But remember that who you think you are—and especially what you think is “you” when you are making decisions—is usually just a set of patterns you’ve fallen into. Just as you can become a pessimistic person simply because you think of yourself as pessimistic, you can make decisions that shape who you become, just because you think they reflect who you are. But when you do this, you box yourself in before you’ve even begun.
When we rationally make big life decisions based on the idea that the world is coherent, we assume a clear-cut situation, clear-cut possibilities, a stable self, unchanging emotions, and an unchanging world. But these things aren’t givens at all. By making concrete, defined plans, you are actually being abstract, because you are making these plans for a self that is abstract: a future self that you imagine based on who you think you are now, even though you, the world, and your circumstances will change. You cut yourself off from the real, messy complexities that are the basis from which you can develop as a human being. You eliminate your ability to grow as a person because you are limiting that growth to what is in the best interests of the person you happen to be right now, and not the person you will become.
If, instead, you maintain a constant consciousness of the world as unstable, you can start to think of all your decisions and responses as based on an awareness of the complex, ever-changing world and your complex, ever-shifting self. You can train your mind to stay open and take into account all the complex stuff that is you. We achieve the best outcomes when we think of things in terms of long-term trajectories. The most expansive decisions come from laying the ground so things can grow.
Consider this story from the Mencius, a tale about the sage kings of old who ushered in the dawn of civilization. It was a time when “all under Heaven was not yet regulated, flooding waters flowed throughout, and the five grains did not grow.”
The sage king Yu was sent to put this world in order. He dug the earth and provided irrigation for crops:
Yu dredged the nine rivers, cleaned out the Ji and Ta so that they flowed into the sea, cleared the Ru and Han, and opened the Huai and Si so that they flowed into the Jiang. Only then were the people of the central states able to obtain food.
Bo Gui said: “My method of regulating the water is superior to that of Yu.” Mencius said: “You are wrong. Yu’s method of regulating the water was based on the way of the water. It is for this reason that Yu used the four seas as the receptacle. But you are using the neighboring states as the receptacle. When water goes contrary to its course, we call it overflowing water. Overflowing water means flooding water, something that a humane man detests. You are wrong. . . .
“As for Yu’s moving the waters, he moved them without interference.”
Yu made radical changes to the environment by digging ditches and channels, but he also made these changes after understanding how the water flowed and moved naturally.
The point of the story is not that we should passively allow water to flow as it will, just as we should not passively allow sprouts to grow as they might. It’s that we must be like Yu channeling the waters. We must be like a farmer cultivating his crops. A farmer is active and deliberate. He chooses the right spot, pulls up the weeds, turns and fertilizes the soil, and sows his crops—ones that he knows already will flourish in that particular climate. He then cultivates his field, weeding it, nurturing the growing plants with water, and making sure they get enough sunlight. But the work doesn’t even end there. It is constant. He builds fences to keep out wild animals and shifts his crops depending on the altering nature of the soil. He is also keenly sensitive to timing and pacing: he knows when to make changes and when to wait. In life we want to constantly be ever-responsive to new circumstances as they arise, just as a farmer is vigilant about situations that affect his field.
Being active does not mean aggressively trying to dam up flowing water. Instead, it is like taking advantage of the fact that water tends to flow downward to help you manage that water. As Mencius said, “What I dislike about crafty people is that they chisel their way through. If they were instead like the sage king who moved the waters, then there would be nothing to dislike. The sage king who moved the waters moved them without interference.”
Being active consists of creating optimal conditions and responding to whatever various situations arise. It means laying the ground in which change can grow. Think of yourself as a farmer, rather than thinking about who you are and arranging your goals around that. Your goal then becomes laying the ground for various interests and sides of yourself to grow organically.
Most of us have hobbies and interests we pursue on the weekend or in our free time. We often don’t think of those things as relevant to figuring out what we want to do with our life. And yet laying the ground means something as simple as scheduling time to take part in activities that speak to the different sides of yourself that you are interested in developing: joining a wine tasting class, learning how to paint in watercolor, or brushing up on your high school French once a week in a language swap. By proactively building room in your life for all sorts of possibilities, and then remaining open and responsive, you are akin to a farmer preparing his field so that his crops can flourish.
As you make room for interests, opportunities open up to you. You might learn that you love working with your hands, but would rather try woodworking than painting. Or you decide that French isn’t for you, but you want to explore other cultures by offering to tutor immigrants at the public library instead, which could eventually lead to other things: new friends, a trip abroad, a change of career down the road. By being responsive to how your interests change over time, you will not be locked in—you will be more able to alter your life and your schedule to allow for growth.
