“In pursuit of learning, you must learn more and more each day
Practicing the Way, seek to do less and less each day
Less and even less, until you reach a state of taking no action
Taking no action, yet nothing is left undone.”
- Tao Te Ching
For all that the Tao Te Ching, or The Book of the Tao and Its Virtue, was picked up in the West by those of a mystical bent, its message still tends to fall upon deaf ears. Nor was this issue avoided in Eastern lands either - as much as I love the tale of the Monkey King in Journey to the West (the Buddhist Pilgrim’s Progress), its author cannot help but mock the Taoists, who are presented as foolish magicians whom Monkey runs rings around with his own powers. To be fair, Chinese literature is rife with this association of Taoists with magic. But at the heart of Taoist teachings is a wisdom that crosses between worlds and may yet resonate with both the Children of Abraham and the followers of Dharma.
The heart of Taoist thought is the Tao (pronounced ‘dow’), or ‘the Way’, and if Christians balk at this name (recalling John 14:16 where Jesus tells the apostles that he is the way and the truth) it is worth remembering that the very essence of Christian teaching is that as humans we are flawed, yet the perfection of God is still our birthright. I take very seriously the wisdom of Proverbs 13:20: “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm,” especially in the light of the New Testament’s focus on breaking beyond mere tribal loyalties to a greater love for all humanity. Even if Christians cannot accept that there might be wisdom in the teachings of the Taoists, they should at the very least accept with the humility commanded by scripture that no-one can claim authoritative knowledge of the mind of God without committing idolatry.
‘The Old Master’, Laozi (or Lao-tsu, pronounced something like ‘lao-tsuh’, with the second syllable as short as you can make it) is one of two legendary figures in Taoism expounding the concept of ‘the Way’ (Tao), the underlying ordering principle of existence. If it goes beyond the scope of any one reflection - or indeed a lifetime of exposition - to capture this idea in its entirety, an essential aspect is that mere words are inadequate to capture the order and chaos inherent in existence, and we must resort to our own intuition to get a sense of it. This idea, at the very least, resonates with equivalent thoughts in other mystic traditions.
What is hardest to grasp for those of us raised in the shadow of Medieval Europe is the Taoist idea of wu wei, which literally means something like ‘non-action’, or ‘actionless action’. It is this that the quote above is attempting to convey. Indulging our thirst for knowledge, we become over-confident, and yet we can never attain perfect knowledge no matter how long we live. Conversely, the Taoist path asks that we seek not to act. This is not so much a suggestion to literally ‘do nothing’, but rather the idea that if we reach some intuitive sense of the implicit order and chaos of existence (what in the West might earn the name ‘God’, and to Taoists is ‘the Way’), we can learn to trust in the divine dimension of the unfolding of events. This, to me at least, is a profound crossover between the worlds of the Tao and the worlds of the desert religions.
Thus, rather than attempting to control everything that happens, rather than arrogantly presuming that we even understand everything that is happening, the Taoist sages ask that we carefully curtail our own attempts at intervention. Doesn’t any sober consideration of the behaviour of governments both nationally and internationally validate this caution a thousandfold…? The abstract ideal of “taking no action yet leaving nothing undone” asks us to be discerning about when to act, and it is this wisdom that truly crosses between our worlds. As the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus expressed upon parallel lines: “Don’t demand that events happen as you would wish them to. Accept events as they actually happen. That way peace is possible.”