A friend wrote me last week asking for some advice.  While not an orthodox Taoist he has been studying the tradition for many years, and finding himself in a difficult living situation, turned to the I-Ching oracle for assistance. He found the response puzzling and had difficulty reconciling it with his understanding of the Taoist philosophy.   He wrote:

“The Zang Zi seems to advise that rulership as such is a lost cause, one should aspire to the nature of the sage, and then without doing, the kingdom will be in order. It cautions against differentiating between that which is good and that which is bad.

the 44th hexagram in the Yi, encourages a ruler to weed out the evil influence in his court.

How are these reconciled?”

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