In the Comments section below, my friend Karl takes me to task for last week’s post on The TAO of Journalism, where I wrote about having taken the TAO Pledge to be Transparent, Accountable and Open in this blog.
Describing himself as “a sometime journalist and a self-styled Taoist,” Karl says journalistic transparency, accountability and openness have nothing to do with the concept of “tao.” He doesn’t charge me or the Washington News Council with word abuse, but I think that’s the gist.
(Karl does like that the Wade-Giles spelling “tao” is being used instead of the official pinyin spelling “dao,” and he makes a thoughtful argument for use of Wade-Giles spellings for all Chinese spiritual terms—but that’s another subject.)
I have concluded that tao/dao is simply a word with more than one meaning, in Chinese and in English. There’s tao/dao “lite” and tao/dao “heavy.” Continue reading
