The ineffable Tao
The Tao finds worth in worthlessness, use in uselessness, beauty in ugliness.. The Tao was a source of yin and yang, the reconciliation of opposites.
This is Who made our minds? my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Ecstasy in the Nunneries, Homer’s Psyche and The (French) Revolutionary Conscience.
LAOZI (born c. 571 BCE), also known as Lao Tzu, was a Chinese philosopher usually credited with the ‘discovery’ of the Tao.
The Tao is the ‘Way’ or the ‘Path’ to understanding the nature and flow of the universe and the essence of all things. If we accept the existence of this endless, indivisible ‘life force’, it seems truer to say that the Tao ‘discovered’ Laozi.
The Tao’s origins are obscure. The concept appears to have sprung from the Spring and Autumn Period (c. 770–481 BCE), which preceded the Warring States Period. It flourished much later, from the second century BCE, as a reaction to the perceived austerity and conservatism of the Confucians and their disciples.
The Tao owes its written explanation (insofar as one is possible) to two foundational texts, the Zhuangzi, a work of wonderful stories and parables attributed to a semi-legendary philosopher of the same name (369–286 BCE), and the Tao Te Ching (c. 400 BCE), Taoism’s core philosophical work, usually credited to Laozi. These masterpieces spawned countless derivative works, notably the second-century BCE Taiping Jing, along with hectares of scholarship.
Of the countless attempts to define and explain the Tao, Laozi’s remains the best:
‘The Tao is unseen because it is colourless; it is unheard because it is silent; if you try to grasp it, it will elude you, because it has no form . . . On the surface it appears incomprehensible, but in the depths it reveals itself. It has been nameless forever! It appears and then disappears. It is the form of the formless, the image of the imageless . . . No one knows where it came from, or where it is going. Yet, by holding fast to the ancient Tao, the wise may grasp the present, because they understand the past. This is a clue to the Tao.’
The Tao reconciles opposites. It finds substance in absence, purpose in emptiness, utility in a void. To begin to grasp the Tao, one must understand its insubstantial substance. It is not ‘nothing’: it is ‘no thing’.
Take a spoon. It is not a metal object, as you suppose. According to Taoist thought, the spoon is the hollow in the metal object that contains the soup. A room is not four walls; it is the space within the walls where one sleeps or eats. The space is the room’s wu, the essence of the room’s utility. Wu is that which ‘we must learn to see’. All matter – a spoon, a room, a human body – finds utility or purpose in its wu.
Taoists think of the soul (or mind) in the same way. The soul, though invisible, is the measure of a human life, not the body that contains it. The Tao Te Ching beautifully expresses this idea of something in nothing:
‘A jar is formed from clay, but its usefulness lies in the empty centre . . . Matter is necessary to give form, but the value of reality lies in its immateriality. Everything that lives has a physical body, but the value of a life is measured by the soul.’
This appealing paradox finds worth in worthlessness, use in uselessness, beauty in ugliness. The best action may be non-action. The simplest solution is the most ‘advanced’. The truest friend is your best critic. The perfect self is selflessness.
The interdependence of seeming opposites, of their harmonious or co-dependent relationship (a theme closely related to yin and yang), permeates our lives: long/short, high/low, use/wear out, worn out/renewed, empty/full, white/black, hot/cold, strong/weak, contract/expand, destroy/ create, act/inert, being/non-being, male/female, good/evil.
In Taoist thought, weakness is strength, or can be made strong:
‘To contract, it is necessary first to expand.
To weaken, it is necessary first to strengthen.
To destroy, it is necessary first to create.
To take, it is necessary first to give:
The weak and the tender overcome the hard and the strong.’
The Tao permeates the human world like an omnipresent stream of energy, where opposites interact to produce synthesis: restrain yourself and you shall feel release; exercise and you will relax; find your voice in silence, your strength in weakness, your action in restraint. In the political sphere, do nothing if doing something will create war or chaos.
The supreme duality of existence is a mighty paradox that resolves itself in the completeness of the Tao. As the Tao Te Ching says: ‘The Tao seems nonexistent, but it is the basis of existence. The universe, the earth, and everything in it comes from existence, but existence comes from nonexistence.’
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Taoism recognises two levels of human consciousness: wuwei and youwei. A wuwei-conscious man is a man of ‘no-action’. He is not by nature lazy; he has decided not to act. The seemingly idle emperor, the inert ruler, knows why he does nothing. Choosing not to act is an action. Choosing not to choose is a choice.
The youwei-conscious man ‘plans, devises, acts and manipulates’. He ‘deems’ the thing that must be done, then acts to do the deemed thing. The politician, civil servant and businessman are youwei-conscious men. The Tao Te Ching relegates youwei consciousness to a lower rung, that of the aspiring and ambitious functionary.