Rather than going into all of this thinking, I can be anything I want to be, the approach you’re taking is I don’t know yet what I can become. You don’t know where any of this might take you; it’s not possible to know that now. But what you learn about yourself and what excites you won’t be abstract; it will be very concrete knowledge born of practical experience. Over time, you open up paths that you could not have imagined, out of which emerge options that you never would have seen before. Over time, you actually become a different person.
You can’t plan out how everything in your life will play out. But you can think in terms of creating the conditions in which things will likely move in certain directions: the conditions that allow for the possibility of rich growth. By doing all this, you are not just being a farmer. You are also the results of the farmer’s work. You become the fruit of your labor.
Ming and the Unpredictability of Life
Despite all that you do to keep your life open and to stay responsive, things don’t always turn out well. You can apply for a job, do the very best you can during interviews, and be rejected in the last round. You can pour your heart into a relationship, only to be dumped. You can arrange to take off six months from work in order to travel, only to learn that your father is critically ill and that you need to cancel your trip to spend time with him in his final months. This is the sort of world that Mencius envisioned, very different from that of the Mohists.
In Mencius’s world, ming prevails. Ming has been translated variously as Heaven’s commands, fate, or destiny. But for Mencius, it was a term for the contingency of life: the events, good and bad, that happen outside our control. Ming explains that windfalls (such as a job opening) and tragedies (such as a death) happen no matter what we have planned or intended.
We know ming: Talented people get fired and can’t find another job. The person we love decides, inexplicably, to leave us. Good friends die suddenly, leaving behind young, grieving children. Confucius’s favorite disciple died tragically young. Mencius, you’ll recall, suffered a major personal crisis late in life, when the ruler of Qi took advantage of him. He struggled to accept the fact that we cannot control the events that affect us deeply. The best plans, the most carefully made decisions, never guaran
tee against arbitrary, sometimes tragic, events.
When we assume that the world is stable, it leads us down one of two culturally sanctioned roads: belief in either fate or free will. A fatalist might think that whatever happened was meant to be, whether ordained by a deity or by fate; she’d work to accept the ways of the universe. Someone who believes in free will thinks that he controls his own destiny and might have trouble letting himself be touched by tragedy. In the face of, say, a career setback, divorce, or death, he might crumble under feelings of responsibility, or he might be steely and move on as quickly as possible. All of the above are passive reactions because they deny the unpredictability of life.
But Mencius said of ming: “It should never be anyone’s fate to die in shackles.”
Dying in shackles means failing to respond properly to what befalls us. It means letting our reaction be controlled by the things that happen to us. Whether we let tragedies destroy us or we accept what happened, both of these responses are the equivalent of standing under a falling wall and then saying it was your fate to be killed by that wall.
There’s another way to respond, one that allows us to shape our own ming and forge our own future. As Mencius tells us, “One who really understands his ming does not stand beneath a falling wall. One who dies after fulfilling his way has corrected his destiny.”
Living in a capricious world means accepting that we do not live within a stable moral cosmos that will always reward people for what they do. We should not deny that real tragedies do happen. But at the same time, we should always expect to be surprised and learn to work with whatever befalls us. If we can continue this work, even when tragedies come our way, we can begin to accept the world as unpredictable and impossible to determine perfectly. And this is where the promise of a capricious world lies: if our world is indeed constantly fragmented and unpredictable, then it is something we can constantly work on bettering. We can go into each situation resolved to be the best human being we can be, not because of what we’ll get out of it, but simply to affect others around us for the better, regardless of the outcome. We can cultivate our better sides and face this unpredictable world, transforming it as we go.
It’s a very different vision from asking grand questions such as “Who am I?” and “How should I plan out my life?” Instead, we work constantly to alter things at a small, daily level, and if we’re successful, we can build tremendous communities around us in which people can flourish. And even then, we continue to work. Our work—of bettering oneself and others to produce a better world—is never over.
In the face of fate, we should neither feel destroyed nor simply look on the bright side. The cult of positive thinking assures us that whatever difficult circumstances we find ourselves in, it will all work out. But the danger with that position is that it makes us passive. Things will happen that we can’t control, but we have a choice to act: to get out of the way of the falling wall, to respond to our ming and shape our future accordingly.
Ming is not just about the tragedies that befall us. It’s about the good things, too; the unexpected opportunities, unforeseen chances to do something we love, the chance encounter with someone who will change the trajectory of our whole life. When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.
When we can let go of the idea that there are clear guidelines and a stable world, then what we are left with is the heart-mind to guide us. The heart-mind is all there is, and we develop it every day through our relationships with the people we’re with. It helps us to sense things correctly, to lay the groundwork for growth, and to work with what we have. And as you do so, all that you thought you were will begin to change. You will find parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. The world you once thought of as stable starts instead to seem like a world of infinite possibilities.
