Daoism

The distinctions that do the work

Dao and de. The Way is not a set of rules and de is not obedience to them. De is the actual realisation of a particular thing’s nature, which is why it can also be read as a person’s character in the sense of their potency, and why one cannot acquire it by adding something. The uncarved block has more de than the finely finished object, which is the whole of the claim in one image, and which is why the Daodejing’s artisan and its scholar are both suspects.

Ziran, and the trouble with the word spontaneous. Ziran is usually reached for by the English word spontaneous, and that is a mistranslation of the most consequential kind, because spontaneous in modern usage means a person following impulse. What the term actually rules out is a person following an impulse. It names the condition in which a thing is the process that yields it, with no prior model laid over the top. The test the tradition gives is behavioural rather than introspective: the watercourse goes where the ground allows, and a person whose judgement is ziran arrives at the place the situation has, not the place he had aimed at. What the field’s account of the tradition’s own criticism adds is that both founders rejected names, in the sense of socially designated language, and social practices generally, on the ground that they distort our natural guiding capacity by instilling desires for social status. That is a claim about the mechanism, and it is unusually precise for a text this old.

Wuwei, and the four ways it gets mistranslated. It is not passivity, it is not the absence of action, and it is not a state to be entered. Its meaning is the quality of an action that does not have to insist, and the standing example is a tree that has not been planted in a row. A project worked to a plan is the object of the whole critique, and a reader who has heard wuwei as permission to drift has kept the plan and dropped the tradition.

Xu, and the emptiness that is full. The text’s second great term is xu, emptiness or unfilledness, and the reference work puts the consequence plainly: the person of the Way is shown to be full precisely by being empty, and without desire is able to rediscover the riches of ziran. Empty is not a state to achieve. It is the removal of a filling, and the filling has a name, yu, desire, which the same account describes as the movement of the heart-mind drawn towards what it finds agreeable and away from what it dislikes, and as the thing that perverts judgement and colours experience of reality. That is a mechanism and not a mood, and it is the operative part of the tradition. It is also why the Daodejing can be tranquil and yielding and still forbid envy and killing outright instead of merely preferring calm.

What the text reaches for, and the chapters are worth having because the figures are chosen to undercut rather than to flatter: water, in the eighth and seventy-eighth, as a symbol reinforcing the yielding and deep strength that characterises nonaction; the infant, in the fifty-second and fifty-fifth, whose innocence and wholesome spontaneity are offered as the pristine fullness of virtue in the ideal world; the low-lying fertile valley, in the twenty-eighth and thirty-ninth; the Dao as a mother, in the first and twenty-fifth; and the highest good and the highest virtue, in the eighth and thirty-eighth. Underneath the figures is an argument about value, and it is a destructive one: it would be a mistake, the account says, to take hardness to be strength and give it a higher value than softness. Show that the ordinary ranking is arbitrary and you have made yieldingness available as a way of being strong.

The useless tree, and what Zhuangzi thinks a life is for. What the book tests, again and again, is whether a thing is worth having by the standards that judge things. A tree that is useless, and therefore lives out its years by the roadside, is better off than a cultivated one, and the discourse that establishes this is not a poem but an argument, and the friend who raised the objection is answered rather than dismissed. The happiness of fish, the butterfly dream, and the skill that is exhausted by being used are all in the same register: they are not metaphors for calm, they are demonstrations that the criteria of a life are criteria, and that any criterion of the sort used on other people will kill what it measures.

What follows from all of this, and is the part a reader most needs: the tradition has no account of where a disposition comes from. Naturalness is a description. It tells you what the thing is like, not why this one and not another, and it is silent on the question of whether the disposition you were born with is a fact about you or a decision. That silence is not a gap the tradition loses points for. It is the shape of the tradition, and it is the point at which the two accounts this page is comparing part company.

Where it touches this material

The strongest correspondence is exact, and a reader who only remembers the general resemblances will miss it. At 47.7 the material describes a will that has fully crystallised, and names its three properties: it will not splinter or break, it is very strong without effort, and it is radiant, translating light into a refraction that gives pleasure of the eye to many. Read that as a description of what a developed being is, and it is a description of wuwei in the strict sense, arrived at from a completely different direction: a faculty that has stopped having to force itself and is now strong precisely in not forcing. A Daoist objection would say the material has described a state it treats as a summit as though it were an attainment, and the answer is that the material does treat it as an attainment, and has never claimed otherwise. On this point the two accounts agree and the agreement is not superficial.

The second correspondence is the mechanism, and it runs the other way. At 66.14 the material names the faculty of the will as the transdimensional thing that causes a new configuration of the body: it is the will, the seeking, the desire of the entity. A Daoist hears a description of striving and looks for the error. The material’s own hedge is the interesting part, since it puts the action in the body rather than in the effort, and does not say that the entity grasps anything. Read that way, will and wuwei are not rivals. One names the direction and the other the manner, and the Daoist is entitled to say the material has never asked whether the manner is right.

