Tao

[T]he Neo-taoists rejected any interpretation of the Tao which would make it conceptually or ontologically separate from phenomena themselves. Accordingly, there is no longer any conception of the Tao as a cosmologically antecedent matrix from which the ten thousand things evolved, nor is there any understanding of the Tao as some sort of metaphysical substance inhering in things. Instead, the manner in which things exist singly and collectively, and the way in which they exist in harmonious interrelationship, is what is meant by "Tao."

---Francis H. Cook---