God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (43 page)

The eighty-one short chapters of the
Daodejing
, also called the
Laozi
(or the
Lao-Tzu
), can be read on a longish coffee break, but they have delighted and perplexed readers for millennia. This cryptic classic, part poetry and part prose, is divided into two parts: a more mystical opening section on the Dao, and a more political closing section on
de
. Although Confucians have long interpreted the
Daodejing
as a philosophical text, and Western Sinologists have generally followed their lead, a new generation of interpreters is coming to reckon with its spiritual and religious elements, including its roots in ancient Chinese traditions of shamanism and divination.

Usually translated as “the Way,” the term
dao
also refers to a “path” or “road.” All the great Chinese schools have wrestled with this keyword, but Daoists, as their name suggests, puzzled over its profundities, poking and prodding it to see where it might lead. And where it led was back to the source, to the subtle force that creates all things, sustains all things, and pervades all things, which is to say to the Dao itself. Both transcendent and immanent, both perfection and potential, the beginningless and endless Dao is at least as theological as it is philosophical. Everything comes out of it (originally) and returns to it (eventually). So while it represents ultimate reality, it also permeates everything, including our blood and bones. “The Tao is not far off,” Daoist sages say, “it is here in my body.”
²²

According to Laozi (or whoever wrote the
Daodejing
) this impersonal Dao lies beyond ordinary language and the ordinary mind, so it can never be fully understood or fully described. To try to capture it is to feel it slip through your fingers. So while Daoists use language to depict the Dao, they typically do so with humor and humility. The Dao is the way of untamed nature, the way of authentic human life, and the harmonious union of the two. But it is also the social harmony so prized by Confucians, because when everyone acts authentically and without artifice the natural result is social order.

Reversal and Return

The central verb in the
Daodejing
, and the term that gives the text momentum, is
return
. And where Laozi wants us to return is to the primordial unity of the Dao itself. “Tranquility is returning,” the
Daodejing
reads, so “return to the state of infancy,” “return to the state of the uncarved block.”
²³
One of the great themes of the Italian Renaissance was to return
ad fontes
—to the fountainhead. In this text the movement is back to nature and to the endlessly fertile waters out of which everything natural first emerged. “The movement of the Tao,” writes Laozi, “is to return.”
²⁴
And the fruits of this homecoming are revitalization and renewal.

This returning is necessary only because human beings have left behind the natural rhythms of the country for the artificial syncopations of civilization. At birth, human beings are in full possession of the Dao. We are, in a famous metaphor from the
Daodejing
, uncarved blocks—simplicity itself. But Confucians and other civilizers insist on carving these blocks into useful parents and subjects, husbands and wives. Laozi sees each cut as a little death, with each shaving stealing from us our natural vitality, wearing us down, and shortening our lives. As Henry David Thoreau and Huck Finn can attest, however, this custom also steals from us our uniqueness. How can we be free to become ourselves if society is forever conspiring to turn us into something else? Must a government’s need for good citizens and a family’s need for filial children come before our own individual desires to flourish in our own way and on our own terms?

Laozi is responding here to Confucians who are convinced that both humanity and society are at their best when they are most intricately intertwined. For Laozi, however, the rituals and etiquette of polite society are a trap. The way back—and it
is
a returning—is to reverse the socialization process. The way to freedom leads through nature, which far more than society embodies the unity and harmony of the Dao. It is social beings who force things, who fight the way things are, who swim against the tide. Natural beings accept what is. If they find themselves in a riptide, they float with it until it is safe to swim to shore.

Closely related to this theme of return is the theme of reversal. Like a good wander, the Dao will surprise you. In fact, this sometimes seems to be its full-time job. In the New Testament parables of Jesus, the kingdom of God is about reversals—overturning our expectations by putting the rich before the poor and the last before the first. In the
Daodejing
it is the Dao that plays fast and loose with our expectations. We are to yield rather than pursue, to let go rather than grasp. We are to prefer the valley, which safeguards us in a storm; the female, which outlives the male; and the infant, whose freedom and vitality are unbound. Like James Agee, whose
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941) glories in the everyday lives of “nobodies,” Daoism roots for the underdogs. In the endless dance of the passive yin and the active yang, we are to partner with the soft and the supple, the weak and the quiet. We are to let things come to us rather than pursuing what we think we want and need. And why? Because yielding will make us free, and freedom will make us flourish.

The goal of human life, therefore, is to merge with the Dao, to mimic its flourishing, and thereby to flourish ourselves. And the best metaphor for the Dao, which is ultimately indescribable and therefore can only be approached via metaphor (and not without trepidation) is nature itself. So when Laozi wants to know how to act, he looks at the natural world, which has been neither socialized nor acculturated. He looks at the infant, who is innocent of learning and pretense. He looks at water running from mountain to valley without a thought in the world of doing otherwise.

Both infant and water embody
wu wei
, another key concept in the
Daodejing
.
Wu wei
literally means “no action,” and in Daoist writing it can refer to not acting and to reducing one’s actions to a minimum. More often, however, it refers to acting as nature does, which is to say spontaneously and effortlessly and out of the core of one’s being—to do this or that because it seems right in the moment, not because it is prescribed by this law or decreed by that god. So the opposite of
wu wei
is not action but artificial or contrived action. To act in the spirit of “noninterference,” as
wu wei
is sometimes translated, is to submit with equanimity to what is rather than resisting it in the name of what ought to be.

