The goal of human life, therefore, is to merge with the Dao, to mimic its flourishing, and thereby to flourish ourselves. And the best metaphor for the Dao, which is ultimately indescribable and therefore can only be approached via metaphor (and not without trepidation) is nature itself. So when Laozi wants to know how to act, he looks at the natural world, which has been neither socialized nor acculturated. He looks at the infant, who is innocent of learning and pretense. He looks at water running from mountain to valley without a thought in the world of doing otherwise.
Both infant and water embody wu wei, another key concept in the Daodejing. Wu wei literally means “no action,” and in Daoist writing it can refer to not acting and to reducing one’s actions to a minimum. More often, however, it refers to acting as nature does, which is to say spontaneously and effortlessly and out of the core of one’s being—to do this or that because it seems right in the moment, not because it is prescribed by this law or decreed by that god. So the opposite of wu wei is not action but artificial or contrived action. To act in the spirit of “noninterference,” as wu wei is sometimes translated, is to submit with equanimity to what is rather than resisting it in the name of what ought to be.
Someone once explained wu wei to me in terms of the choices that present themselves to a surfer. Bobbing up and down in the ocean, she has three ways to proceed. She can force things by paddling to shore (intentional action). She can sit there and drift (nonaction). Or she can catch a wave (wu wei). My colleague David Eckel tells me that the best metaphor for wu wei is water that effortlessly runs downhill. Falling water exhibits the Daoist virtue of ziran, which literally means “self-so” but typically refers to acting spontaneously or letting things take their natural course. The Daodejing refers to water as an example of the paradoxical power of weakness. Laozi admonishes us to be as flexible and yielding as water, which wears down rock not by smashing through it but by flowing around it. “There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water,” writes Laozi, “yet for attacking things that are hard and strong there is nothing that surpasses it.”25
Ground of Becoming
Passages such as this one may convey the impression that the Daodejing is crusading for the superiority of the passive yin over the active yang. “Know the male,” Laozi writes, “but keep to the female.”26 However, the goal of all this talk of valley and void, simplicity and tranquility is balance. In Daoist thought, yin and yang are opposing yet complementary (and interpenetrating) principles, with each containing a bit of and forever evolving into the other. So what Daoists seek is a harmonious union of the two. At the time the Daodejing was written, however, the yang energy of Confucianism was running amok. So an infusion of yin was needed to balance things out.
The Western monotheisms, drawing on Zoroastrianism, speak of a cosmic battle between two opposing principles and pray for the total victory of light over darkness. Even Hollywood movies drink deep from this well. In the Daodejing, however, the Dao is neither good nor bad. Confucians may go to great lengths to distinguish between beautiful and ugly, superior and inferior, strong and weak, but Laozi sees such judgments as both false and dangerous. The Daodejing is replete with all sorts of pairs that most of us would regard as opposites. In every case, however, what seem to be opposites are actually complementary pairs, ever melting into one another. So any effort to take sides is both futile and frustrating. The hope instead is for balance, accompanied by acquiescence to the way things are always changing—from day to night, summer to winter, and back again.
The Daodejing opens with two enigmatic lines that have vexed and delighted interpreters for millennia. These lines are typically translated, “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” This rendition suggests a mystical reading: the Dao is as ineffable as Allah for Sufis and God for Kabbalists. But my colleague Thomas Michael has suggested a different reading. These two lines are about change and creativity, he says. Rather than an assertion of mysticism, they are an observation about change and justification for creativity. The key to each sentence lies not in its subject but in its object, which is to say that the key words are not and eternal, or, in Michael’s translation constant: “Daos can lead, but these are not constant daos. Names can name, but these are not constant names.”27
The second line is somewhat easier to parse. The name “professor” can name me in one context (when I am teaching a class, for example) but it will not do in other contexts (when I am “coach” of my daughter’s soccer team or “son” at my parents’ Thanksgiving table). The first line is trickier but can also be made plain. There are many daos in the sense of “ways” to do things. And following them can lead you where you want to go. But these daos do not stay constant, because the circumstances in which they are employed are ever changing. So, to take Michael’s example of basketball, there was a dao for playing basketball at the time James Naismith invented the game, and this way could lead you to victory in the 1890s. But it wouldn’t do for Michael Jordan or Larry Bird in the National Basketball Association of the 1990s. Why? Because circumstances change. Because players get bigger and faster and (among other things) trade in the set shot for the jump shot and learn to dunk.
