Is Dao ‘a Circle whose Center is Everywhere and Circumference Nowhere’?

[Abstract for the New England Daoist Assembly, August 24–27]

The 6th century BCE featured several prominent circle-oriented mystics such as Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Heraclitus. Was Lao Tzu one of them? Does replacing God with Dao in the renowned title quote (of uncertain origin) provide a key to Daoist metaphysics? There are no facets in a circle; the connection between any moment on a circumference to the next moment is thus not a knowable way/dao; connections between circumferential moments can only be inferred as the ‘unfolding’ of radial endpoints from a single centerpoint. This solitary centerpoint mutually defining and defined by an indeterminably sized circumference ‘does not act yet is the root of all motion; does not move yet is the root of all creation.’ And this root is ‘everywhere’ ‘has become everything’ and brings ‘all things to completion without their even knowing it.’ While the Wuji symbol of an empty circle is identified with the primordial Dao, might the infinite invisible radii of the circle prevail over the yin and yang that the circle later fills up with? Do not such eternal radii ‘where yin and yang do not penetrate’ best account for what Harold Roth called Daoism’s ‘most profound level of consciousness,’ the shenming (numinous clarity) that ‘provides humans with metaphysical knowledge such as precognition’? So too is not orientation toward a centerpoint rather than the forging of a linear path more conducive to the fundamental Daoist practice of wei wu wei?