Confucius:

Human Culture as the Center

of Philosophy
At the dawn of Chinese culture there stand
shadowy figures called "The Five Emperors."
The most famous of them is Huang-ti, or the
"Yellow Emperor." These figures are
conceived as semi-divine beings who
established the foundations of human
civilization— their status is similar to that of
Prometheus in the ancient Greek tradition.

When culture in China became sufficiently

organized, articulated, and defined to name
itself, it was classifiable into dynasties. The
first three dynasties in Chinese history are:

1. The Hsia dynasty — 2205-1766 BCE

2. The Shang dynasty — 1766-1123 BCE
3. The Chou dynasty — 1122-256 BCE
I draw your attention to the three earliest
dynasties in China not only to provide you with
some historical background, but also to
impress upon you the extraordinary precision
of the ancient (very ancient) Chinese
calendars. The Hsia dynasty ended in 1766
BCE― not, say, a nice round and approximate
number like 1750, or even the smoother 1765.
The precision of the recorded dates suggests
a parallel sophistication in the study of
astronomy/astrology (the two were not
distinguished in antiquity).

It is with the 3rd dynasty, the Chou, that we

are concerned, since toward the end of that
dynasty is when philosophical thought is
believed to have begun in China. The fall of
the Chou dynasty was a protracted affair
that dragged on over centuries. Not unlike
the Roman empire, the Chou dynasty had both
organized society and maintained the peace in
China. Its disintegration brought chaos and
disasters that were witnessed by Confucius:
civil wars, famine, epidemic, and economic
collapse. Confucius looked on this troubled
situation with the eyes of a reformer.

He lived from 551-479 BCE. In fact his

contemporaries did not know him as
Confucius, and there's a good reason for that.
Confucius is a Latinization of the Chinese
Kung Fu-Tzu. The name Confucius was given
him in the 17th century by European scholars
visiting China, scholars who were deeply
impressed by the teachings of "Master Kung."

What you've read are selections from the

Analects, or "Sayings" taken down by his
students. Confucius (as we'll call him) taught
a way of life, a teaching that saw life as good.
In terms of Confucius's teaching, the horrors
entailed in the fall of the Chou dynasty were
not seen as "that's just how it is"; they were
seen as aberrations and as altogether
unnecessary disorders. And they were
unnecessary, for Confucius, because their
causes were rooted not in nature, but in
human culture. Social disasters, he believed,
did not just happen, they occurred because
they were allowed to happen.

Confucianism (as Confucius's teaching is

called) arose roughly contemporary to another
great Chinese philosophy— Taoism. The
traditional founder of the Taoist view is
taken to be a sage named Lao Tzu. Imagine
the two men— Confucius and Lao Tzu—
standing together and surveying the dreadful
conditions emerging with the fall of the Chou
dynasty. In our imaginary scenario, both men
would ask a very important question: What
went wrong? The question is important
because it assumes that misery is not endemic
to the human condition, as, we've seen, the
Indian teachings propose. Confucius and Lao
Tzu may be said to agree to that the
disastrous conditions of their time are in no
way "given" in the human predicament. And
they agreed on other points:
 — they both believed in the
natural goodness of human
nature
— they both stressed the
need for harmony
— they both spoke of "the
Way"

We'll focus for now on the last point: a

concept of order that was called the Tao, the
"way." They both teach the reality of the
Tao, yet each understands the Tao very
differently. Let me put things in schematic
order. First, here's what the Chinese
character for Tao looks like:
 For Confucius:
The Tao is a social order
The Tao is a human product; a social
construction
The Tao is a moral order
The Tao can be given expression in language

For Lao Tzu and Taoism:

The Tao is a natural order
The Tao is an order to which humans are
subject
The Tao is not a moral order
The Tao cannot be expressed in language

Again: both Confucius and Lao Tzu use the

term "Tao." But they mean, as indicated
above, something very different by the term.
Let's look more closely at Confucius.

The Tao for Confucius is a human product—

what can be called a social construction. No
one person, no matter how powerful, can
construct the Tao, the Tao is an
accomplishment of an entire society. For all
its influence in our lives, this social order is
not something that produces us in that way
that, say, nature produces us. The Tao is
something we produce, something we do,
something we do collectively, something we
humans manifest:

Confucius said: "The human being

manifests the Tao. The Tao doesn't
manifest the human being." 15:28

For Confucius, humanity is the touchstone of

all values and the measure of reality. Because
of this, his philosophy is called a humanism.
The mark of humanism is that it looks neither
to God nor the gods nor nature for the
explanation of the human situation; the
concerns of humanism are centered squarely
in humanity. Confucius's humanistic values are
evident in his lack of concern for either
'spiritual beings' (gods or ancestors) or any
life after death:
 Confucius said, "If you can't yet serve
men, how can you serve the spirits?" Lu
said, "May I ask about death?" Confucius
said, "If you don't understand what life
is, how will you understand death?" 11:11

And even more succinctly:

Confucius said, "Work to give the people

justice. And respect the spirits, but keep
them at a distance. That you can call
wisdom." 6:20

Respect the gods or spirits, but keep them at

a distance: respect tradition, but don't be
enslaved by it. This respectful attitude
toward tradition stand in contrast to that of
another humanist, Karl Marx. Both Confucius
and Marx see experienced reality as a human
construction, but where Confucius's attitude
toward tradition is respect, Marx's attitude
toward tradition is revolution. This is
significant in Chinese history because the
revolution that ended in 1949 and gave birth
to the People's Republic of China was in fact a
triumph of Marxist revolutionary humanism
over Confucianist traditional humanism.

