Daoism

The big questions

1. If the deepest order of things cannot be put into words, what can words do?
2. Is acting well a matter of following rules, or of a skill that no rule captures?
3. Do our distinctions, between right and wrong, this and that, belong to things, or to the standpoint we speak from?
4. Can anyone know what another being experiences?
5. Should government govern less?

Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly. In Herbert Giles’s translation he says, on waking, “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” The story closes the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, a chapter about how every “this” has its “that” and how no standpoint can judge the others from nowhere. It is a good place to begin, because it shows what Daoist philosophy does best: it does not give an answer, it loosens the grip of the question.

Daoism, also spelled Taoism, is the classical Chinese philosophy of the dao, the Way. The Han historian Sima Tan grouped its writers as the Daojia, the “school of the Way”, in his account of six schools of thought. Its two founding texts are the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching), traditionally attributed to Laozi, and the Zhuangzi, named for the thinker Zhuang Zhou. They differ in style and temper, but both argue against the Confucian confidence that the right names, rituals and rules can put the world in order.

The Way that cannot be spoken

The Daodejing opens, in James Legge’s 1891 translation, with “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.” Whatever the Way is, it outruns the words we use to point at it. The book then proceeds, in some eighty-one short chapters, by paradox and image: water, which is soft yet wears away stone; the valley, which is empty and so receives; the uncarved block, which has not yet been cut to any one use.

Its practical counsel follows from this. Fixed distinctions between beautiful and ugly, good and bad, produce one another, so a sage does not cling to either side. Desire and cleverness breed disorder, so the wise reduce their wants. And the ruler governs best by doing least. Chapter 37, in Legge’s words: “The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do.”

Wuwei and ziran

Two terms carry most of the weight. Wuwei, literally “not doing”, is acting without forcing: action so well fitted to its situation that it seems to happen of itself. Ziran, “so of itself”, names the spontaneity of things left to unfold by their own nature. Neither is idleness. The point is that striving, imposing and over-governing defeat their own ends, while the effective act is often the one that does not need to be forced.

The Zhuangzi shows this in its craftsmen. Cook Ding, carving an ox for his prince, says his blade has lasted nineteen years because he no longer looks at the ox with his eyes but lets the knife follow the natural joints. The prince says he has learned from it how to nourish life. Skill of this kind is knowledge that lives in practice and cannot be written down as rules, a theme that still matters in arguments about expertise, and about what is lost when a skill is turned into a procedure that a machine can follow.

Perspective, doubt and the limits of argument

The Zhuangzi is the more philosophical of the two books and, for many readers, one of the great works of scepticism. Its second chapter argues that “this” and “that”, right and wrong, are fixed only relative to a standpoint, and that disputes such as those between Confucians and Mohists cannot be settled because each side judges from its own. The chapter does not conclude that nothing is true. It recommends a kind of release: holding distinctions lightly, moving with the shifting standpoint, as a hinge turns in its socket.

The same spirit runs through Zhuangzi’s exchanges with his friend Huizi, a logician. In the most famous, translated in the library, Zhuangzi remarks on the joy of fish in a river and Huizi asks how he can know it, not being a fish. It is a short and funny version of a problem philosophers still argue about: whether, and how, one can know what another being experiences.

Texts, dates and later thought

Tradition makes Laozi an older contemporary of Confucius in the sixth century BCE, but the earliest biography, in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (about 100 BCE), already hedges, and scholars now date the Daodejing to the fourth or third century BCE and think it was compiled over time. Excavated manuscripts have changed the picture: silk copies found at Mawangdui in 1973 place the De half before the Dao half, and bamboo slips from Guodian, discovered in 1993, contain parts of the text from around 300 BCE. Zhuang Zhou lived in the fourth century BCE. The Zhuangzi as we have it was edited by Guo Xiang around 300 CE into thirty-three chapters, of which the first seven, the “inner chapters”, are usually thought closest to Zhuangzi himself.

Commentaries by Wang Bi on the Daodejing and Guo Xiang on the Zhuangzi began a new school, Xuanxue, “the study of the mysterious”, and Daoist vocabulary shaped how Buddhism was received in China, above all in Chan (Zen). The Daodejing is among the most translated books in the world.

Daoism and Confucianism

Daoism is often read as Confucianism’s other. Confucius and Mencius thought a good society was made by correct names, rites and cultivated virtue; the Daoist texts doubt that names fix anything and suspect that elaborate virtue is what remains when the Way has been lost. The two were not simply enemies. For two thousand years Chinese thinkers read both, and many lived by a division of labour between them, Confucian in public office and Daoist in private.

How to start

Read chapters 1, 2 and 37 of the Daodejing, then chapter 2 of the Zhuangzi in full; both are free in the translations linked above, and the Chinese Text Project sets the classical Chinese beside Legge’s English. Chad Hansen’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Daoism is the best philosophical companion.