Third, the account of the origin, which is where the resemblance is strongest and the difference sharpest. At 13.12 the intelligent infinity discerns a concept, and it discerns it because of the freedom of will of awareness; the concept is finity, and finity is named the first and primal distortion. The one intelligent infinity then invested itself in an exploration of many-ness, and at 13.13 each portion created a universe, the rhythms of free choice flowing, and each individualised portion channelled love into intelligent energy and so produced what the material calls the natural laws of that universe. A Daoist reads the whole passage and says: yes, and that is what happens when the One lets itself go, which is the least forcing thing there is, and it is the Daodejing’s own first chapter rather than an argument against it. The one word the Daoist cannot accept is free, and it is the one word the material cannot drop.

Fourth, the harm done by forced action, which both accounts have in common and for different reasons. At 7.15 the material says that those who seek intelligent infinity through service to self create the same amount of power but weaken and eventually disintegrate, because the concept of separation is implicit in a service to self that involves power over others, and that service to others in fact results in service to self and so preserves and harmonises the distortions. The Daodejing says the same thing about a ruler who forces. Both are describing a mechanism by which effort directed outward returns as disintegration on the one who exerted it, and both locate the mechanism in the nature of the effort rather than in the character of the person. A third correspondence is closer still and is easy to miss. At 27.12 the material describes love as the focus, the choice of attack, the type of energy that causes intelligent energy to be formed, and the reference work on the Daodejing says that what transgresses the order of nature is wilful desire for self-gratification. Two traditions, three thousand years and a continent apart, naming the same distortion in the same terms.

Fifth, a pedagogy, and the closest the two ever come to agreeing. At 15.13 the material is asked whether exercises may be published and answers that it is important to allow each seeker to enlighten itself rather than for any messenger to attempt in language to instruct, on the stated ground that otherwise the exchange becomes an imbalance in free will. That is not merely compatible with the Daoist position on letting the thing be. It is the Daoist position, stated by a tradition that has no interest in being a school, in a corpus whose whole argument is against the school. A reader arriving from the Western esoteric lineages should note that the ground given is a freedom argument and not a mystique argument, because the two produce very different institutions.

Where the material parts company, and where this library takes a side

The Daoist case has to be put at full strength first, because the version most people meet is a parody of it and it would be easy to argue against a straw man and gain nothing. Read properly, the strongest reading of wuwei is not a virtue of doing nothing. It is an argument about the limits of deliberate action, and it has a live scholarly case behind it. The field’s account of ziran and wuwei in the Daodejing is that the pair does not mean passively accepting things, but entails a proactive dimension, and that the reason is not squeamishness but the observation that aggressiveness and destructiveness are what directed effort produces. A recent study of the Zhuangzi puts the case at full strength: a world of limitless possibility is not freedom but its opposite unless someone can reorient to a new normal, and that freedom there requires self-directed practice, involves working with the constraints rather than transcending them, and turns on maximising the fit between the conditions you are actually in and the capacities you are actually able to develop. And the standard scholarly comparison of the two Western and Chinese traditions treats freedom in each as one claim rather than two: the ability to do only those actions that are necessary. On that account wuwei is a theory of skilled agency, and the man who forces is the man who has not yet learned what his own capacities are.

So the real conflict, when the argument is put properly, is not about passivity. It is about what makes a being the kind of thing it is. The material’s account is that a being is a chooser by nature, and it will not soften that word. At 19.17 the answer to a question about what drives an entity along its path is that some love the light and some love the darkness, that the whole matter is the unique and infinitely various Creator choosing and playing among its own experiences like a child at a picnic, and that all these experiences are available, and that it is the free will of each entity which chooses the form of play and the form of pleasure. A second passage, at 13.12, says the same of the whole of creation, where the concept of finity was discerned because of the freedom of will of awareness. The ground of a being is an exercise of will, and a being whose will has not been exercised is not a being that has not yet started. Reading that from the Daoist side produces the objection this page has to answer.

Before answering it, the honest thing is to notice what the Daoist objection actually is, because it is stronger than the usual one. It is not that the material adds a layer of metaphysics to a good intuition. What it does instead is take the most important term in the human vocabulary, freedom, and move it down to to the foundation, where the Daodejing has put the Way, and then proceed to live as though having done so cost nothing. One tradition says the One spends itself into multiplicity without anyone choosing anything, and has located the origin of the world in a process. The other says the One spends itself into multiplicity by an act of free will, and has located the origin in a decision, and a decision is the thing the Daodejing is arguing you should stop performing.