The desire to grab onto what does not change is typically only amplified by religious institutions. The Daodejing, by contrast, tells us to glory in transformation. The Daoist tradition includes a creation story that reverses the American motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” by affirming “out of one, many.” In the beginning was the Dao, which is changeless, formless, and indivisible, but also generative, transforming, and fertile—the mother of all that is to come. Out of this primordial unity comes qi, the life force present in all matter, human and otherwise. This vital energy then gives birth to yin/yang, which gives birth to the three realms of Heaven, Human, and Earth, the Five Phases of water, metal, fire, wood, and earth, and the ten thousand things, which is to say everything else. Everything, including human beings, is made of qi in some combination of yin and yang. The endless interaction of yin qi and yang qi is forever creating new things and transforming the old. So this cosmology of one and two and ten thousand answers not only the question, “How do things come into being?” but also, “How do things change?”
The German theologian Paul Tillich famously defined God as “the ground of being.”28 The impersonal Dao is that, too, but more fundamentally it is the ground of becoming—the natural process undergirding all generativity and change. This creative transformation is on view in the natural world, where every day light yields to darkness, every year courses through spring, summer, fall, and winter, and every life sees both birth and death. And so it goes with wealth and poverty, order and chaos, war and peace. The nature of things is not stasis but change. And the Dao is the ground of this becoming.
Soft Power
If the Daodejing is a mystical, metaphysical, and mythological text, it is also a manual for life, including political life. So the second half of this classic is devoted to de, or power/virtue. And here Laozi’s divergence from his Confucian friends becomes most plain. Confucius had argued that the problem of social chaos would yield to the solution of social harmony only when rulers and subjects alike educated themselves in the classics and cultivated virtues such as ren (benevolence). Laozi’s advice is just the opposite. He tells rulers to “throw out knowledge” and “stop benevolence,” adding that if they do, “the people will be a hundred times better off.”29 In their Book of Common Prayer, Anglicans confess sins both done and left undone. For Laozi, things left undone are far less dangerous.
The Daodejing is said to have been written as Laozi was withdrawing to the mountains, and it obviously commends the natural life of the recluse he is becoming over the artificial life of the clerk he had been. It is inhuman, Laozi says, to live under the thumb of the dictates of ruler or father or husband; to be human is to be free. Unlike the seventeenth-century Englishman Thomas Hobbes, who famously argued that human life in
the state of nature would be “nasty, brutish, and short,” Laozi is convinced that human life in a society where everyone acts naturally and spontaneously would be pleasant, humane, and long. But Laozi is no anarchist. His vision favors “soft power” rather than no power. It imagines small-scale, noncompetitive communities that are harmonious because their governments, in keeping with wu wei, do as little as possible and leave the rest to nature. The great U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis was channeling Laozi when he said of America’s highest court that “the most important thing we do is not doing.”30
Zhuangzi and the Zhuangzi
The next Daoist classic, second in influence only to the Daodejing, is the Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu), which takes its name from Zhuangzi (369–286 B.C.E.), a follower of Laozi and contemporary of the Confucian thinker Mencius. Although we know more about Zhuangzi than we do about Laozi, we don’t know much. A biographical account from the first or second century B.C.E. portrays him as a writer of anti-Confucian allegories who laughs in the face of an offer to become a prime minister’s chief of staff. “I’d rather enjoy myself playing around in a fetid ditch,” Zhuangzi says, “than be held in bondage by the ruler of a kingdom.”31
Widely recognized as a masterpiece of world literature, the Zhuangzi, which likely came together between the fourth and second centuries B.C.E., consists of seven “inner chapters” probably written by Zhuangzi himself plus fifteen “outer chapters” and eleven “miscellaneous chapters” probably written by his followers. This classic had a major impact not only on Daoism but also on Chan Buddhism, which in Japan would come to be known as Zen. Like Zen, the Zhuangzi uses language to call language into question. It also shares with Zen the conviction that what matters most can be found wherever we look. A famous Zen exchange goes, “What is the Buddha?” “Dried shit.” The Zhuangzi informs us that the Dao can be found even in excrement.
