Dao is untranslatable but it is best rendered as the ‘way’ or ‘way of life’. To live in harmony with the Dao was regarded as essential if the human being was to realise her full potential during her time on Earth.
Qi Bo continued:
“There was temperance in eating and drinking. Their hours of rising and retiring were regular and not disorderly and wild. By these means the ancients kept their bodies united with their souls, so as to fulfil their allotted span completely, measuring unto a hundred years before they passed away. Nowadays people are not like this; they use wine as beverage and they adopt recklessness as usual behaviour. They enter the chamber of love in an intoxicated condition; their passions exhaust their vital forces … they do not know how to find contentment within themselves; they are not skilled in the control of their spirits … For these reasons they reach only one half of the hundred years and then they degenerate.”
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