What "Tentao" means
Tentao is how my home dialect says 天道, tiandao in Mandarin: "the Way of Heaven."
In everyday Chinese the phrase turns up in sayings like "Heaven rewards the diligent" and "Heaven moves without rest." That is the meaning I want, but traced further back, to before Confucius.
The Book of Documents (Shangshu) has a chapter called "Against Ease" (Wuyi), a warning from the Duke of Zhou to the young king. It opens: "The noble man does not indulge in ease." Then he goes through the old Shang kings and King Wen of Zhou. Those who worked hard and never let things slide reigned long: seventy-five years, fifty years. The later ones who "lived at ease from birth" reigned briefly: "ten years, or seven or eight, or five or six, or four or three."
That, to me, is "Heaven rewards the diligent," said three thousand years ago.
A hymn the Zhou sang to King Wen has another line: "The mandate of Heaven, how deep and solemn, never ceasing." "Heaven moves without rest" says the same thing.
One honest caveat. The two characters 天道 never actually appear in the reliable chapters of the Shangshu. Those chapters speak of "Heaven" and "Heaven's mandate." The often-quoted line "the Way of Heaven blesses the good and punishes the wicked" comes from chapters forged in the fourth century AD. So Tentao borrows the idea, not a phrase from that book.
What this site is
[Author to revise: draft based on the author's own words.]
I write several essay series in Chinese: on China itself, on its neighbours and the overseas Chinese, on world civilizations and religions, on India, on Hunan and Jiangxi, and on everyday life (housing, children, old age).
All of them circle one question: what could hold East Asians together, in China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the overseas Chinese communities around the world? These places once shared Chinese characters, ancestral rites, ritual and festivals. What I am looking for is a shared culture and faith, not a single ethnic identity: each people can keep its own.
I have my own leanings, but every piece tries to give the strongest case against them. Selected pieces are translated here. If you disagree, write to me.
Contact
Write to tentao@duck.com.