Back to Confucius himself. Since humanity is

the measure reality and value for Confucius,
it only makes sense that his cardinal virtue
should be jen— translated variously as
"humanity," "humane," or "human-
heartedness." Jen is established in relation
to others— it is a social virtue. The sense of
jen is stated this way by Confucius:

Yen Yuan asked about the meaning of jen.

The Master said, "To completely
overcome selfishness and keep to
propriety (li) is jen." 12.1

Chung Kung asked about the meaning of

jen. The Master said: "Go out of your
home as if you were receiving an
important guest. Employ the people as if
you were assisting at a great ceremony.
What you don't want done to yourself,
 don't do to others. Live in your town
without stirring up resentments, and live
in your household without stirring up
resentments." 12.2

For Confucius, jen is the virtue of living well

within society, of living well as a social being.
One commentator sums up his position: "His
primary concern was a good society based on
good government and harmonious human
relations." But: could this emphasis on good
society and good government lead something
sinister like a "cult of the State" in the
fashion of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia?
Look what Confucius says to the Duke of
Sheh:

The Duke of Sheh told Confucius: "In my

land, there are Righteous men. If a father
steals a sheep, the son will testify against
him." Confucius said, "The Righteous men
in my land are different from this. The
father conceals the wrongs of his son, and
 the son conceals the wrongs of his father.
This is Righteousness!" 13.18

The point here is that Confucius saw the

family as the basic unit of society, and thus
filial obligations have more weight than
societal. The self, according to Confucius, is
neither an individual nor a member of society
in the broad sense. The self is most
fundamentally a family member. The well-
ordered society does not consist in an
authoritarian rule being imposed from above;
rather, a society is automatically well-ordered
when jen and harmony preside in the family.

The family, for Confucius, is the basis of

humanity, of jen. A person learns things
about being fully human that can be learned
only in the family. One can say that Confucius
is the great-grand-daddy of "family values"—
accept no Republican substitutes. I joke
around here, but the point is momentous: as a
culture, America is in deep trouble if we come
to see family values as one party's political
agenda.

It is a measure of the degree of Confucian

influence in Chinese culture that family-
rooted identity still persists, at the beginning
of the 21st century and in far-off America,
among folks of Chinese ancestry.

Let's briefly summarize Confucius's teaching.

He made the human situation the measure or
touchstone of reality and value. He answered
the basic questions of life this way:

— What is there? There is the human

tradition; the ongoing unfolding of human
culture, human society.
— Who am I? First and foremost: I am a
member of a social group; a group defined
most fundamentally a the family.
— What's the best way to live my life? To
cultivate the highest virtue in myself; to
develop the social virtue of jen.
Now: an important final point on Confucius in
regard to that last question: how does a
person develop jen? What is the method?
This brings us to another Confucianist
concept— the concept of li. Li is difficult to
render into English through any single term,
and the translations we have are often
compromises. Li means all of the following:

— ritual, sacred ceremony

— custom, traditional way of doing
anything
— patterns of human interaction,
social forms
— convention and propriety

Li is tradition as it is handed down; li is what

the individual must struggle to learn; li is
what humanizes a person, what gives rise to
the virtue of jen. I suggest that the insight
of Confucius here is profound: we live in a
world that is for the most part socially
constructed; we live in a world of convention
and ritual. This ritual is on the one hand very
subtle and on the other very obvious to the
people who share a culture. Take for example
being introduced to another person here in
California: with a marvelous grace and
confidence we each smile, meet each other's
eyes, extend our right hands, then grasp and
joggle appropriately.

Easy, right? Not if you aren't from a

"handshaking culture," or if you are greeting
someone who isn't. Then the subtlety and
complexity of the ritual becomes unpleasantly
apparent in for form of awkwardness.

And note— we are not born with li, we learn

li. And the learning of li requires effort. For
Confucius li and jen are inextricably bound
up: li is the method for attaining jen and jen
is necessary for full participation in li:

Confucius said: "If a man has no jen what

can his propriety (li) be like? If a man
has no jen what can his music be like?"
3.3
Jen is developed through participation in li;
genuine participation in li requires the
development of jen. One cannot be developed
without the other. Although the point is
sometimes questioned, Confucianism is indeed
a religious outlook: the li that is merely
convention when casually considered is, on
more careful examination, a traditional ritual
— and for Confucius a sacred ritual.

What does failure in regard to li look like?

