As I have done for Thanksgiving and Christmas, let me put down a few thoughts here about Easter from a Taoist perspective.

    Easter may be the most Taoist of
the three holidays.  Of course, Taoists would not embrace the central
story of the Son of God rising from the dead to return to his place at
the right hand of the father.   That fundamental act of transcendence
in the Resurrection is alien to Taoist thought, which, in its
philosophical form, holds out no promise of an after life and no image
of an omnipotent God.  So, how can you have Easter with no Resurrection?

     It is in a more abstract manner
that Easter is Taoist.  If we think of Jesus’s rise as a return of
sorts, his return to a non-material form, then we might keep passage 40
from the Tao Te Ching in mind:

 In Tao the only motion is returning;
The only useful quality, weakness.
For though all creatures under heaven are the products of
Being,
Being itself is the product of Not-being.

     – Waley translation

Turning back is how the way moves;
Weakness is the means the way employs.

The myriad creatures in the world are born from
Something, and Something from Nothing.

 – Lau translation

   "Returning" is the central event of Easter.  In Taoist terms, Jesus
could represent the continual and inevitable returning of all things to
Tao.  We all emerge from non-being, we find an integral existence in
being, and then return to non-being. Jesus moves in a similar manner,
reassuring us that life is greater than our earthly experience, just as
a Taoist might believe that Way is greater than our life.  In both
cases, we needn’t fear death.  For a Christian our fear is assauged by
the promise of life everlasting; for a Taoist our fear is relieved by
our knowledge of the ubiquity of the passages from non-being to being
and back.  In both cases, return is a soothing transformation.

     The Spring setting of Easter is
an exhilarating physical reminder of the beauty and promise of return.
The birds are returning with their song; the flowers are returning with
their fragrance; the sun is returning with its warmth.  And it is
precisely those sorts of natural patterns, the movements of the
seasons, the ebb and flow of demise and return, that animates so much
of Taoist thought.

     So, happy Taoist Easter.  He has returned!