58DANTE ALIGHIERI
brother was even allowed to go with him
to the palace and study. The 14th Dalai
Lama was the fifth of 16 children and was
born in a small village. When he turned
15, he was formally initiated as the Dalai
Lama because of the Chinese invasion of
Tibet. In 1959, he fled to India to escape
Chinese persecution. Both the head of
state and the spiritual leader of Tibetan
Buddhism, the 14th Dalai Lama currently
lives in exile in India, traveling the world
and teaching loving-kindness and peace.
DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321).
Italian poet and author of the Divine
Comedy (first printed edition in 1472),
the narrative of Dante the Pilgrim on a
journey. Beginning with his being lost in
the middle of his life and culminating in a
vision of God in which his will and desire
are captured by the love that moves the
sun and other stars, the journey takes
Dante through limbo, hell, purgatory, and
finally to paradise. The poem and Dante’s
other works, such as On Monarchy (1309)
and Vita Nuova (New Life) (1292) involve
a host of philosophical themes. Dante
holds that earthly loves (such as his love
for a young woman named Beatrice) can
be a reflection of the transcendent love of
God. His poem the Divine Comedy is built
on an extensive framework in which rea-
son (represented by Virgil) acts in collab-
oration with faith (Beatrice). His other
works include On Plebeian Eloquence
(c. 1305) and The Banquet (1308).
DAOISM. A Chinese philosophy articu-
lated by Laozi in the Daodejing and
by Zhuang Zhou in the Zhuangzi that
seeks harmony by means of passivity and
humility. Dao means “road” or “way” and
refers to the processes of life which flow
back and forth in a correlative pattern
between yin and yang. It is used as both
a noun and a verb. Although the dao is
ultimately inaccessible to human minds,
the “true person” (zhen ren) may seek
unity with the dao through effortless
action (wu wei), accepting the flow of
reality between yin and yang. One ought
not to draw moral (good vs. bad) or aes-
thetic (beautiful vs. ugly) distinctions, for
these human forms of ordering the world
interrupt the dao.DARWIN, CHARLES ROBERT (1809–
1882). Co-discoverer of the theory of
biological evolution, Darwin and Alfred
Russel Wallace, working independently,
advanced a theory of evolution at the same
time. Darwin argued that current and
extinct organisms developed through a
process of natural selection and elimina-
tion. Rather than species being separately
created by a provident God, diverse kinds
of living things developed from simpler
life forms. At first Darwin advanced
evolution as the way God shaped life on
earth, and he did not include human
evolution in his purview. Partly due to
Darwin’s assessment of the pain and
apparent violence of nature involved in