derida, and Carl G Jung.

Part 1 Taoism and Sufism

Big topics, I know. Many will be skeptical about the idea that Sufism, rooted in Islam, can have anything in common with Zen and Taoism. Taoism (道家, Daojia) arose in Warring-States–era China; Sufism (تصوّف, taṣawwuf) crystalised in the formative centuries of Islam from Arabia to Persia. No manuscript trail shows direct borrowing, yet classical mystics in both streams describe reality, practice and attainment in strikingly similar patterns.

This “essay” is a study of “comparative metaphysics” that bypasses historical influence to probe the structure of spiritual experience itself.

Emphasis on the word “essay” here because my writing is nothing but a playground. « Essai » is the French word for essay and it originally meant an attempt. When you are writing, it is an attempt to think. It is a word that defies categorization because its very nature is open to experimentation. Bear with me as I learn how to write.

1 The Ineffable Absolute

Taoist term	Sufi term	Shared motif
道 (Dao) — the nameless source of Heaven-and-Earth	الله (Allah) as “ﻻ إله إلا هو — He beyond predicates”	Ultimate reality is ontologically prior to language; it can only be pointed to through negation or paradox.

The Daodejing’s “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao” echoes Ibn ʿArabī’s assertion that the Real “has no name or attribute in Itself; all names are relations.”

A miniature of a Sufi Saint supplicating- Unkown Artist

2 Cosmology of Emanation and Return

Taoism: the Dao “gives birth” to yin-yang polarity, which begets the ten-thousand things.

Sufism: the Real’s self-disclosure (tajallī) cascades through the “five presences,” culminating in the sensible world.

Both maps read creation as gradations of one reality, not separate substances. Mystical realisation is therefore a return movement: fanāʾ (annihilation in the Real) parallels the Taoist fan wan fu yi (“the ten-thousand return to the One”).

Outing to Zhang Gong's Grotto Shitao (Zhu Ruoji)

3 Practice: Surrendered Action

Taoist	Sufi	Convergent dynamic
無為 (wu wei) — “non-forcing” alignment with the spontaneous flow	توكّل (tawakkul) — radical trust in the Real’s unfolding	The practitioner relaxes egoic will, letting cosmic rhythm act through them.

Inner alchemy (neidan) refines jing → qi → shen; Sufis perform dhikr to polish the heart. Both arts link breath control, body subtlety and recollection of origin.

4 Poetic & Paradoxical Language

Mystics favour apophatic (via negativa) and image-rich speech:

Water metaphors (柔 vs. ماء) for supple power.

Empty valley / desert heart for receptivity.

Animal symbols (crane, phoenix ↔ Simurgh, hoopoe) guiding the journey.

The rhetorical strategy is identical: unhinge literal logic so intuition can glimpse the numinous.

5 Transmission & Community

Lineage secrecy: Taoist dan-dao manuals and Sufi silsila chains are both veiled, handed mouth-to-ear.

Master-disciple bond: Zhuang-Chou stories of fish-hooks of words mirror Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s “Whoever travels without a guide needs two hundred years for a two-day journey.”

The pedagogy emphasises direct taste over scholastic proof.

6 Ethos

Both uphold humility, compassion, and simplicity as signs of realised oneness. The Taoist sage “does not compete”; the Sufi friend of God (walī) “stands at the door to serve creaturely need.” Ethics are not imposed rules but spontaneous fragrance of unity.

7 Key Divergences

Dimension	Taoism	Sufism
Ultimate	Impersonal “Way”	Personal, loving God
Cosmology	Cyclic, non-teleological	Linear creation → resurrection
Social matrix	Largely extra-institutional	Entwined with Sharīʿa & mosque life
Language	Chinese pictograms, nature idiom	Arabic-Persian, Qurʾānic allusion

Thus similarity is structural, not doctrinal.

8 Why am I looking into these parallels?

I am curious how do such two seemingly different schools of thoughts converge:

Universal mystic phenomenology: human consciousness, when pushed to its horizon, reports parallel states (silence, unity, surrender)

Axial-age patterning: both traditions matured within iron-age empires undergoing cosmopolitical crisis, prodding thinkers toward trans-social “ultimate concern.”

Possible Silk Road osmosis: while no text proves direct borrowing, Sino-Islamic caravans by the 8th c. did ferry ideas; echoes are plausible but not required to explain the depth-level convergence.