5
On Influence: Laozi and Generating Worlds
Imagine you are walking through a forest. It’s a glorious summer afternoon, and the sun is shining brightly through the vibrant green leaves. Off in the distance, you see a mighty oak towering above the others. It’s so high that you can barely see the top. A few yards away is a tiny sapling, growing in the shadow of the larger tree. Odds are, you will see the larger tree as powerful, steadfast, magisterial, and the sapling as fragile and vulnerable.
But when a windstorm comes, the forest floor will be littered with large branches. The oak tree might not be able to withstand the wind, rain, and lightning of a fierce storm. In the end, it will topple to the ground, yet the sapling will remain intact. Why? The sapling has been bending and shifting with the winds; pliable and soft, it stands up again when the storm has passed. Its very weakness is what has allowed it to flourish and prevail.
* * *
We often assume—because this is what we’ve been taught—that to be influential we have to be strong and powerful like the tall oak in the forest. We have to assert ourselves convincingly and even bend other people to our will.
But there is another recipe for influence to be found in Chinese philosophical texts such as the Laozi, also known as the Dao de jing. It derives from appreciating the power of seeming weakness, understanding the pitfalls of differentiation, and seeing the world as interrelated. Rather than think that power comes from strength prevailing over strength, we can understand that true power comes from understanding the connections between disparate things, situations, and people. All of this comes from an understanding of what the Laozi calls the Dao, or “the Way.” The sapling prevails because it is close to the Way.
But a sapling, in the end, is just a sapling. It sways with the wind and grows without consciousness. We human beings can do far more. We are capable of not just understanding connections but also making new ones to generate entirely new realities and new worlds. Being the architects of these worlds is how we become powerful.
Laozi and the Way
Laozi, the Chinese thinker to whom the Laozi is attributed, is a mysterious figure. We don’t know when he lived, and there is debate over whether Laozi was even the name of a real person. Laozi in Chinese simply means “old master,” a generic term that could refer to anyone. But in later eras, people attempted to define the author of this compelling text. He was eventually portrayed as a great sage who lived even before Confucius; some wild tales said he lived for three hundred years, and others even claimed that he eventually traveled to India, where he was known as the Buddha. Laozi would also come to be known as the founder of a school of thought—and later an entire religious movement—called Daoism. One legend portrays Laozi as an actual deity, a god who made the cosmos and whose revelations eventually became the Laozi.
But Laozi did not found Daoism: the very term “Daoism” was not coined until several centuries after the Laozi was written. The reason Laozi was retrospectively considered to have been the founder of Daoism is because of the text’s frequent references to the Way.
Most of us, if we have heard of the Way, have some vague notions about what it is. Think of a Chinese landscape painting: brush and ink deftly paint an image of mist-covered mountains dotted subtly with trees and the occasional person, almost too small to see: a pilgrim who has taken solace in the vastness of the natural world. In the West, we tend to interpret these paintings as representative of a human quest to leave society and seek harmony in nature. These paintings appear to portray an unchanging world to which humans must adjust to achieve inner calm and tranquility.
This is how the Way is commonly perceived: as an ideal that is “out there”; the natural perfection that exists beyond us and with which we need to come back into harmony. For many people, the Laozi seems to hearken back to a semimythical “golden age,” when life was purer and simpler and people were like the pilgrim in the painting: in sync with the natural world, able to flow with things as they were, and close to t
he Way.
This interpretation, though, dates from the nineteenth century, when the West declared itself modern and the East as its foil. It has more to do with our modern-day romanticizing about what we consider to be traditional Chinese notions about harmony and tranquility than it does with the content of the Laozi itself.
The Laozi is not telling us that we should simply follow some harmonious pattern that is somewhere “out there” and that we could better reach by going on a pilgrimage or returning to the ways of primitive antiquity. It is not telling us that we should strive to be accepting and tranquil. It teaches a very different notion: that the Way is something we can actively generate ourselves, in the here and now. We each have the potential to become effective and influential in transforming the worlds in which we live. We can re-create the Way.
Re-creating the Way
For Laozi, the Way is the original, ineffable, undifferentiated state that precedes everything. It is:
a thing inchoate and complete,
born before Heaven and earth.
It is that from which everything in the cosmos emerges and to which everything in the cosmos returns.
And it exists on many levels. On an earthly level, the Way is akin to the ground. Think of a blade of grass, growing from the earth. As it grows, it becomes more distinct and differentiated, and as it grows taller, it becomes further separated from the Way. This is why a sapling is closer to the Way than a mature oak tree. But when all these things that grow from the earth die, they return once more to the earth, or the Way:
The myriad things become active
And I thereby watch them return.
Things are teeming and multifarious,
The Path Page 7