The key, I think, is found in the following. Li
is the "magic" by which society functions
well; it is government by example rather than
government by reward and punishment:

Confucius said: "If you govern the people

legalistically and control them by
punishment, they will avoid crime, but
have no personal sense of shame. If you
govern them by means of virtue and
control them with propriety (li), they will
gain their own sense of shame, and thus
correct themselves." 2.3
The term I want to bring to your attention is
shame (and its counterpart, honor). Good
government by way of li generates a sense of
shame in people; government merely by force
of law does not. The relevance of this to
contemporary America is twofold:

1. We seem seriously to hope to solve

social problems by building more prisons.
2. We don't seem to fully appreciate the
connections between drug dealer in the
inner cities on the one hand, and the CEOs
of tobacco companies publicly swearing
that they don't think tobacco is addictive
on the other.

What is the importance of shame? And

doesn't it strike us as weird that it should be
so important? There are some extremely
important assumptions operative here, ones
that are alien to us because of our own very
different Western assumptions. To a
Confucian mind, a brazen display of lying
under oath by leading citizens of a culture
(corporate executives, for example) betokens
a lack of shame in that culture— a very
dangerous state of affairs.

The Chinese word for shame is chih. This is

indeed a moral shortcoming, but it is failure
centered on the very public phenomenon of li.
That is, shame is focused on one's social role,
not on one's inner self. Shame is oriented
"outward," not "inward." Shame is what one
feels in respect to others; not what one feels
in respect to oneself.

And just this is the difference between the

Confucianist response to moral failure and the
typical Western response— the contrast is
between shame on the one hand and guilt on
the other. Confucius never speaks of "guilt"
or "repentance" as being the appropriate
response to moral failing.

Guilt is an emphatic attack on the self; shame

is an attack on some specific form of
behavior. Put otherwise: guilt is self-
condemnation; shame is the condemnation of
outward, public actions. Shame is a matter of
what Chinese call face (as in "loss of face"),
of embarrassment, of social disgrace, of a
loss of public honor. Shame says "Change your
ways!"

Guilt is a private matter, a relation between

you and yourself, not a loss of public honor
but a loss of self-respect, of self-esteem.
Guilt says "You are no good!"

Now— where is all this leading us? For

Confucius, the individual is not an autonomous,
isolated entity, a little "private world" over
against the reality "out there." The Western
conceptions of guilt and repentance are
premised on a separation of self and reality
that is for the most part denied in Eastern
thought. Guilt assumes a separateness, a
disconnectedness of the self that Eastern
thought denies.
Instead of isolated separateness, the
Confucianist view of the self is that the
individual is born as raw material that must be
civilized (=humanized) through the rigorous
process of education— education as to the
complexities of li.

Moral failing is thus not a matter of individual

perversity, but of a lack of power, a lack of
genuine development, a defect in one's
authentic (=social) formation. And so for
Confucius, the appropriate response to failing
to properly act out li is not self-
condemnation, but self-reeducation. Not guilt
but determination is what is needed. From the
Confucianist viewpoint, the problem with guilt
is that it undermines one's self-esteem, is
enervating, and thus subverts the very
determination that is appropriate to the
situation.

But what do you think?

 Taoism: the Way of
Simplicity
The book is called the Tao Te Ching (or "the
Lao-Tzu"). It is one of the shortest and
simplest of the world’s great religious
classics. The text comprises only 5,000
characters; only 800 different characters.

Tao Te Ching = the book (=Ching) of Tao and

Te. The famous I Ching is the book (=Ching)
of change (=I). We’ve considered the
concept of Tao in our discussion of Confucius.
We’ll look more closely at Tao, and also at the
concept of Te, shortly.

For now, let’s stay with the book itself. There

are many translations of the Tao Te Ching.
And there are many discrepancies among the
various translations. In his elegant book,
Taoism: the Parting of the Way, Holmes
Welch says this:
 To read the Tao Te Ching is an act of
creation. In a sense, there is no Tao Te
Ching text— no authoritative version of
what the text says (never mind what it
might mean). This is an important
realization for seekers of Taoist 'wisdom.'
Whether they know it or not, readers of
the Tao Te Ching either in Chinese or in
translation are entirely dependent on
scholarly and imaginative interpretations.
Let’s keep in mind, then, that we will never
but never get to the Truth of Taoism. No
Truth, but we can develop in interesting
interpretation, we can develop an intuitive
feel for the outlook. Now: you've heard the
term "cut to the chase"? Or "give me the
bottom line"? We’ll do something like that,
because we’re going to begin with what may
be taken as the culminating question of the
three Basic Questions that are serving as the
prisms through which we are investigating the
world’s religions― we’ll begin with the third
question: What’s the best way to live?
This brings us at once to a crucial Taoist
concept: wu-wei. Wu-wei means literally no
(=wu) action (=wei― pronounced like the
English “way”). No action. That's the literal
translation, but it is misleading. It suggests
stillness or passivity, and Taoism is a
worldview that stresses dynamism and
constant change. So a better way to think of
wu-wei is twofold:
― Non-interference
― Spontaneity
One might say that wu-wei is the art of not
getting in your own way, of not defeating
yourself through an obsessive determination
to make life go "my way." Not my way, but
wu-wei. Admittedly a goofy way of putting it,
but the silly phrasing makes the point: you will
be happier if you allow an openness, a
spontaneity, to guide you through life rather
than a script by which you insist― to yourself
and others― how life should be happening. Put
otherwise, wu-wei is freedom from the
"control freak" in all of us, that insistent
voice (always reading from a script) that
wants to assert control over events out there
in the world and over thoughts and emotions
within the self.

