The Tao of Pooh

by Benjamin Hoff

  After all, if it were Cleverness that counted most, Rabbit would be Number One, instead of that Bear. But that's not the way things work.

  "We've come to wish you a Very Happy Thursday," said Pooh, when he had gone in and out once or twice just to make sure that he could get out again.

  "Why, what's going to happen on Thursday?" asked Rabbit, and when Pooh had explained, and Rabbit, whose life was made up of Important Things, said, "Oh, I thought you'd really come about something," they sat down for a little... and by-and-by Pooh and Piglet went on again. The wind was behind them now, so they didn't have to shout.

  "Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.

  "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."

  "And he has Brain."

  "Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."

  There was a long silence.

  "I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything."

  And if Clever Rabbit doesn't quite have what it takes, Abrasive Eeyore certainly doesn't either. Why not? Because of what we could call the Eeyore Attitude. You might say that while Rabbit's little routine is that of Knowledge for the sake of Being Clever, and while Owl's is that of Knowledge for the sake of Appearing Wise, Eeyore's is Knowledge for the sake of Complaining About Something. As anyone who doesn't have it can see, the Eeyore Attitude gets in the way of things like wisdom and happiness, and pretty much prevents any sort of real Accomplishment in life:

  Eeyore, the old grey Donkey, stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water.

  "Pathetic," he said. "That's what it is. Pathetic."

  He turned and walked slowly down the stream for twenty yards, splashed across it, and walked slowly back on the other side. Then he looked at himself in the water again.

  "As I thought," he said. "No better from this side. But nobody minds. Nobody cares. Pathetic, that's what it is."

  There was a crackling noise in the bracken behind him, and out came Pooh.

  "Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh.

  "Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

  "Why, what's the matter?"

  "Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it "

  It's not that the Eeyore Attitude is necessarily without a certain severe sort of humor . . .

  "Hallo, Eeyore," they called out cheerfully.

  "Ah!" said Eeyore. "Lost your way?"

  "We just came to see you," said Piglet. "And to see how your house was. Look, Pooh, it's still standing!"

  "I know," said Eeyore. "Very odd. Somebody ought to have come down and pushed it over."

  "We wondered whether the wind would blow it down," said Pooh.

  "Ah, that's why nobody's bothered, I suppose. I thought perhaps they'd forgotten."

  . . . it's just that it's really not so awfully much fun. Not like a few other points of view we can think of. A little too complex or something. After all, what is it about Pooh that makes him so lovable?

  "Well, to begin with—" said Pooh.

  —Yes, well, to begin with, we have the principle of the Uncarved Block. After all, what is the most appealing thing about Pooh? What else but —

  "Well, to begin with—"

  —simplicity, the Simplicity of the Uncarved Block? And the nicest thing about that Simplicity is its useful wisdom, the what-is-there-to-eat variety-wisdom you can get at.

  Considering that, let's have Pooh describe the nature of the Uncarved Block.

  "AH right, Pooh, what can you tell us about the Uncarved Block?"

  "The what?" asked Pooh, sitting up suddenly and opening his eyes,

  "The Uncarved Block. You know ..

  "Oh, the . . . . Oh."

  "What do you have to say about it?"

  "I didn't do it," said Pooh.

  "You——"

  "It must have been Piglet," he said.

  "I did not!" squeaked Piglet.

  "Oh, Piglet. Where did you——"

  "I didn't," Piglet said.

  "Well, then, it was probably Rabbit," said Pooh.

  "It wasn't me!" Piglet insisted.

  "Did someone call?" said Rabbit, popping up from behind a chair.

  "Oh—Rabbit," I said. "We're talking about the Uncarved Block."

  "Haven't seen it," said Rabbit, "but I'll go ask Owl."

  "That won't be nec——" I began.

  "Too late now," said Pooh. "He's gone."

  "I never even heard of the Uncarved Block," said Piglet.

  "Neither did I," said Pooh, rubbing his ear.

  "It's just a figure of speech," I said.

  "A what of a who?" asked Pooh.

  "A figure of speech. It means that, well, the Uncarved Block is a way of saying, 'like Pooh.'"

  "Oh, is that all?" said Piglet.