Taoism and Sufism, though geographically distant and theologically distinct, map the journey from multiplicity back to an ineffable ground, valorise non-coercive action, employ paradox and poetry, and transmit wisdom through intimate lineages. Their convergences invite a broader hypothesis: the mystical core of the world’s traditions may express a limited set of archetypal patterns, surfacing independently wherever seekers interrogate the roots of being and self. Comparative study therefore enriches each path by revealing what is uniquely cultural and what might be universally human.

If Taoist and Sufi mystics meet in the silence beneath words, what happens when we bring language’s most relentless critic and the psyche’s great cartographer into the same room?

Part 2: Taoism and Western Theories of Meaning and the Unconscious

When I first read the Daodejing, it felt like the book was whispering through the cracks of language itself: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the constant Tao.” It immediately reminded me of Jacques Derrida dismantling Western metaphysics with the claim that every word is haunted by what it is not, a restless play he calls différance. It also made me think of Carl G. Jung mapping the depths of the psyche, insisting that our conscious life is merely one pole of a larger dance whose forgotten partner he called the shadow.

Then I gasped.. everything is connected.

Three thinkers, three very different contexts, Warring-States China, post-structuralist Paris, and early-twentieth-century Zürich, yet each circles the same strange insight: wholeness hides in the gaps, the absences, the places where certainty gives way to mystery.

Naming and the Loss of Presence

Lao-tzu opens his classic with a paradox: the moment you name the Dao, you have already stepped away from it. Derrida, writing across millennia, argues almost the same thing in a different accent: the Western quest for self-present meaning (“the metaphysics of presence”) founders because signs only gain sense by differing from—and deferring to—other signs. In both cases, the absolute slips through our fingers like water; we can gesture toward it, but never bottle it. Where the Chinese sage prescribes yielding to the nameless flow, the French philosopher prescribes patient, playful reading that never pretends to land on a final, stable meaning.

Binary Oppositions

Taoist cosmology famously draws the circle of yin and yang, black dot nested in white, white dot nested in black, each eternally turning into the other. Derrida looks at the West’s great conceptual couples (speech/writing, mind/body, man/woman) and hears an unspoken hierarchy in every pair. His method of deconstruction loosens the screws, showing how each privileged term secretly leans on what it tries to dominate. If Derrida had chosen a symbol, it might well have been the taijitu; in Taoist eyes, hierarchy dissolves and only rhythmic complementarity remains.

Emptiness That Generates Everything

Lao-tzu calls wu—non-being, emptiness—the “mother of the ten-thousand things.” Derrida’s “trace” captures a similar intuition: every presence bears the mark of absence that enables it. Emptiness, far from impotent, is productive. Jung, meanwhile, peers inward and discovers that psyche, too, has its fertile void. Dreams process symbols our daylight selves cannot yet hold; synchronicities stitch events together without linear cause. What looks like nothingness becomes a womb for new form.

From Wu Wei to Deconstructive Reading

Where the Taoist sage practices wu wei (acting without forced effort) Derrida practices a kind of wu wei of the page: reading that refuses to dominate the text, letting multiple possibilities arise, resisting the rush to closure. Jung’s clinical stance echoes this: he listens for what the unconscious wants to say instead of steering the patient toward a predetermined cure. In each domain, wisdom appears as supple responsiveness rather than rigid control.

Jungian Alchemy and Taoist Inner Alchemy

Jung’s late writings on alchemy describe psychological transformation as a three-stage fire: black dissolution (nigredo), white purification (albedo), red integration (rubedo). Taoist inner alchemy (neidan) traces a strikingly similar arc—refining raw bodily energy (jing), distilling it into subtle breath (qi), and crystallizing spirit (shen). Both traditions imagine change not as linear progress but as cyclical transmutation, a return to the source carrying newfound coherence.

Again, why am I writing this?

The three voices differ, of course. Taoism ultimately trusts a cosmic spontaneity (ziran); Derrida refuses any metaphysical resting place, committing himself to perpetual questioning; Jung speaks of an emergent Self that reconciles opposites within the psyche. Yet all agree on one practical point: the human task is not to eradicate the void but to befriend it. Isn’t that crazy?

So the next time my plans unravel, my words fail, my unconscious ambushes me with a dream of impossible geometry, I will pause. I will feel the contours of that absence. Lao-tzu would say it is the doorway of the Mysterious Female. Derrida would call it the play of the trace. Jung would invite me to dialogue with the shadow. I can choose whichever language suits me; the invitation is the same. In the gap where certainty dies, something alive is waiting to be born.

And I think that is beautiful.

Sources

isrgpublishers.comtraditionalhikma.com

philpapers.orgkahfmagazine.com

https://www.with.org/tao_te_ching_en.pdf

ucpress.edu

ucpress.eduisrgpublishers.com

kahfmagazine.com