The point is vital, and is worth elaborating a

bit. Wu-wei as spontaneity alarms those who
think in terms of Original Sin: for them,
"spontaneous" suggests bestial, appetitive,
aggressive, and predatory. As early as Plato,
through the Christian Saints Paul and
Augustine, right down to Freud, spontaneity in
human life has been associated with depravity
and anti-social behavior. But for Taoism:
spontaneous means free flowing, healthy,
unimpeded by private purposes. Wu-wei is
letting Nature do it; letting it "happen"―
getting your calculating and controlling ego
out of the way and making room in your life
for a natural spontaneity. "What's the best
way to live?" Practice wu-wei.
Taoist writers often use the analogy of the
artist or craftsman― or even the
accomplished athlete who does not ponder or
intellectualize how he does what he does. The
skill has become so much a part of him that
he does it instinctively, naturally,
spontaneously. But note that wu-wei is not a
substitute for skill and discipline. Skill must
be acquired, but then, once mastered,
expertise is allowed to flow through a person
effortlessly. And for all that it is
effortless, that flow is a marvel of
competence.

As you read these lines, you are an expert at

eating. You may even be exercising that
expertise as you read. Eating is an extremely
complex physiological process, yet you pull it
off with aplomb― you even talk (another
complex process) while you eat. Effortless
and un-self-conscious. It is when we become
aware of ourselves, conscious and self-
conscious of our eating― say, on a first
date― that we are liable to choke on our
food.

Or consider another example: driving. You

were never such a public menace as when you
were learning how to drive. You were trying to
do it right, you were thinking and rethinking
through every move. You were acutely aware
of how all the anxiety you experienced was
apparent to anyone else in the car. But, you
learned. You mastered the skill. And now―
look at you: you drive expertly and un-self-
consciously; while you drive you hold complex
conversations (sometimes even with other
people); you listen to music, you keep an eye
out for drunken pedestrians and the street
you’re looking for in an unfamiliar
neighborhood; you are an effortlessly and
impeccably skilled driver. Driving is no longer
something you need to think about, it has
become, as they say, "second nature" to you.
And just that exquisite
competence, that effortless spontaneity, can
be brought to the whole of your life. That is
what wu-wei looks like in action. In a word:
easy. Living in a state of wu-wei is not only
natural, it is for that very reason smooth and
harmonious.

Another aspect of wu-wei is less easy,

because more controversial. Wu-wei is what
Taoism proposes as an alternative to morality.
In a preliminary comparison of the
Confucianist position to the Taoist position
last time, I noted (without comment) that for
Confucius the Tao is a moral order, where for
Taoists the Tao is not a moral order. For
Taoists, morality is rejected, and wu-wei is
recommended in its place. See Chapters 18
and 19:
Eighteen
When the great Tao is forgotten,
Kindness and morality arise.
When wisdom and intelligence are born,
 The great pretense begins.
When there is no peace within the family,
Filial piety and devotion arise.
Nineteen
Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
And it will be a hundred times better for
everyone.
Give up kindness, renounce morality,
And men will rediscover filial piety and love.
(emphasis added)
Morality, in the Taoist view, is not the
solution; morality is a big part of the
problem. Again, those who see human failings
in terms of sin will find this claim alarming.
But in the Taoist view, there are sound
reasons why morality should be rejected.
Here are three:

1. Morality supports strife.

Morality posits a good and an evil that
inevitably divide people; morality becomes
a strategy for suppressing dissent, for
privileging one's own biases. "What I say
is not merely right, but righteous; what
you are saying is not merely wrong, but
wicked." (Sound like a conversation you've
been engaged in lately?) Note this― no
moralist has ever claimed to be
representing the interests of Evil; Evil is
what those other folks are all about. This
is not conclusive evidence in a case against
morality, of course, but it is nonetheless
suggestive. For Taoism, what is to be
avoided above all is competition and
strife. And morality it that is does not
attack the problem at its root: all it does
is regulate discordant activity and
thereby legitimize it.

2. Morality foments hostility to nature.

The Good and Evil in which morality
trades inevitably reflect human welfare.
And natural disasters― ironically called
"acts of God"― stand as grim evidence
that human welfare is not one of nature's
priorities. In addition, there is the
recurrent horror of epidemic, like that of
the "Black Death" of the 14th century.
Nature has always been a source of
menace to humanity, and that menace,
seen in moral terms, comes to be framed
as an indictment of nature: nature comes
to be seen as evil.

3. Morality is based on the exclusivity

of opposites.
Finally, morality treats Good and Evil as
exclusive and independent of each other:
"Be good and don't be evil." For a Taoist,
this is a mistaken approach to opposites.
The point may sound overly philosophical,
but it is absolutely central to the Taoist
position. Opposites relate to each other,
in the Taoist view, not on terms of
"either/or" but on terms of "both/and."
Their relation is not exclusive, but
reciprocal. This point is best made with an
image, an image that has historically been
the emblem of the Taoist religion. You are
 no doubt familiar with it:

There's more at issue than a compelling logo.

