#269: TAOISM FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS.  Taoism is, with Confucianism, one of the two chief indigenous Chinese systems of thought, that have shaped their culture, world view, and history.  By the time its principal texts were composed, around the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Taoism was already of great antiquity, and its influence has continued, reluctantly tolerated by China’s Communist political leaders, who seem to have figured they have to make the best of something they can’t eliminate.  It has been thought of as China’s romantic strain, as opposed to Confucianism’s classical bent, though the scholar A.C. Graham has raised his eyebrow over this comparison.  The shock of reading its central texts is they are not the propositional, rational texts expected by students of Western philosophy, nor quite the mixture of mythic history and moral injunction approaching the personal God of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.  At some level the Taoist texts are all non-ritualistic, and their mysticism—if you want to call it that—is apophatic, limning its subject by describing what it is not, like the famous “neti, neti” of the Upanishads: “Not this, not that.”  Bill Porter has said of Taoism’s most widely-read text, the Tao Te Ching, that it is a “poem written in praise of something we cannot name, much less imagine.”

       The Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tzu, is a collection of short, gnomic verses.  Tao is usually translated as “way” or “path,” but “the Way that can be named is not the immortal Way,” Lao Tzu warns us at the beginning.  Te is power, ability, or virtue, as when we speak of a substance’s healing virtues. Ching in Chinese means “classic”—so, the Classic of the Way and its Power. It speaks of aligning oneself with nature above the urges and limited vision of the self—going with the flow, in the old phrase.  Its orientation is the waxing and waning of the moon, the forces that peak and revert.  Its courtesy to the world is in bowing, as opposed to standing up and fighting.  Its fascination is with the empty center of the wheel, around which its utility revolves and depends, and above all with the endless, downward, powerful flow of moving water.  Much has been made of the text’s infinite openness to interpretation, the supposed mystery of its meaning; yet, if you read a few of the almost innumerable translations into English, you will hear an unmistakable consistency in the voice and the message, and, in that consistency, something utterly convincing: the accent of wisdom.  “Those who know do not speak,” Lao Tzu says, but obviously, he does know; he speaks, but, in the best way of poetry, tells it slant.

        The Tao Te Ching was the first of the major Asian texts I read, fifty years ago now while in college.  I still remember the shock of discovering a whole half of the world I’d known nothing about—a way of experience and belief entirely different from the Catholicism I grew up with—and it has remained one of the most inexhaustible of companions.  Of all the texts of Chinese thought, it has been translated and read more widely than any other.  The version by Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought (originally 1934, but still in print from Grove Press) holds early pride of place for the grace of its rendering and the scholarship of its presentation.  Lao Tzu’s Taoteching, by Red Pine (Copper Canyon Press, third revised edition, 2009) renders with particular success the terseness of the original, and draws on some dozen or more of the classical commentaries, making the book “a conversation between Lao Tzu and people who have thought deeply about his text.”  If you want a pocket copy, to go with you on your way, Frances Lincoln in England has issued a lovely illustrated edition of Stephen Mitchell’s very good translation, and Shambhala does a pocket version of D.C. Lau’s.

       The other major texts of Taoism are the works attributed to Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu.  Lieh Tzu is the least widely read in English; the work that carries his name is mostly a collection of folk-like tales, and if he lacks some of the distinctive tone of Chuang Tzu, his plainness makes him perhaps more simply accessible, if less arresting, than the Tao Te Ching.  The one complete translation, fortunately, is The Book of Lieh Tzu, by A.C. Graham, reprinted by Columbia University Press; the translation is excellent and the preface is one of the best of all introductory essays on Taoism.  More recently, Eva Wong’s Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living (Shambhala, 1995) is an accessible and inviting presentation.