As this observation implies, the Zhuangzi is a mischievous text. Its reputed author has been described as “a mystic, a satirist, a nihilist, a hedonist, a romantic,” and “a profound and brilliant jester who demolishes our confounded seriousness.”32 The words attributed to him run in all these directions, often at the same time. Long before American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself,” Zhuangzi was arguing (no doubt with a sly grin) that arguing is a dead end. While his contemporaries in the Confucian, Mohist, and Legalist schools were using logic and rhetoric to advance arguments, Zhuangzi told stories. In the face of a society that championed usefulness, the Zhuangzi championed uselessness, singing the praises of a tree so bent and unkempt that it can’t be used for anything other than shade for an afternoon nap. Zhuangzi didn’t want the Dao to be useful for politics, or even philosophy. He wanted it to be good for nothing. The same goes for each of us. Instead of making ourselves useful, he advised, make yourself useless. Then everyone will leave you alone.
The Zhuangzi includes chapter titles such as “Webbed Toes” and a long cast of off-beat characters—“Master Timid Magpie,” “Nag the Hump,” “Sir Sacrifice,” “Uncle Obscure Nobody,” “Princely Nag,” “Mad Stammerer”—that seem to have sprung full-blown from a Flannery O’Connor short story.33 If the Daodejing is a work of philosophy, this is a work of literature, and of comedy. It uses fables and fantasy in the service of satire and ranks as both the funniest and the most irreverent of the great religions’ scriptures. One way to cope with death and degeneration, the Zhuangzi suggests, is to step lively through laughter and play. If there had been knives and forks at the time of Confucius, his starchy followers would have used both to consume their noodles. Not Zhuangzi. He slurps.
Taking up many of the key themes of the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi underscores the fact of change and the futility of resisting it. It glories in simplicity, spontaneity, flexibility, and freedom. It observes that rules and concepts get in the way of both individual happiness and social harmony. (“Get rid of goodness,” reads the Zhuangzi, “and you will naturally be good.”34) Zhuangzi is less interested than Laozi, however, in dispensing political advice. Whereas Laozi had at least one foot in the Confucian problem of social chaos, Zhuangzi frames the human predicament almost entirely in individual terms. The problem is lifelessness, which is brought on by the social customs so prized by Confucians. The solution is a life well lived, which is to say health, longevity, and perhaps even bodily immortality. But none of this is possible without freedom from life-sapping social conventions.
The Zhuangzi also differs from the Daodejing in its preference for the story over the aphorism. One of its most poignant parables concerns a rare seabird discovered far away from the ocean in the city of Lu. A government official fetes it like an honored guest from some faraway land. A great feast is prepared, music is played, and wine is offered. But the bird is overwhelmed by the fuss and dies after three days.35
In Leaving Church (2006), memoirist Barbara Brown Taylor writes about giving up a job as an Episcopal priest—a job that was killing her. Along the way, she challenges readers to ask what in their lives is killing them and what is giving them life. Daoism poses the same challenge. In one of the Zhuangzi’s oft-told tales, a ruler sends his officials to convince Zhuangzi to accept a prestigious government appointment. But Zhuangzi, who is fishing, doesn’t even give them a glance. As he continues his casting, he speaks of the dry bones of an ancient tortoise kept by the ruler in a temple and trotted out on special ritual occasions. “What would you say that the tortoise would have preferred: to die and leave its shell to be venerated or to live and keep on dragging its tail over the mud?” Zhuangzi asks. “It would have preferred to live and drag its tail over the mud,” the officials answer. “Go your ways,” Zhuangzi says, “I will keep on dragging my tail over the mud.”36
The Zhuangzi speaks of a variety of techniques that can take us from the problem of lifelessness to the solution of flourishing. Each aims to redirect us from social death to natural life. For example, Zhuangzi advocates “sitting and forgetting,” a method for emptying the mind of so-called learning. In a passage that upends both the Confucian hierarchy of teacher over student and Confucian confidence in education, Confucius is speaking with his favorite student Yan Hui. Yan Hui proudly reports that he has forgotten all sorts of core Confucian virtues. “I sit and forget everything,” Yan Hui says. “I leave behind my body, perception and knowledge. Detached from both material form and mind, I become one with that which penetrates all things.”37 This story ends when Confucius, rather than rebuking Yan Hui, asks to become his student. So while education, so highly prized by Confucians, may help us get ahead in the Chinese bureaucracy, it does not foster life or make us human. Only the spontaneity and surprise of the Dao can do that.
