[opportune]

That’s very fair, as a kind of meditation-skeptic I probably too aggressively dismissed and mischaracterized it.

The Tao Te Ching itself isn’t prescriptive at all with meditation and the only time it really comes up is in a reference to a breathing exercise, which you could just as well interpret as a one-off for the excerpt rather than formal or ideologically sanctioned meditation. In later early Taoist texts meditation (particularly breathing exercises) was promoted as a way of cultivating various beneficial forces internally, rather than as a linear path to salvation or anything. But then even later they start getting into the Taoism stuff I don’t care for like meditation as a way of becoming immortal lol. Personally I think it’s possible to read the classical texts and come away thinking the Tao doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with, positively or negatively, with meditation.

I think of OG Taoism as a kind of deconstructivist reaction to Chinese culture at the time - highly political, rigidly Confucian - and defining itself more by where it disagreed with the contemporary schools of thought than by what it promoted. While it’s not contradictory to say meditation is compatible with Taoism, any kind of strong rules or expectations about meditation would contradict with early Taoism just on the basis of specifying some kind of rigid understanding of meditation or prescriptive rules about such a complex thing (because that would be very Confucian).