The Philosophical Taoism of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu

Lao-tzu and his eponymous classic, also known as the Tao Te Ching, are both equally obscure and shadowy. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, who was author of the Shih chi (Historian’s Records) and wrote in the first century bce, some three centuries after Lao-tzu, is as much in the dark about him as we are today.

Early Chinese is not grammatically difficult—if any­thing it is too simple and ambiguous—but the interpretation of a text like the Tao Te Ching is often a matter of ad hoc hermeneutics, with an end result far removed from the author’s original intentions. It would be hard enough to glean the meaning of many sections of the Tao Te Ching even if the text were not rife with abbreviated characters, and if it were punctuated. One would think that the very obscurity of Lao-tzu’s magnum opus would have deterred translators, but that has not been the case. It is often said that only the Bible has been translated into English more often.

Here are two versions of the opening fines of the Tao Te Ching:

The way that can be spoken of

Is not the constant way: The name that can be named Is not the constant name.

The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth; The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

(TTC 1:1, tr. D.C. Lau, 1963)

Lodehead lodehead-brooking: no forewonted lodehead Namecall namecall-brooking: no forewonted namecall.

Having-naught namecalling: Heaven-Earth’s fetation Having-aught namecalling: Myriad mottling’s mother.

(TTC 1:1, tr. P.A. Boodberg, 1979)

The character tao ( ) is composed of two ele­ments (a head/person and to walk/go ), and has the basic meaning of

‘way’ or ‘road’. By extension it has the meaning of a ‘ruled district/pro vince’, the more abstract sense of‘the (virtuous) way’ or ‘doctrine’ and the verbal meanings of‘to enact a law’, ‘to state’, ‘to tell’ and ‘to instruct’. The word tao is thus by no means the exclusive property of Taoism—most early Chinese philosophers, Confucius included, made ample use of it, usually in the sense of an ethical code of some sort. In early popular religion tao signified the power or ability to perform magical feats, as well as the power of kings whose authority often rested on such magical skills. It was by following the order or principle of the world, apparent in the daily, monthly, seasonal and yearly alternations of yin and yang, the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ principles, that the ruler came to possess tao. Perhaps it was the inclusion of that strangest of books, the I Ching (Book of Changes), among the canonical books of the Confucians that prompted early philosophical inquiry into the tao underlying the 64 hexagrams representing pure yang, pure yin and all the various intermediate states.

Lao-tzu used the word ‘tao’ provisionally, as can be noticed in the above passage. He seems to have considered his tao to have been twofold, nameable and unnameable, the unnameable being the ‘constant’ tao, the fundamental principle behind the named tao which produces the universe (‘heaven and earth’) and all beings (‘the myriad creatures’). This interpretation is somewhat at variance with what Lao-tzu seems to be saying, where the nameless tao is actually responsible for the creation of the universe.

Lao-tzu unifies both taos under the rubric hsiian, ‘the Obscure’, which really seems to hit the nail on the head. All this is perhaps best summed up in Lao-tzu’s own phrase:

The way begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures.

(TTC XLIL93)

This sentence itself, expressing a slightly different point of view from those of the opening section already quoted, has given many commentators con­siderable trouble, contradicting as it does the general yet perhaps naive concept of the tao as the One. (This misinterpretation led Catholic translators of the Bible into Chinese to translate ‘God’ by ‘tao’.) Chuang-tzu in particular refutes this interpretation—in any case the word tao is uncountable—and there is surely no way of reconciling the concept of tao and its various manifestations to the Western ideas of universals and particulars. This is very reminiscent of the way in which the Neoplatonist Damascius held to the doctrine of the unnameable principle behind all nameables (in contrast to, say, Plotinus, for whom the One was the highest principle).

So how does the tao—the unnameable tao—appear to the mystic?

As a thing the way is

Shadowy, indistinct.

Indistinct and shadowy,

Yet within it is an image;

Shadowy and indistinct,

Yet within it is a substance.

Dim and dark,

Yet within it is an essence.

