What Is Taoism? The Way, Effortless Action and the Tao Te Ching

Tao means way or path, and Confucians used the word for the right way to behave. Taoists used it for something larger: the way the whole universe goes, the pattern by which seasons turn, water flows and things grow and decay without anyone directing them. It is not a god and does not give commands. It cannot be defined, which is why the Tao Te Ching opens by saying that the Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao, and then spends eighty-one short chapters speaking of it anyway, in paradox and image rather than argument.

The Tao Te Ching, the Classic of the Way and Its Power, is traditionally credited to Laozi, an older contemporary of Confucius said to have written it at a frontier gate before disappearing into the west. Most scholars think it was compiled from older sayings in the fourth century BC and that Laozi, whose name simply means Old Master, may not have existed. It is short enough to read in an hour and has been translated more often than any book except the Bible.

The central practical idea is wu wei, usually translated as non-action, which does not mean doing nothing. It means acting without forcing: responding to the situation as it is rather than imposing a plan on it, the way a good swimmer works with the current or a skilled carver follows the grain. The Zhuangzi, the second great Taoist book and the funnier one, tells of a butcher whose knife stays sharp for nineteen years because he cuts through the spaces between the joints rather than hacking at the bone.

Applied to government, wu wei was a political programme. The Tao Te Ching tells rulers that the more laws they make, the more thieves there will be, and that the best ruler is one the people barely know exists. It was written against the ambitious, meddling states of the Warring States period, and it is the ancestor of every later argument that a society runs best when it is interfered with least.

In the second century AD the philosophy acquired gods, priests and scriptures. A healer called Zhang Daoling claimed a revelation from a deified Laozi and founded the Way of the Celestial Masters, a church with parishes and rituals that still exists. Religious Taoism took in the old Chinese gods, the search for immortality through alchemy, breathing exercises and diet, the yin-yang cosmology and the five elements, and a vast pantheon headed by the Three Pure Ones. The philosophers had been indifferent to death; the religion set out to postpone it.

The two strands never fully separated, and Chinese thinkers have generally moved between them and Confucianism and Buddhism without feeling the need to choose. Its main ideas and practices:

• •The Tao: the natural way of all things, beyond naming
• •Wu wei: effortless action in accord with the situation
• •Ziran: naturalness, being what one is without contrivance
• •Yin and yang: complementary opposites whose balance makes the whole
• •Qi: the vital breath or energy, cultivated in breathing, tai chi and medicine
• •Simplicity, humility and the rejection of ambition

Taoism's mark is on almost everything Chinese that is not directly about government. Chinese medicine, with its meridians and balance of qi, is Taoist in its assumptions; so are tai chi and the internal martial arts, feng shui, and the alchemy that gave the world gunpowder as a by-product of the search for the elixir of life. The landscape painting in which tiny human figures cross vast mountains is Taoist in its proportions, and so is a great deal of Chinese poetry, from Li Bai drinking alone under the moon to the hermit poets of the Tang. Chan Buddhism, which became Zen in Japan, took much of its style from Taoist masters who answered questions with a joke or a silence.

It survived the twentieth century badly. The Communist government closed temples and persecuted priests, and the Cultural Revolution destroyed much of what was left. Since the 1980s it has been rebuilt, and Taoism is now an officially recognised religion in China with several thousand temples, alongside a large following in Taiwan, Hong Kong and among the Chinese diaspora.

For most of history, readers knew the Tao Te Ching only through versions that had been copied, edited and commented on for many centuries. Archaeology changed that. In 1973 excavators opening tombs at Mawangdui in Hunan province found two copies of the text written on silk, from the second century BC. They were broadly the same book, but with the two halves in the opposite order, the section on power first and the section on the Way second, and with many small differences in wording that settled some old arguments about puzzling lines.

An even older find came in 1993 from a tomb at Guodian in Hubei, where bamboo slips from around 300 BC contained passages matching parts of the Tao Te Ching, though only about two fifths of it and arranged differently. Many scholars take this as evidence that the text grew gradually from smaller collections of sayings rather than being written in one sitting by a single author. The discoveries also show how living the tradition was: the book readers treat as fixed scripture was once a text still taking shape, copied by scribes who did not all agree on its order.

Two short stories from the Zhuangzi show how Taoist thinkers argued by puzzle rather than proof. In the most famous, Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, fluttering happily with no idea that he is Zhuangzi. He wakes up, and he is unmistakably Zhuangzi again. But now he cannot tell whether he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that it is a man. The passage ends by calling this the transformation of things, suggesting that the boundary between one state of being and another is less fixed than it seems.

In the second, Zhuangzi walks with his friend Huizi, a logician, on a bridge over a river and remarks how happy the fish are, swimming wherever they please. Huizi objects that Zhuangzi is not a fish, so how can he know what fish enjoy? Zhuangzi replies that Huizi is not Zhuangzi, so how can he know what Zhuangzi knows. Finally he says that by asking how he knew, Huizi had already granted that he knew, and that he knew it standing there above the water. Readers still argue whether this is a clever dodge or a serious claim that knowing comes from being part of the scene.

The black and white circle known as the yin-yang symbol is widely associated with Taoism, but the idea it represents is older and shared across Chinese thought. Yin and yang describe complementary forces, such as dark and light, cold and hot, rest and movement, each containing the seed of the other and each turning into the other over time, like night becoming day.

Confucian scholars, doctors, astronomers and diviners all used yin and yang, and the concept runs through traditional Chinese medicine and the ancient divination text known as the Book of Changes. Taoist writers made the balance of opposites central to their picture of the Way, which is why the symbol became so closely linked with Taoism. The familiar circular diagram itself took its standard form many centuries after the idea first appeared.

Taoism is the Chinese tradition, rooted in the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi, that teaches living in accord with the Tao, the natural way of things, through wu wei, effortless action that works with a situation rather than against it. It grew from a philosophy of simplicity and minimal government into a religion of gods, priests and the pursuit of long life, and it shaped Chinese medicine, martial arts, painting and poetry.