Taoism
What if we acted better by ceasing to force? Attuning to the rather than imposing our will on the course of things.
400 BCE – …
A tradition born in the China of the Warring States (5th-3rd century BCE), an age of war and the collapse of order that pressed each school to offer a cure for the disorder. So-called philosophical Taoism forms around two texts: the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), an aphoristic collection ascribed to (Lao Tzu), a perhaps legendary figure, and the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), a sequence of tales, parables and dialogues of great inventive freedom. Where the of answered the crisis with ritual, study and social duty, Taoism seeks deliverance in withdrawal, naturalness and the critique of artifice. Gathered later alongside the Liezi, this current would feed, from the Han onward, a religious Taoism with its deities, its longevity techniques and its quest for immortality, distinct from the original philosophical vein. Its sensibility deeply shaped Chinese poetry, painting and medicine, the Chan school (the ancestor of Zen) across Asia, and today nourishes in the West an imaginary of simplicity and accord with nature.
The world orders itself: whoever acts by , without forcing, accomplishes all, while the will to master everything only deepens the disorder.
When rites and morality must be codified, living virtue is already lost: better the attuned to the case at hand than a rigid code.
The that can be named is not the eternal dao: our distinctions of true and false depend on the standpoint, and no disputation stands above them.
Man is not the master of nature but one creature among others: wisdom is to take the spontaneous order of the world as one's model, not to subdue it.
The is not a god of the beyond: the source of all things, it engenders them all without possessing them and is found nowhere outside them.
Justification
To name is to carve reality into opposed categories (great and small, true and false), yet the is the undivided ground from which those distinctions proceed: no word can grasp it without betraying it. Language fits bounded things, never the source that engenders them all. Zhuangzi draws from this a radical perspectivism: every judgment speaks from a situated standpoint, disputation merely sets two partialities against each other with no judge above them, and to claim a universal verdict is to mistake one's perch for the center of the world. Hence a that aims less to deny than to dissolve the claim to certain knowledge and to free one from the need to be right.
The Dao that can be named is not the constant Dao.Dao De Jing, ch. 1
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 1 · Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (On the Equality of Things)
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Justification
Taoism is wary of conceptual, bookish knowledge, which carves up and names while the Tao exceeds all speech: the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. True knowledge is not rational accumulation but unlearning and intuitive accord with the course of things, a knowing of the concrete and the spontaneous, closer to lived experience than to discursive reason.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching, ch. 1 and 48 · Zhuangzi
Justification
The world already follows its own : to set it right by will, by law or by calculated effort is to break that order and produce the opposite of what one intends, as one kills a plant by pulling at its shoots. From this observation Taoism draws : not inertia, but an efficacy through espousal rather than constraint, like water that, being the most yielding, wears down the hard by giving way to it. Where would reform man through moral effort and ritual, the Taoist holds that all willful action deepens the very disorder it means to mend: it is the exact reverse of a drive to mastery.
Nothing in the world is softer and weaker than water; yet for attacking what is hard and strong nothing surpasses it.Dao De Jing, ch. 78
Laozi, Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), ch. 43, 78 · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great and Venerable Teacher)
Justification
Refined desires arise not from need but from the artifice that manufactures them: it is the five colors, the five flavors and the craving for rare goods that blind the eye and lead the heart astray, so that multiplying desirable objects never fills the lack but hollows it. The pursuit of wealth and honors scatters the mind and draws it away from : the remedy is not to satisfy desire better but to dry it at its source, returning to pu 樸 (simplicity, the uncarved block of wood). Thus no misfortune, for Laozi, is worse than not knowing when one has enough: the contentment of one who desires little is a wealth that nothing external can threaten.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 12, 46 · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 19
Justification
The three poles of this axis fit the Taoist view poorly: death is neither a nothingness to be tamed nor the promise of an immortal soul, but simply a moment of universal transformation, like the turning of the seasons. At his wife's death, Zhuangzi stops weeping and sings while drumming on a basin, understanding that she now sleeps in the great chamber of the cosmos. The fear of death dissolves into consent to change.
Zhuangzi, ch. 18 (Perfect Happiness) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great and Venerable Teacher)
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Justification
Taoism opposes to suffering neither crusade nor valuing: it invites one to welcome the alternation of fortune without judging it, like the old man in the parable who does not know whether the loss of his horse is bad or good. Pain arises above all from resistance and desire; attuning oneself to the course of things through wu-wei defuses its torment, a position close to equanimity.
Zhuangzi · Huainanzi (the old man of the frontier)
Justification
For Taoism, the Tao is the source and order of all things, the spontaneous course to which existence belongs. Meaning is not invented but found by attuning oneself to this course through wu-wei and simplicity, renouncing the artificial ends man forges for himself. To live well is to wed a fabric that precedes and exceeds us, yet without the personal design of a god.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching · Zhuangzi
Justification
The Taoist good is flourishing through accord with the Tao: following one's spontaneous nature (ziran), acting without forcing (wu-wei), savoring simplicity and contentment. It is neither Confucian virtue nor the pursuit of pleasures, but an easeful, attuned life, where health, longevity and inner peace arise from harmony with the course of things.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching · Zhuangzi
Justification
Taoism holds that each being has its spontaneous nature (ziran), received from the Tao, and flourishes by following it rather than by fashioning itself. The sage returns to the uncarved block (pu), original simplicity, against the distortions of artifice and convention: to preserve a given nature, not to create one.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching, ch. 28 and 19 · Zhuangzi
Justification
The Taoist sage asserts no autonomous will: he acts by wu-wei, non-action, effacing himself to wed the spontaneous course of things (ziran). To will, to force, to impose a self, is to thwart the Tao and exhaust oneself; true freedom is this effortless accord with natural necessity, closer to an assent to the determined than to a conquering free will.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching, ch. 37 and 63 · Zhuangzi
Justification
The Taoist path goes through an inner work of emptiness: the fasting of the heart-mind (xin zhai) and sitting in oblivion empty the mind of knowledge and distinctions, making it available to . The transformation sought is less effective action in the world than an intimate accord with the order of things, through a stripping-away of the self.
Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (In the World of Men) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great and Venerable Teacher)
Justification
The Taoist universe is fundamentally benign and trustworthy for whoever attunes to it: nourishes all things without possessing them, and the spontaneous order of the world provides of itself once humans stop thwarting it. Evil and disorder spring from human forcing, not from a flaw in the cosmos: there is here a deep trust in the order of things.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 34, 51 · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 73
Justification
The good Taoist ruler is the one who governs least: he practices in politics, lightens laws and constraints, and lets the people follow their . Multiplying prohibitions and regulations only increases disorder, hence a libertarian leaning close to anarchism.
Governing a great state is like frying a small fish.Dao De Jing, ch. 60
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 57, 60 · Zhuangzi, ch. 11 (Letting Be and Exercising Forbearance)
Justification
If duty and propriety must be codified, it is because lived virtue has already vanished: for Laozi, the very appearance of rules is the symptom of a fall, not its cure. Taoism thus turns Confucianism's own program against it: the rites, study and ostentatious morality that raises into the path of social repair in fact betray the loss of , and the effort to enforce them hardens hearts instead of attuning them. For the rigid application of a code the sage substitutes a to the case at hand, with no fixed model: conduct governed not by the letter but by the of each situation.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 18, 38 · Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (The Secret of Caring for Life)
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Justification
Taoism is wary of explicit moral rules, which it takes as the sign of an already-lost virtue: to Confucian codification it opposes the spontaneous virtue (te) of one who accords with the Tao. The good life obeys neither principles nor a calculation, it flows from a character cultivated in simplicity and naturalness, hence a virtue ethics of a paradoxical, effortless kind.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching, ch. 38 · Zhuangzi
Justification
Zhuangzi's perspectivism issues in a relativism: what is beautiful, right, or useful for one is not so for another, and no standpoint overlooks the rest. A man sleeping in the damp falls ill, but not the eel; which of the two knows the right dwelling? Sharp moral distinctions lose their claim to universality.
Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (On the Equality of Things)
Justification
Everything, up to heaven and earth, models itself on what is more original than it is, and at the end of the chain the models itself only on : the human being therefore holds no commanding place, but is one creature among others, hanging on the same order. The right place is not to subdue nature but to conform to it as one follows a slope: to claim to correct it is to think oneself wiser than what made us. Taoism thus overturns the implicit anthropocentrism of schools that make the human order, the rites and government the summit of reality.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 25 · Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (Autumn Floods)
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Justification
A source that engenders everything cannot stand outside what it engenders: if the is the origin of the ten thousand things, it inhabits them all rather than reigning over them from a world beyond. Far from a personal, transcendent god who creates by decree and commands from without, the dao is and impersonal: it makes things grow without possessing them, acts without claiming the merit. Hence Zhuangzi's provocation when asked where the dao is: it is in the ant, the blade of grass, the tile, and even the dung, for what is everywhere cannot be missing from the lowliest thing.
There is no place where the dao is not.ch. 22
Zhuangzi, ch. 22 (Knowledge Wandered North) · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 34
The Tao is not a God: neither a person, nor a creator, nor a lawgiver, it is the impersonal principle and the spontaneous course from which everything proceeds and to which everything returns. Philosophical Taoism therefore falls under neither theism nor atheism, which presuppose the idea of a personal god to affirm or to deny; it thinks a ground of the world of an entirely different nature.
Justification
A primitivist distrust runs through Taoism: contrivances and machines breed the calculating mind and corrupt simplicity. Zhuangzi tells of the old gardener who refuses a water-raising machine, fearing that whoever keeps a machine in his heart loses his native purity; Laozi dreams of a small country where, though tools exist, none would be used.
Zhuangzi, ch. 12 (Heaven and Earth) · Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 80
Justification
Zhuangzi cultivates an equanimity that is not the refusal of feeling but the refusal of being enslaved to it: understanding that all is ceaseless transformation calms disturbance. The sage lets neither gain nor loss, neither joy nor grief disturb his inner peace; he welcomes events as the natural course of things, without clinging to them.
Zhuangzi, ch. 5 (The Sign of Virtue Complete) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great and Venerable Teacher)
Justification
Taoist cosmology resists reduction to Western categories: reality is a continuous flux of qi 氣 (the breath, the energy animating all things), with no sharp break between matter and mind, which places Taoism closer to a monism of materialist coloring than to idealism or dualism. The , the undifferentiated source from which the One, then the Two, then the ten thousand things arise, is neither pure spirit set apart from matter nor an individual mind: everything proceeds from a single energetic ground.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 42 · Zhuangzi, ch. 22 (Knowledge Wandered North)