The Tao draws a line between what we can (or must) know, and what we cannot know:
‘Not to know the things you ought to know is folly.
To know that there are some things you cannot know is wisdom. The wise recognize the limits of their knowledge;
The foolish think they know everything.’
Taoism was the earliest philosophical system to identify the impossibility of knowing the ‘thing in itself’ and the origins of subjective thought, anticipating Kantian ideas on the limits of human reason by about 1600 years. It achieved this through playful stories and dialogues, not cold philosophy.
Consider the marvellous dialogue between Zhuangzi and his friend and student Hui Tzu. The pair were strolling by the Hao River when Zhuangzi said, ‘See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy!’
Hui Tzu said, ‘You’re not a fish – how do you know what fish enjoy?’
Zhuangzi replied, ‘You’re not I, so how do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?’
Hui Tzu said, ‘I’m not you, so I certainly don’t know what you know. On the other hand, you’re certainly not a fish – so that still proves you don’t know what fish enjoy!’
Zhuangzi shot back: ‘Let’s go back to your original question, please. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy – so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. I know it by standing here beside the Hao.’
Here, we find ourselves in a mind-spinning Taoist loop: Hui Tzu’s assertion that Zhuangzi cannot know the happiness of the fish contradicts itself, because it also asserts ‘that the person making the judgement can know what Zhuangzi can or cannot know’.
The Tao upended settled assumptions about power, free will, motivation and human nature. Its counterintuitive wisdom enveloped all humankind, often without us knowing:
‘The kind man discovers it and calls it kind; the wise man discovers it and calls it wise; the common people use it every day and are not aware of it.’
While Confucius and Mencius were reluctant to tackle questions of the soul, the Taoist philosophers were not so inhibited. They waded into the afterlife, and lent spirit and interiority to the stark Confucian landscape:
‘The wise attend to the inner truth of things and are not fooled by outward appearances. They ignore matter and seek the spirit.’
The restless intellectual curiosity of Zhuangzi conceived of the soul as an ‘emanation of the Tao’, a vital force ‘passing to and from this earth through the portals of birth and death’. The coalescence of that force was life itself; and its dispersal was death. ‘If, then, life and death are but consecutive states,’ Zhuangzi wrote, consolingly, ‘what have I to grieve about?’
While the causes of joy and anger, sorrow and happiness, baffled him, he recognised sincere emotion as life-giving: ‘But for these emotions, I should not be . . . but we do not know what it is that brings them into play. It would seem to be a soul, but the clue to its existence is wanting.’
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True disciples of the Tao absorbed its ‘three treasures’ – compassion, economy and humility – and tried to apply them in their lives.
These were the essence of the Tao, and those who practised them stayed true to the path; those who lacked them fell off, as the Tao Te Ching explains:
‘If you are compassionate,
you can be truly courageous;
if you are economical,
you can be truly generous;
if you are humble,
you can be truly helpful.
If you are brave but lack compassion, are generous but lack economy,
and try to help others but lack humility, you’ve lost the way.’
That was a deeply subversive thing to say in an age when the avaricious, arrogant and compassionless held all the wealth and power. Its appeal to human decency bears comparison with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, delivered some 400 years later.
We know little of the lives of the Tao’s authors. We know enough to see that they were possessed of rare insight and an extraordinary way of understanding the world, out of which they forged a belief that had the power to change the way people see and think. They were, like Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Christ and Muhammad, prophets of their time, and prophets to their believers for all time.
Next Thursday, 8 August: Ecstasy in the Nunneries
Selected sources and further reading:
Cane, E.P. (2002) Harmony: Radical Taoism Gently Applied, Bloomington IN: Trafford Publishing.
Chang, S.T. (1985) The Great Tao, Tao Longevity.
Hansen, C. (2000) A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Howard Smith, D. (1958) ‘Chinese Concepts of the Soul’, Numen, 5(3) pp. 165–79.
Lau, D. (1958) ‘The Treatment of Opposites in Lao Tzu’, Bulletin of the Society for Oriental and African Studies, 21, pp. 344–60.
Lao Tzu and Goddard, D. (transl.) (2021) Tao Te Ching, Sam Torode Books.
Laozi and Ryden, E. (transl.) (2008) Daodejing, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yancy, G. (16 September 2020) ‘How to Die (Without Really Trying): A Conversation with the Religious Scholar Brook Ziporyn on Taoism, Life and What Might Come After’, The New York Times.
Zhuangzi and Burton, W. (transl.) (2014) The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, New York: Columbia University Press.
Ziporyn, B. (2012) The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Ziporyn, B. (2009). Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, Indianapolis IN: Hackett Classics.