Where morality, with its exclusivity of
opposites, speaks the language of victory―
the victory of good over evil― the Taoist
approach, based on the reciprocity of
opposites, speaks the language of balance.
For the moralist, rapprochement with evil is
dishonorable capitulation. For the Taoist,
seeking balance with the dark aspect of life
(not evil, now, but the dark aspect of life) is
realistic.

We turn now from the question "What’s the

best way to live?" to the question "What is
there?" The Taoist response is one word―
nature. Nature, not a God, is the ultimate
reality in Taoism.

In the Taoist view, nature is a living reality.

Some folks in the modern world see the space
program as a "search for life in the universe."
This would strike a Taoist as absurd: they see
the universe as alive, as throbbing with life,
life on the cosmic scale― literally. And you
are part of that grand life, that life is not
something other than you, it is your inmost
reality. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

"What is there?" There is nature? What is

nature? First, we can say that nature is the
vast domain of particular things― everything
from atoms to fly specks to your body to the
continent on which you live; everything from
the earth to the solar system to the Milky
Way galaxy; everything from our home galaxy
to that cluster of galaxies called by
astronomers “the local group.” Everything
including the total of all galaxies, the entire
cosmos.
To say it again: there is nothing beyond
nature in Taoism― there is no God, no higher
reality beyond nature. Taoism is a nature
religion. But let’s look a bit closer. The vast
domain of particular things does not, of
itself, tell the whole story; of itself, the
domain of particular things is not nature―
there’s more to nature because, to say it
again, nature is a living reality. Let me
illustrate by some homey examples. Consider a
typewriter, and also a cat. Like these:

This is a typewriter.
 This is a cat.
Let’s start with the typewriter. You can do
this yourself. Dismantle it. Take your time;
take care. Make full use of the special tools
you've received for the purpose; pay close
attention to the repair manual that you've
been given. There: you’ve broken the
typewriter down into all its component parts.
You've spread the parts out onto a spacious
table. And now― put it all back together.
Once you've completed the re-assembly, try
it out. You've been careful, and the
typewriter works as good as new. This is
because the typewriter is a machine. The
point is important: a machine is nothing more
than the sum of its parts. You can do with any
machine what you’ve just done with the
typewriter: take it apart, put it back
together and still have― a typewriter, a
machine.

Now turn to the kitty cat. Not your cat, of

course, but an anonymous cat that's been
supplied to you. You are not a savage; you
anesthetize the cat so that it feels no pain in
the procedure. And now you follow roughly
the same steps as you did with the
typewriter. Dismantle it. Once again, use the
special surgical instruments you've been
given. In fact, there's even a veterinary
surgeon in attendance to consult with you.
There: you've anatomized the cat into its
major components, and the parts are spread
out before you on a spacious table. And
again― you put it all back together. This will
be tricky, but you'll have fine surgical
sutures, and the veterinary surgeon is right
there to help you. You finish, and― and alas,
what you have is not a cat. It is a former cat,
a late cat, an ex-cat.

The experiment has been a bit grisly, but

something important has been learned
through it. Specifically, a cat is not a
machine, a cat is not simply the sum of its
parts. A cat is an organism― is it a living
thing― and as such it is more than the sum of
its parts. In addition to the parts that
comprise it, an organism is possessed of an
integrating principle that allows the organism
to regulate itself, repair itself, organize
itself. Biologists call this integrating function
the homeostatic principle. This principle is
not itself a thing, or a part of the body. It is
not localized in any area of the body, but
permeates every part. If I ask to point to the
homeostatic principle by which you are a living
being, you’ll realize that you can’t do that―
the homeostatic principle through which you
live is operative in every cell of that
comprises you.
And now comes the crucial step: what the
homeostatic principle does to the organism
that is you― it’s what makes you, in fact, an
organism, a living entity― so the Tao does to
the vast array of particulars that is the
cosmos. The Tao is nature’s homeostatic
principle; the Tao is what makes nature a
living reality. But is this making sense to you?

There's more. The Tao, nature's homeostatic

principle, is the law of nature. And it is first
and foremost a biological law. And a biological
law operates very differently from a
mechanical law. A useful illustration of
mechanical law is the Newtonian law of
gravitation. And a term commonly associated
with such laws is inexorable. Mechanical laws
do not admit of exceptions; mechanical laws
are universal, invariable, and inviolable. If, for
example, someone credibly asserts that an
exception to the law of gravitation has been
found, scientists will dash in from every
quarter to confirm or disconfirm that
stunning claim. And confirmation of the claim
would be very big news— it would amount to a
veritable tectonic shift in the domain of
theoretical physics.