Someone once explained
wu wei
to me in terms of the choices that present themselves to a surfer. Bobbing up and down in the ocean, she has three ways to proceed. She can force things by paddling to shore (intentional action). She can sit there and drift (nonaction). Or she can catch a wave (
wu wei
). My colleague David Eckel tells me that the best metaphor for
wu wei
is water that effortlessly runs downhill. Falling water exhibits the Daoist virtue of
ziran
, which literally means “self-so” but typically refers to acting spontaneously or letting things take their natural course. The
Daodejing
refers to water as an example of the paradoxical power of weakness. Laozi admonishes us to be as flexible and yielding as water, which wears down rock not by smashing through it but by flowing around it. “There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water,” writes Laozi, “yet for attacking things that are hard and strong there is nothing that surpasses it.”
²⁵

Ground of Becoming

Passages such as this one may convey the impression that the
Daodejing
is crusading for the superiority of the passive yin over the active yang. “Know the male,” Laozi writes, “but keep to the female.”
²⁶
However, the goal of all this talk of valley and void, simplicity and tranquility is balance. In Daoist thought, yin and yang are opposing yet complementary (and interpenetrating) principles, with each containing a bit of and forever evolving into the other. So what Daoists seek is a harmonious union of the two. At the time the
Daodejing
was written, however, the yang energy of Confucianism was running amok. So an infusion of yin was needed to balance things out.

The Western monotheisms, drawing on Zoroastrianism, speak of a cosmic battle between two opposing principles and pray for the total victory of light over darkness. Even Hollywood movies drink deep from this well. In the
Daodejing
, however, the Dao is neither good nor bad. Confucians may go to great lengths to distinguish between beautiful and ugly, superior and inferior, strong and weak, but Laozi sees such judgments as both false and dangerous. The
Daodejing
is replete with all sorts of pairs that most of us would regard as opposites. In every case, however, what seem to be opposites are actually complementary pairs, ever melting into one another. So any effort to take sides is both futile and frustrating. The hope instead is for balance, accompanied by acquiescence to the way things are always changing—from day to night, summer to winter, and back again.

The
Daodejing
opens with two enigmatic lines that have vexed and delighted interpreters for millennia. These lines are typically translated, “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” This rendition suggests a mystical reading: the Dao is as ineffable as Allah for Sufis and God for Kabbalists. But my colleague Thomas Michael has suggested a different reading. These two lines are about change and creativity, he says. Rather than an assertion of mysticism, they are an observation about change and justification for creativity. The key to each sentence lies not in its subject but in its object, which is to say that the key words are
not
and
eternal
, or, in Michael’s translation
constant
: “Daos can lead, but these are not constant daos. Names can name, but these are not constant names.”
²⁷

The second line is somewhat easier to parse. The name “professor” can name me in one context (when I am teaching a class, for example) but it will not do in other contexts (when I am “coach” of my daughter’s soccer team or “son” at my parents’ Thanksgiving table). The first line is trickier but can also be made plain. There are many daos in the sense of “ways” to do things. And following them can lead you where you want to go. But these daos do not stay constant, because the circumstances in which they are employed are ever changing. So, to take Michael’s example of basketball, there was a dao for playing basketball at the time James Naismith invented the game, and this way could lead you to victory in the 1890s. But it wouldn’t do for Michael Jordan or Larry Bird in the National Basketball Association of the 1990s. Why? Because circumstances change. Because players get bigger and faster and (among other things) trade in the set shot for the jump shot and learn to dunk.

The desire to grab onto what does not change is typically only amplified by religious institutions. The
Daodejing
, by contrast, tells us to glory in transformation. The Daoist tradition includes a creation story that reverses the American motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” by affirming “out of one, many.” In the beginning was the Dao, which is changeless, formless, and indivisible, but also generative, transforming, and fertile—the mother of all that is to come. Out of this primordial unity comes qi, the life force present in all matter, human and otherwise. This vital energy then gives birth to yin/yang, which gives birth to the three realms of Heaven, Human, and Earth, the Five Phases of water, metal, fire, wood, and earth, and the ten thousand things, which is to say everything else. Everything, including human beings, is made of qi in some combination of yin and yang. The endless interaction of yin qi and yang qi is forever creating new things and transforming the old. So this cosmology of one and two and ten thousand answers not only the question, “How do things come into being?” but also, “How do things change?”

The German theologian Paul Tillich famously defined God as “the ground of being.”
²⁸
The impersonal Dao is that, too, but more fundamentally it is the ground of becoming—the natural process undergirding all generativity and change. This creative transformation is on view in the natural world, where every day light yields to darkness, every year courses through spring, summer, fall, and winter, and every life sees both birth and death. And so it goes with wealth and poverty, order and chaos, war and peace. The nature of things is not stasis but change. And the Dao is the ground of this becoming.

Soft Power

If the
Daodejing
is a mystical, metaphysical, and mythological text, it is also a manual for life, including political life. So the second half of this classic is devoted to
de
, or power/virtue. And here Laozi’s divergence from his Confucian friends becomes most plain. Confucius had argued that the problem of social chaos would yield to the solution of social harmony only when rulers and subjects alike educated themselves in the classics and cultivated virtues such as ren (benevolence). Laozi’s advice is just the opposite. He tells rulers to “throw out knowledge” and “stop benevolence,” adding that if they do, “the people will be a hundred times better off.”
²⁹
In their Book of Common Prayer, Anglicans confess sins both done and left undone. For Laozi, things left undone are far less dangerous.