       That leaves Chuang Tzu, the beloved nonpareil of Taoist masters, with his imagination, fantasy, humor—perhaps the least solemn, the most fantastical of the great religious writers, and, at D.T. Suzuki’s evaluation, the greatest of the Chinese philosophers.  But, again, the book attributed to him looks little enough like philosophy to a Westerner.  He begins with a poker-faced description of an enormous fish (named K’un, if you were wondering) and takes flight from there (literally: K’un soon metamorphosizes into a huge bird) (named P’eng, if you were wondering).  Big and small condition each other; light and dark are relative to each other.  Chuang Tzu also gives probably the best story illustrating the Taoist virtue of wu wei, a term usually rendered “inaction,” and, like the Buddhist term sunyata, “emptiness,” a nicely engraved invitation to misunderstanding.  Chuang tells us of Wen Hui’s cook, who carves an ox with hardly any effort, his blade “murmuring like a gentle wind.”  Perhaps the fuller version of the term, wei wu wei, “doing without doing,” is less confusing.  The Italians call it sprezzatura.  Chuang Tzu is throughout his work the great literary master of sprezzatura.

        For sixty years Thomas Merton’s book The Way of Chuang Tzu has been many readers’ introduction to Chuang Tzu, and it retains its charm and marvelous accessibility; it is, happily, reprinted in a pocket edition by Shambhala.  The great translator of Chinese literature, Burton Watson, did both a selection from Chuang Tzu (Basic Writings, Columbia) and a full translation (Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, Columbia); it is readable, reliable, and the version I return to.  Other versions, in excerpt and complete, are also available from A.C. Graham (Hackett), David Hinton (Counterpoint), Martin Palmer (Penguin), and Chris Fraser (Oxford World Classics).  You can’t go far wrong with any of these.

        There is a larger literature of Taoism, heavily and complexly involved with breathing exercises, alchemy, the search for physical immortality.  Writers as far apart as the modern scholar Holmes Welch and the T’ang poet Li Po have turned up their noses at it—Li Po called it “a mere waste of paper.”  The division between Philosophical Taoism and what is now usually referred to as religious Taoism—Holmes Welch’s book was called Taoism: The Parting of the Way—was once informed by the assumption that all the more arcane aspects were basically later encrustations, an assumption now largely discarded, just as the Vajrayana was long considered in the West a debased and superstitious form of Buddhism.  As with any religion, you have to find your own border between riding the wind—a favorite Taoist phrase for transcendent wisdom—and milling around in the woo-woo.  The magical/alchemical aspects of Taoism are certainly present in, say, the Tao Te Ching, but these out-of-the-way wonders largely do not interest me, though, not looking for them, I will say I have occasionally glimpsed some of them out of the corner of one eye.  The Buddha said often that the supernatural powers sometimes connected with religious practice—levitation, prevision, the Tibetan monks’ speed walking, the search for physical immortality (snake handling? speaking in tongues?)—were really to one side of the point, and best not bandied to the gullible.  It’s in the interior, meditative practices I find my interest in both Buddhism and Taoism, but still one of the most charming books on Taoism, now nearly fifty years old, is John Blofeld’s Taoism: The Road to Immortality (Shambhala, 1978) which gives the tales, the esoteric practices and the poetic imagery, their imaginative and affectionate embrace, just as he did in his book on Kuan Yin, Bodhisattva of Compassion (Shambhala, 2009), which has long been a bedside book of mine.  Blofeld’s books are not pieces of academia; he has skin in the game, and his retelling of some of the Taoist tales is flavored with his remembered sense of a long residency in the landscape of China, visiting the monks and recluses, studying the old texts.  It seems to me a life well spent, and I bow to his memory.

A footnote on the difficulty of Chinese names.  Over some thirty years—from its introduction in 1958, through its spread in the seventies, up to its adoption by the United Nations in 1986—the Pinyin system of transliterating Chinese has edged out the old Wade-Giles system; but the Wade-Giles lingers on in older books, and was in use when I started reading around in Chinese literature.  So Lao Tzu (or Lao-tse) is now Laozi, Chuang Tzu (or Zhuang Zhou) is now Zhuangzi; Lieh Tzu is Liezi.  My personal favorite metamorphosis was when the author of Dream of the Red Chamber, once Tsao Hsueh Chin, became Cao Xueqin.  Keep alternate spellings in mind if you’re trying to locate or order the books described above; it will be worth the effort. Pinyin bears roughly the resemblance to the actual pronunciation of Chinese that canned lasagna does to lasagna, and, as I have written elsewhere, all of this makes any attempt to become familiar with the Chinese classics like dealing with a field of moving targets.  But as Annie Proulx wrote of a very different situation, if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.