  "I wondered," said Pooh.

  Pooh can't describe the Uncarved Block to us in words; he just is it. That's the nature of the Uncarved Block.

  "A perfect description. Thank you, Pooh."

  "Not at all," said Pooh.

  When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.

  Now one autumn morning when the wind had blown all the leaves off the trees in the night, and was trying to blow the branches off, Pooh and Pig let were sitting in the Thoughtful Spot and wondering.

  "What I think," said Pooh, "is I think we'll go to Pooh Comer and see Eeyore, because perhaps his house has been blown down, and perhaps he'd like us to build it again."

  "What I think," said Piglet, "is I think we'll go and see Christopher Robin, only he won't be there, so we can't."

  "Let's go and see everybody," said Pooh. "Because when you've been walking in the wind for miles, and you suddenly go into somebody's house, and he says, 'Hallo, Pooh, you're just in time for a little smackerel of something,' and you are, then it's what I call a Friendly Day."

  Piglet thought that they ought to have a Reason for going to see everybody, like Looking for Small or Organizing an Expotition, if Pooh could think of something.

  Pooh could.

  "We'll go because it's Thursday," he said, "and we'll go to wish everybody a Very Happy Thurs day. Come on, Piglet."

  From the state of the Uncarved Block comes the ability to enjoy the simple and the quiet, the natural and the plain. Along with that comes the ability to do things spontaneously and have them work, odd as that may appear to others at times. As Piglet put it in Winnie-the-Pooh, "Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right."

  To understand all this a little better, it might help to look at someone who is quite the opposite—someone like, well, say, Owl for example . . .

  SPELLING

  TUESDAY

  Through copse and spinney marched Bear; down open slopes of gorse and heather, over rocky beds of streams, up steep banks of sandstone into the heather again; and so at last, tired and hungry, to the Hundred Acre Wood. For it was in the Hundred Acre Wood that Owl lived.

  "And if anyone knows anything about anything," said Bear to himself, "it's Owl who knows something about something," he said, "or my name's not Winnie-the-Pooh," he said. "Which it is," he added, "So there you are."

  So now we come to Owl's house, as some of us have so many times before, searching for answers to questions of one sort or another. Will we find the answers here?

  Before we go in and take a look around, it seems appropriate to have a few Background Remarks about the kind of scholar that Owl represents, in relation to the attitudes and principles of Taoism that we are concerned with here.

  To begin with, it is necessary to point out that in China, scholars were generally Confucianist in training and orientation, and therefore often spoke a somewhat different language from the Taoists, who tended to see Confuci
anist scholars as busy ants spoiling the picnic of life, rushing back and forth to pick up the bits and pieces dropped from above. In the final section of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tse wrote, "The wise are not learned; the learned are not wise"—an attitude shared by countless Taoists before and since.

  From the Taoist point of view, while the scholarly intellect may be useful for analyzing certain things, deeper and broader matters are beyond its limited reach. The Taoist writer Chuang-tse worded it this way:

  A well-frog cannot imagine the ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar understand the Tao? He is restricted by his own learning.

  (This and other selections from classic oriental texts are my own translations and adaptations.)

  It seems rather odd, somehow, that Taoism, the way of the Whole Man, the True Man, the Spirit Man (to use a few Taoist terms), is for the most part interpreted here in the West by the Scholarly Owl—by the Brain, the Academician, the dry-as-dust Absentminded Professor. Far from reflecting the Taoist ideal of wholeness and independence, this incomplete and unbalanced creature divides all kinds of abstract things into little categories and compartments, while remaining rather helpless and disorganized in his daily life. Rather than learn from Taoist teachers and from direct experience, he leams intellectually and indirectly, from books. And since he doesn't usually put Taoist principles into practice in an everyday sort of way, his explanations of them tend to leave out some rather important details, such as how they work and where you can apply them.

  On top of that, it is very hard to find any of the spirit of Taoism in the lifeless writings of the humorless Academic Mortician, whose bleached-out Scholarly Dissertations contain no more of the character of Taoist wisdom than does the typical wax museum.