To repeat, a biological law operates very

differently from a mechanical law. A example
of a biological law is what Charles Darwin took
to be the engine of evolution— natural
selection. As a biological law, natural
selection is unlike Newtonian mechanistic laws
in what might be called its tolerance for
exceptions. Not mechanistic certainty, but
biological probabilities characterizes the
operation of the Tao. You (or we, as a
species) can go against the Tao, but the
probabilities of your success decreases with
each step. To align your behavior with the Tao
will not secure you guarantees, but it will
increase your odds for success. To return to
Darwin’s idea, natural selection does not state
that an individual possessed of adaptive
characteristics will survive. Instead, the
theory of natural selection states that such a
well adapted individual will have a higher
probability of surviving. That is, the odds of
that individual are better. Better odds, yes;
guarantees, no. Consider the fate of some
splendidly adapted animals, the dinosaurs—
indeed entire species of dinosaurs— that
dominated the planet until some sixty-five
million years ago. All their adaptive success
was of no avail when a huge meteorite struck
the earth in the general area known today as
the Gulf of Mexico. Natural selection theory
describes odds, probabilities. And sometimes,
against all odds, the improbable happens.

We can go against the Tao because the Tao is

not a mechanical law. We cannot hope to
persist in going against the Tao, because it’s
operation as a biological law is consistent. Put
simply: you can go out and get good and drunk
tonight and, aside from the hangover, your
body will successfully accommodate the
impact. However, if you get good and drunk
every night for several years, you are likely to
experience incapacitating symptoms. The Tao
can be ignored on occasion, but not as a long-
term policy. At least no as a successful long-
term policy.

Let’s return to the concept of wu-wei. It was

stated earlier that wu-wei is the art of
getting out of your own way. Non-
interference: not interfering with something
natural that, at your best, flows through you.
What flows through you, we now can say, is
the Tao. At least when all is going smoothly
and well for you― when you are, as they say,
in the flow― the way of nature, the Tao,
flows through you.

But the Tao doesn’t flow through everyone in

the same way. That is because each person is,
to varying degrees, different from every
other person. We have arrived at the concept
of Te. The title of Lao Tzu’s text, recall, is
the Tao Te Ching― the book of Tao and Te.
Every person has a Te, which involves all of
the following:
― a unique essence
― a unique power
― a unique virtue, or
excellence
The emphasis, clearly, is on unique. The
emphasis, put otherwise, is on individuality.
But some clarity is needed. In the Taoist
view, an individual is understood differently
than in, say, traditional Western view. In that
view, an individual is taken to be defined by
the boundaries that separate it from it’s
environment. The individual is isolated and
"atomistic." Such an individual, so conceived,
may or may not be related to its environment.
An individual is fundamentally independent.

The Taoist conception, by contrast, centers

on the individual’s uniqueness, not
independence. The individual, in Taoism, is not
independent, but interdependent. The
individual is relational by its nature. And in
this context of relatedness and
interdependence, individuality is stressed―
but, again, individuality is realized through
uniqueness. That uniqueness is the Te of
each individual.

Your Te is what might be called your set of

natural assets. You were born with those
assets. And you will live best if you align you
life according to those assets. When you are
so aligned, there is (to use the term again) a
sense of flow in your life. Your Te is your
natural aptitude― it is those activities at
which you are born to excel.

The task, for the Taoist, is to see through

the various expectations that have been
placed on us by society― and by those close
to us who love us and wish us well― and
discover the unique assets through which we
will live most successfully. Typically, this
discovery proceeds through experiment.
 Chuang Tzu.
Chuang Tzu lived around the end of the 4th
century B.C.E.— about 150 years after Lao-
Tzu, the ancient master traditionally
considered to be the founder of Taoism. In
Chinese tradition, Chuang-Tzu is considered
not only as a philosopher and religious
teacher, but as a master literary figure as
well.

As a Taoist, Chuang Tzu recommends a life of

simplicity, a life in which the individual lives
well through living in accord with nature. As a
poet and psychologist, Chuang Tzu has a
special interest in boundaries: his stories and
tales dance on the boundaries of the
conscious and the unconscious, of dream and
waking, of dead-seriousness and whimsy, of
sublimity and slapstick.
Chuang Tzu's thinking is in accord with the
tradition of the earlier Taoist, Lao-tzu. And
the first line of LaoTzu's book, the Tao Te
Ching, reads: "The Tao that can be named is
not the constant Tao." That is: our accounts,
our stories, and every state of our human
understanding— not one of these is able to
grasp reality. The Taoists were some 2000
years ahead of the epoch-making German
philosopher Immanuel Kant on this point.

We cannot attain knowledge of reality: we can

be grim about that, or we can have fun with
that. Chuang Tzu chooses the latter mode.
One translator of his work, Burton Watson,
says this of him:
"Chuang-Tzu uses throughout his writings
that deadliest of weapons against all that
is pompous, staid, and holy: humor. He
appears to have known that one good laugh
would do more than ten pages of harangue
 to shake the reader’s confidence in the
validity of his pat assumptions."
Chuang Tzu is a trickster and at the same
time a benevolent sage. But always a
trickster; an imp, puckish and pointedly
irreverent. The montage of images that
characterize his stories is an invitation not to
believe what he says, but to dance with him—
and in the process learn not only about life
but also about the nature of our beliefs. Only
when we have a clear understanding about our
beliefs are we, perhaps, in a position to learn
about life.