(TTC XXL49)

Although the sage has access to the tao via medita­tion and trance, Lao-tzu never indicates that the experience is ecstatic (or rather, enstatic) or involves any feeling of union or any experience of light or totality or any of the other typical signs of mystical achievement.

Meditational and breathing exercises, and perhaps sexual techniques, are of use to the sage wishing to attain the tao:

When carrying in your head your perplexed bodily soul can you embrace in your arms the One And not let go?

In concentrating your breath can you become as supple

As a babe?

Can you polish your mysterious mirror And leave no blemish?

When the gates of heaven open and shut

Are you capable of keeping to the role of the female?

(TCC X:24)

In this poem, the termp’o or ‘bodily soul’ (the yin ‘soul’ which descends into the earth at death, as opposed to the yang ‘soul’, the hun, which ascends to heaven) comes to have the meaning of‘semen’ accord­ing to the commentators. Likewise the ‘gates of heaven’ are glossed as the mouth and nostrils. It is only because everything produced by the tao—the nameable tao, heaven and earth, the myriad beings—returns to the tao that it is possible for the sage to attain the tao prematurely.

If we can ignore, perhaps unfairly, Lieh Yu-k’ou’s Lieh Tzu (the extant text of which is based on a version some 600 years later than the author’s presumed dates (fourth to fifth centuries bce), and which is of dubious authenticity), the other early Taoist work to have survived is the Chuang Tzu of Chuang Chou (fourth century bce). Once again the author is often called by the name of his work. Biographical details of Chuang-tzu’s life are few and far between, and are perhaps even thinner on the ground than in Lao-tzu’s case. The difference between the two authors is considerable, not necessarily philosophically but stylistically. Where Lao-tzu is lofty and mys­terious, obscure and even humourless, Chuang-tzu is worldly, lively, playful and, above all, human:

A man was terrified of his shadow, and disliked his footprints.

How different is this to Lao-tzu’s

I do my utmost to attain emptiness;

I hold firmly to stillness.

(TTC XVI:37)

A lot of the energy expended on the dozens of translations of Lao-tzu’s work would have been better spent on the Chuang Tzu.

There are two aspects of Chuang-tzu’s thought which are worth emphasising, though one is hardly doing justice to him by ignoring other aspects such as his emphasis on spontaneity. Firstly, Chuang- tzu advocates a type of relativism based on what might be termed a ‘meta­view’ encasing various linguistic and conceptual terms. As we have seen, Lao-tzu was also aware of the limitations of language in describing the tao—indeed the recognition of this limitation could be regarded as a hallmark of true mysticism—but this finds far fuller expression in the Chuang Tzu. Secondly, Chuang-tzu wrestles with the problem of what it is exactly that controls mental activities such as perception, and thereby parallels the tao in its controlling aspect. For the controller of mental activities Chuang-tzu uses the term hsin, originally meaning ‘heart’ (the organ), but also translatable as ‘mind’. Locating the essential core of man at the heart is not, of course, exclusively Chinese. The hsin was also a valve for the tao, a double mirror which reflected both the tao and the external world indiscriminatingly, much as the mirror-like wisdom of the dhydnibuddha Aksobhya reflects the Bud­dhist tathatd or ‘suchness’.

The works of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu exerted con­siderable influence in literary, court and academic circles, and indeed con­tinue to do so in the Far East of today.

Despite all this, the Taoism of Lao-tzu and Chuang- tzu never became a religion as the term is commonly understood. There was no room for faith, prayer, ecstasy, a priesthood, no way of involving the ordinary man, and no way of truly accommodating government, authority or conventional morality. It was the way purely of the solitary sage, the anchorite possessed of superior wisdom (ming or ‘light’) who achieves every­thing through the superficially paradoxical technique of ‘not-doing’ (wu wei), through not interfering with the natural order. Wu wei does not mean total abandonment of activity. Rather, it is a way of rolling with the punches, as it were; or, even better, not even being there when the punch is thrown. Strictly speaking, the Taoism of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu should have no place in this book.