In passages that have captured the attention of Western philosophers of language, the Zhuangzi also takes aim at the Confucians’ tendency (and our own) to chop up the world into quick-and-easy dualisms. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing / there is a field. I’ll meet you there,” writes the Sufi mystic Rumi.38 Except for the meeting part, that is vintage Zhuangzi. For him, dichotomies of right and wrong, life and death, large and small work only inside our limited conventions of thought and language. From the wider perspective of the Dao, so-called opposites logically depend on one another and are forever melting into one another. To grasp after any one side of these dualisms is to bring on lifelessness. Why fixate on success when, as Bob Dylan once put it, “there’s no success like failure” and “failure’s no success at all”?39
It is sometimes said that Daoists believe that human beings are born good. And it is true that Daoists see virtues such as naturalness and simplicity in abundance in infants, who have the additional merit of an equal balance of yin and yang. But from the Daoist perspective human nature is neither inherently good, as Mencius argued, nor inherently evil, as many of his opponents insisted. It is, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would later argue, “beyond good and evil.”
As in the Daodejing
, the exemplary human being in the Zhuangzi is the sage, described here as a “genuine person.” The Zhuangzi also includes a tantalizing glimpse into a figure that will become central in later Daoism: the immortal who is indifferent to politics, uninterested in fame, unmoved by profit or loss, and unafraid of death.
Popular Daoism and Superhero Immortals
Around the time of the emergence of Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, devotional Hinduism, and Mahayana Buddhism, which is to say at the dawn of the first millennium, Daoism began to take on many of the characteristics of other organized religions. Spurred by Buddhists, who upon their arrival in China in the first century C.E. organized themselves around monasteries and temples, Daoism took institutional shape. Daoists wrote thousands of scriptures and gathered them into a massive canon. They turned their heroes into gods. They developed a full range of festivals, rituals, and self-cultivation practices. They integrated into their tradition Buddhist notions of karma and rebirth, Confucian commitments to filial piety, and elements from ancient Chinese religion such as shamanism, divination, sacred mountains, pilgrimage, and sacrifice. They institutionalized their tradition, founding new sects and building and maintaining temples and monasteries. They invited a vast pantheon of gods to inhabit these institutions and ordained priests to oversee them. Some Daoist priests followed Laozi’s example by living apart from society. Others were married with children, performing life-cycle rituals in the midst of the hubbub of social and sexual life.
Drawing on ancient beliefs in ghosts and demons and practices such as ancestor veneration and shamanism, Daoism added to its goal of nourishing life an ambitious corollary: physical immortality. Whereas Laozi and Zhuangzi had cultivated an air of indifference toward life and death alike, Daoists now sought after not only vitality and longevity but also the immortality of the body. As Buddhism gained in popularity, Daoists started to treat Laozi like a religious founder, a revealer, and even a deity who demonstrated that it was possible for ordinary human beings to live forever. While Buddhists sought to become bodhisattvas or Buddhas, Daoists now sought to become immortals (aka “transcendents” 40), who according to legend distinguished themselves from the rest of us through all sorts of astonishing powers.
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