As mentioned earlier, Chuang Tzu precedes

the Enlightenment philosopher Kant in
asserting that our truth-claims say as much
about us as they do about reality:
Men eat vegetables and flesh, and deer eat
tender grass. Centipedes enjoy snakes, and
owls and crows like mice. Which of the four
knows the right taste? Monkey mates with the
dog-headed female ape and the buck mates
 with the doe, and eels mate with fishes. Mao
Ch'iang and Li Chi were considered by men to
be beauties, but at the sight of them fish
plunged deep down in the water, birds soared
high up in the air, and deer dashed away.
Which of the four knows the right kind of
beauty? ¶ 10

Note that the concern of the story is not

"intellectualist": the focus is not on, say,
philosophical cognition or any such pale
enterprises. Again, knowing is not the issue.
The story is centered on beauty— perhaps as
good a representative of value as can be
imagined. Now tell me again: what were your
claims about beauty and value in the world?
Our values reflect us, not the world. Easy to
say, perhaps, but notoriously difficult to
accept.

Certainly the most famous tale of Chuang

Tzu, one regularly included not only in
collections of World Religion, but also in
collections of World Literature, is this one:
 Once I, Chuang Chou [=Chuang-tzu], dreamed
that I was a butterfly and was happy as a
butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite
pleased with myself, but I did not know that I
was Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and there I was,
visibly Chou. I do not know whether it was
Chou dreaming that he was a butterfly or the
butterfly dreaming that it was Chou. Between
Chou and the butterfly there must be some
distinction. But one may be the other. This is
called the transformation of things. ¶ 13

We typically assume that a dream is unreal—

but to do that supposes that we are in touch
with some experience of the real. And it is
that comfortable assumption that we live in
touch with "reality" that Chuang Tzu’s story
challenges.

In fact there are two dreams spoken of:

Chuang Tzu’s and the butterfly’s. But instead
of dreams, we are invited to see that these
"dreams" are not worlds, but perspectives on
the world. To assess your perspective— your
"dream" right now— you must at least
provisionally allow that your picture of reality
(your world) is powerfully rooted in yourself
as well as in an objective reality.

So whose dream is really a dream— Chuang

Tzu's or the butterfly's? To approach the
question, we must recognize that candidates
for reality in this scenario are "realms of
experience" that are more or less coherent.
The two rival candidates are:
1. Chuang Tzu's realm of experience (in
which the butterfly is a dream object and
thus not really real) and
2. the butterfly's realm of experience (in
which Chuang Tzu is a dream object and
thus not really real)
To engage the problem is to be forced to
critically reflect on one’s own "realm of
experience." To entertain one’s own
experience as "dream" is not to dismiss it as
unreal, but to recognize it (realistically) as
interpretation. The really dangerous form of
dream, for Chuang Tzu, is the unreflective
state in which we passively assume that our
"realm of experience" is reality, and the only
reality. To engage in questioning one’s "realm
of experience" is the beginning of the only
waking that counts for Chuang Tzu.

The point of Chuang Tzu’s story-telling is to

communicate about wisdom. It’s easy, he
keeps suggesting. Easy, maybe, but never
cheap. The price of wisdom is nothing less
than the set of values through which you
define yourself— your preconceptions, your
personal laundry-list of likes and dislikes,
beautiful and ugly, etc. And this includes our
most primitive preferences, such as the like
of life and the dislike of death. A message
from a madman? By the standards of the
unenlightened, yes. But to the Taoist, this is
the message of the Sage.

As stated in last week's discussion, the

Taoist view holds that identity is relational,
not atomistic. An important view, vitally so
for the world of the 21st century. A serious
view. But how does Chuang Tzu communicate
it? See:
There is nothing that is not the "that" and
there is nothing that is not the "this." Things
do not know that they are the "that" of other
things; they only know what they themselves
know. Therefore I say that the "that" is
produced by the "this" and the "this" is also
caused by the "that." This is the theory of
mutual production. ¶ 4

This might be a skit from a Marx Brothers

film, and in fact Chuang Tzu means to be
funny. And he is. But what he presents is the
core of the Taoist teaching. We walk through
the world assuming that each of us,
individually, is the only "this" in sight, perhaps
the only "this" in the world. Everything else,
everyone else, is a "that." Each of us has a
tendency to assume, that it to say, that our
individual self is the only subjectivity in town.
But in fact every other person is also a "this."
Yes, they are each "that" to you, but you are
a "that" to them. (Is this making sense?) We
are what we are by being at one and the same
time a "this" and a "that." We are what we
are by way of a reciprocal causality― this is
why Chuang Tzu calls the situation one of
"mutual production."

Another important aspect of Chuang Tzu's

views― and one not found in the Tao Te
Ching― centers on what may be called
"sudden enlightenment." This is important,
historically, in that it was taken over by a
school of Buddhism that developed in China, a
school that came to be known as Zen. Here's
Chuang Tzu, and again we enter the domain of
dreams:
Those who dream of the banquet may weep the
next morning, and those who dream of weeping
may go out to hunt after dawn. When we
dream we do not know that we are dreaming.
In our dreams we may even interpret our
dreams. Only after we are awake do we know
 we have dreamed. Finally there comes a great
awakening, and then we know life is a great
dream. ¶ 11

When it is said that after a great awakening

we realize that life itself is an illusion, or
anything less than real. To refer back to the
passage just discussed, the passage on "this"
and "that" and mutual production, the illusion
spoken of here, the "dream," is that we are
the only "this" in existence. The realization
that we are, each of us, a "that" in a more
significant way than we are a "this," is a
realization that constitutes, for Chuang Tzu,
a great awakening. An awakening, a sudden
insight, that leaves the individual
transformed is the recognition that I am not
the center of the universe, but an integral
part of the universe.