Read the material’s account of disposition the way the Daoists read the scholars, and they have won. At 19.16 the material says that the majority of third-density beings is far along the chosen path before the realisation of that path becomes conscious. That sounds like ziran, and it is even more like wuwei: a being that is so far along that the effort has stopped being visible, whose disposition is not straining but settled, and who could describe their own state as not having to try. The Daoist conclusion is that the material has described naturalness and then called it a choice, so that willing has been smuggled into the ground of what a being is, and the tradition’s critique of the scholars is thereby complete. That misdescribes the being rather than correcting the account, and the material’s own answer is exactly that. The choice was free will, and it was made before this life, and what is being asked for now is not more effort but the decision about which of two efforts already completed should be carried to the end. That is an unusual position and it is not a version of either tradition.

Here is where the material does something the Dao De Jing cannot, and it should be said plainly rather than treated as a defect on either side. The Daoist account has no origin for a disposition. Ziran describes how the sage acts and has nothing to say about why this one. The material supplies an origin, and it pays for it by putting free will at the foundation, which is a heavy price and is exactly the price the Daoist would refuse to pay. But the Daodejing has its own reply ready, in the fortieth and sixty-fifth, where the reversal it announces means that the way of life it describes will look like the opposite of a normal one; and the reply is that a tradition holding its own effortlessness to be achievable, describable and teachable has become the scholar. That is a genuine objection, and this library does not think it can be answered inside the Daodejing’s own terms.

The objection should not be run backwards and used to flatter either side. Neither text is what it is usually taken for: the material is not a peaceful doctrine of naturalness that happens to mention will, and the Daoists were not a school of passivity that happens to mention effort. Both traditions have a hard position on desire and both put it in the same place. The Daodejing locates the corruption in the wilful desire for self-gratification, and the material names the first distortion of its own Law to be free will and then spends the rest of its corpus on the consequences of choosing badly. A reader who wants the gentler of the two is not choosing between traditions. They are choosing between traditions and a version of one of them.

And where the Daoist side wins, which a reader should be told. The Daoist can be followed for a lifetime without ever once being required to decide anything, and that is a real freedom with a long and defensible pedigree, so the material’s answer is the one at 19.18, where it says the truly helpless are those who have not consciously chosen and who repeat patterns without knowing that they are repeating them or what the pattern means. On the material’s own account a person who has followed the Way without ever choosing is not free. They are in the exact condition the sentence names. Whether the Daoist has a rejoinder to that is doubtful, because the rejoinder would have to be a claim that a life without a decision is nonetheless a life that was lived, and the material has already given the name for it.

So this library takes a side, and names the judgment as its own: the material is right that a being is a chooser by nature, that reading a being’s disposition as a distortion of yielding has misdescribed the being rather than corrected it, and that a philosophy which declines to say where a disposition comes from has described a style of action without a subject to do it. Stated equally plainly, the limit of that judgment is ours. The Daoist is the only one of the two accounts that is indifferent to what you choose, and indifference of that quality is not a weakness of attention. It is the answer to a question the material has never asked, and a reader who has spent a life inside the question will find the answer more restful than wrong.

What it is not

Not passivity, and the tradition will not accept the version of itself that says otherwise. Wuwei does not mean total inaction, it does not mean accepting what happens, and the reading of ziran as private impulse is the error the whole second part of the Daodejing is written against. The instance that settles it is the tree: useless, unplanted, standing by the road, and better off than the specimen in the garden.

Not a way of managing a life. A Daodejing made of maxims, an uncarved block on a desk, and a practice of not trying are a modern assembly in which none of the three parts is load-bearing. The tradition was received in the West in forms that have almost nothing to do with it, including a popular children’s book and a cookbook of meditations, and the standard reference work notes the growth of an audience that runs from nature lovers to management gurus. None of those readers is doing anything the text asks for, and one of them is reading a claim about the administration of other people.

Not a philosophy as against a religion, which is a distinction the West made and the tradition did not. The split between philosophical and religious Daoism is influential and contested, and a recent study of its intellectual history argues that it was produced by the cooperation of Victorian Protestant intellectuals with their late Qing Confucian collaborators, and that it is an erroneous division applied to a living thing, so the consequence for a reader is practical: the internal arts, the community lineages, the ritual and the alchemical traditions are not a superstitions layer to be stripped off so that the philosophy can be reached. They are the form the thing has taken.

Not the internal arts on their own, and not a technique of self-actualisation borrowed from them. The practice of sitting in forgetfulness belongs here and is taught elsewhere in this library, but the traditions that transmit it are lineages with their own account of what it is for, and reading a description of the practice as a means of becoming what you were always going to be is the modern form of the scholar, and the text’s own warning, in the fortieth and sixty-fifth, that a life lived this way will look like the opposite of a normal one, is the last thing a reader should skip.

And not a book about what to choose. The Daodejing will not tell you, because it holds that the telling is the problem, and Zhuangzi will go further and take apart the question itself. That is a genuine limit on the tradition’s usefulness for a reader who is standing at a fork, and this library does not pretend otherwise. A being that is going to be asked to decide anyway is best served by reading the material for what it knows about the decision and reading this one for what it knows about the way the decision stops being a fight.