  But that is the sort of thing we can expect from the Abstract Owl, the dried-up Western descendant of the Confucianist Dedicated Scholar, who, unlike his Noble but rather Unimaginative ancestor, thinks he has some sort of monopoly on ——

  "What's that?" Pooh interrupted.

  "What's what?" I asked.

  "What you just said—the Confusionist, Desiccated Scholar."

  "Well, let's see. The Confusionist, Desiccated Scholar is one who studies Knowledge for the sake of Knowledge, and who keeps what he learns to himself or to his own small group, writing pompous and pretentious papers that no one else can understand, rather than working for the enlightenment of others. How's that?"

  "Much better," said Pooh.

  "Owl is about to illustrate the Confusionist, Desiccated Scholar," I said.

  "I see," said Pooh.

  Which brings us back to Owl. Let's see—how did Rabbit describe the situation with Owl? Oh, here it is:

  . . . you can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.

  "By the way, Pooh, how do you spell Tuesday?"

  "Spell what?" asked Pooh.

  "Tuesday. You know—Monday, Tuesday . . , "

  "My dear Pooh," said Owl, "everybody knows that it's spelled with a Two."

  "Is it?" asked Pooh.

  "Of course," said Owl. "After all, it's the second day of the week."

  "Oh, is that the way it works?" asked Pooh.

  "All right, Owl," I said. "Then what comes after Twosday?"

  "Thirdsday,

  " said Owl.

  "Owl, you're just confusing things," I said. "This is the day after Tuesday, and it's not Thirds—I mean, Thursday."

  "Then what is it?" asked Owl.

  "It's Today!" squeaked Piglet.

  "My favorite day," said Pooh.

  Ours, too. We wonder why the scholars don't think much of it. Perhaps it's because they Confuse themselves thinking about other days so much.

  Now one rather annoying thing about scholars is that they are always using Big Words that some of us can't understand . . .

  "Well," said Owl, "the customary procedure in such cases is as follows."

  "What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?" said Pooh. "For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me."

  'It means the Thing to Do."

  "As long as it means that, I don't mind," said Pooh humbly.

  . . . and one sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something. After all, from the scholarly point of view, it's practically a crime not to know everything.

  But sometimes the knowledge of the scholar is a bit hard to understand because it doesn't seem to match up with our own experience of things.

  Quite often, struggling like a scholar over relatively unimportant matters can make one increasingly Confused. Pooh described the Confusionist's state of mind quite accurately:

  On Monday, when the sun is hot,

  I wonder to myself a lot:

  "Now is it true, or is it not,

  That what is which and which is what?"

  On Tuesday, when it hails and snows,

  The feeling on me grows and grows

  That hardly anybody knows

  If those are these or these are those.

  On Wednesday, when the sky is blue,

  And I have nothing else to do,

  I sometimes wonder if it's true

  That who is what and what is who.

  On Thursday, when it starts to freeze,

  And hoar-frost twinkles on the trees,

  How very readily one sees

  That these are whose—but whose are these?

  On Friday—-

  Yes, whose are these, anyway? To the Desiccated Scholars, putting names on things is the most vital activity in the world. Tree. Flower. Dog. But don't ask them to prune the tree, plant the flower, or take care of the dog, unless you enjoy Unpleasant other words, Knowledge and Experience do not necessarily speak the same language. But isn't the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than the knowledge that doesn't? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff around—walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort of thing.

  "Lots of people talk to animals," said Pooh.

  "Maybe, but . . "

  "Not very many listen, though," he said.

  'That's the problem," he added.

  In other words, you might say that there is more to Knowing than just being correct. As the mystical poet Han-shan wrote:

  A scholar named Wang

  Laughed at my poems.

  The accents are wrong,

  He said,

  Too many beats;

  The meter is poor,

  The wording impulsive.

  I laugh at his poems,

  As he laughs at mine.

  They read like

  The words of a blind man

  Describing the sun.

  Surprises. Living, growing things are beyond them, it seems.

  Now, scholars can be very useful and necessary, in their own dull and unamusing way. They provide a lot of information. It's just that there is Something More, and that Something More is what life is really all about.

  Oops. "Say, Pooh, have you seen my other pencil?"

  "I saw Owl using it a little while ago," said Pooh.