Wang Ch'ung
Wang Ch'ung lived from 27―97 CE. He was
one of the most original and independent
thinkers of the Han period (206 BCE ― 220
CE). His times were steeped in magical
thinking and superstition, ironically
superstitious interpretations of that
archetypal rationalist and champion of
common sense, Confucius. These things
happen. But when they do, for people who
think like Wang Ch'ung, the reality of nature,
and of course the Tao, become obscured.

One of Wang Ch'ung's primary philosophical

targets was the superstition that attended
the idea of death. Confucius, recall, adopted
a somewhat relaxed attitude toward more
such things: "Work to give the people justice.
And respect the spirits, but keep them at a
distance. That you can call wisdom."
(Analects, 6:20) People will believe in spirits
and ghosts, that's just how folks are. But
don't let it distract them from the social
reality in the streets outside.
Wang Ch'ung took the question of spirits and
ghosts more seriously. Belief in spirits (kuei
in Chinese) was, among other things, a hook
onto which hopes for personal immortality
were hung. The problem?― how could this be
anything but a harmless consolation to so
many people mired in peasant conditions? A
Taoist like Wang Ch'ung would see that the
consolations of immortality are far from
harmless: the successful attainment of
immortality is nothing other than victory in
the war against nature and its laws. In such a
scenario, a dismissive attitude toward nature
is not only permissible, it is smart: nature so
conceived is ultimately a trap― literally a
death trap.
An ECOLOGICAL aside: If
the desire for personal
immortality seemed
dangerous to Wang Ch'ung, it
seems even more so to many
concerned folk in the 21st
century. Nature is a domain
 of birth and death; all things
in nature come into and pass
out of particular existence.
The desire for personal
immortality that is so much
at the heart of mainstream
Western religion is a
commitment to either
defeating or escaping the
laws by which nature
maintains itself. The desire
for personal immortality is, at
bottom an unstated
declaration of war against
nature. And in a world facing
ecological crises of various
kinds, such a disposition is―
unhelpful.

Did Wang Ch'ung want to campaign against a

belief of spirits? He was a Taoist, and such
overt resistance would not have been in
keeping with his spirit― it would have gone
against the flow that so characterizes his
view of life, too close by far to morality. But
this didn't leave him with nothing to say. In
the spirit of Chuang Tzu, he employs wit and
rational critique. Interested in ghosts, are
you? Then Wang Ch'ung has some questions
for you. We'll consider just two. These:
[6] Since the beginning of the universe
and rulers of high antiquity, people who
died according to their allotted time or
died at middle age or prematurely have
numbered in the hundreds of millions. The
number of men living today is not as great
as that of the dead. If everyone who dies
becomes an earthly spirit, there should be
an earthly spirit at every pace on the
road. If men see ghosts when they are
about to die, they should see millions and
millions filling the hall and crowding the
road instead of only one or two.
[7] Now, people say that a spirit being is
the spirit of a dead man. If the earthly
spirit is really the spirit of a dead man,
then when people see it, they ought to see
the form of a nude, for there is no reason
why they should see any garments. Why?
Because garments have no spirit. When a
 man dies, they decay along with his body.
How can they be worn by a spirit?
Remember the film The Sixth Sense? The
line "I see dead people" would really be "I see
hoards and hoards of dead people; in fact, I
can’t see the walls and floors for all the dead
people. And they're all― they're all naked!"
Changes the psychological ambience
significantly. Funny. But serious too.

It's like something Detective Columbo would

ask: "Excuse me― but just one more question
regarding your report of seeing ghosts.
You've described how they were dressed very
carefully. But― and this is what I'm havin'
trouble with― where did they get those
clothes?" Is there a ghostly boutique in the
afterlife, where we all can go shopping and
finally get some clothes that fit us, and
perfectly? More seriously: what does the fact
that almost every account of ghosts involves
dressed ghosts suggest to us about the
nature of ghostly encounters? Something to
think about.

It's not that Taoists don't hold any view of

immortality. The Tao Te Ching (Ch.33)
elegantly states the position: "To die is not to
perish but to be everywhere present." Wang
Ch'ung puts it this way:
[4] The vital forces produce man just as
water becomes ice. As water freezes into ice,
so the vital forces coagulate to form a man.
When ice melts, it becomes water. When a man
dies, he becomes spirit again. He is called
spirit just as melted ice changes its name to
water.

Nature― what Wang calls "the vital forces"―

is the water, the primordial water of flowing
nature. This congeals into you, and me, and
Fred over there. When we die as individuals
we do not cease to exist, we return to the
nature out of which we evolved. In fact this is
an idea found in a more ancient source, in the
Tao Te Ching. In the last line of Chapter 33,
we read: "To die isnot to perish but to be
everywhere present."

But what do YOU think of this?