The Way of Chuang Tzu

by Thomas Merton

there is a monastic outlook which is common to all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a mirage.

This book is not intended to prove anything or to convince anyone of anything that he does not want to hear about in the first place.

His philosophical temper is, I believe, profoundly original and sane.

in general a refusal to take seriously the aggressivity, the ambition, the push, and the self-importance which one must display in order to get along in society. This other is a “way” that prefers not to get anywhere in the world, or even in the field of some supposedly spiritual attainment.

The book of the Bible which most obviously resembles the Taoist classics is Ecclesiastes.

St. Therese of Lisieux and Taoism,

The “Little Way” of Therese of Lisieux is an explicit renunciation of all exalted and disincarnate spiritualities that divide man against himself,

For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it.

affirmation of the world that is nothing but...

There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves man in his own home...

it is so simple that it can get along without bei...

you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost.

Chuang Tzu, the greatest of the Taoist writers whose historical existence can be verified (we cannot be sure of Lao Tzu),

The true inheritors of the thought and spirit of Chuang Tzu are the Chinese Zen Buddhists of the Tang period (7th to 10th centuries a.d.).

The fashion of Zen in certain western circles fits into the rather confused pattern of spiritual revolution and renewal.

It represents a certain understandable dissatisfaction with conventional spiritual patterns and with ethical and religious formalism. It is a symptom of western man’s desperate need to recover

spontaneity and depth in a world which his technological skill has made rigid, artific...

moral anarchy that forgets how much tough discipline and what severe traditional mores are presupposed

our own modern concern with the person:

that the life and integrity of the person remain of greater value than any object or any function to which the person may be called to devote himself, at the risk of alienation.

has nothing to offer b...

since it destroys the relationships without which the person c...

Personalism gives priority to the person and not the individual self.

To

give priority to the person means respecting the unique and inalienable val...

The character of the “Superior Man” or “Noble Minded Man” according to Ju philosophy is constructed around a four-sided mandala of basic virtues.

The first of these is compassionate and devoted love, charged with deep empathy and sincerity, that enables one to identify with the troubles and joys of others as if they were one’s own. This compassion is called Jen, and is sometimes translated “human heartedness.” The second of the basic virtues is that sense of justice, responsibility, duty, obligation to others, which is called Yi. It must be observed that Ju philosophy insists that both Jen and Yi are completely disinterested. The mark of the “Noble Minded Man” is that he does not do things simply because they are pleasing or profitable to himself, but because they flow from an unconditional moral imperative.

The other two basic virtues of Ju are necessary to complete this picture of wholeness and humaneness. Li is something more than exterior and ritual correctness: it is the ability to make use of ritual forms to give full outward expression to the love and obligation by which one is bound to others. Li is the acting out of veneration and love, not only for parents, for one’s sovereign, for one’s people, but also for “Heaven-and-earth.” It is a liturgical contemplation of the religious and metaphysical structure of the person, the family, society, and the cosmos itself.

One learns by Li to take one’s place gratefully in the cosmos and in history.

Finally there is “wisdom,” Chih, that embraces all the other virtues in a mature and religious understanding which orients them to their living fulfillment. This

In any case, the man who has attained Chih, or wisdom, has learned spontaneous inner obedience to Heaven, and is no longer governed merely by external standards. But a long and arduous discipline by external

Carthage, Nineveh, or Babylon.

Chuang Tzu was not demanding less than Jen and Yi, but more. His chief complaint of Ju was that it did not go far enough.

Lao Tzu distinguished between the Eternal Tao “that can not be named,” which is the nameless and unknowable source of all being, and the Tao “that can be named,” which is the “Mother of all things.”

Doctrine of the Mean

Confucianism developed, it continued to divide and subdivide the idea of Tao until it became simply a term indicating an abstract universal principle in the realm of ethics.

(the “profit motive” of Mo Ti).

riches, ambition, pleasure, is in reality an intolerable servitude in which one “lives for what is always out of reach,” thirsting “for survival in the future” and “incapable of living in the present.”

the problem that the very goodness of the good and the nobility of the great may contain the hidden seed of ruin

the hero of virtue and duty ultimately lands himself in the same ambiguities as the hedonist and the utilitarian. Why? Because he aims at achieving “the good” as object. He engages in a self-conscious and deliberate campaign to “do his duty” in the belief that this is right and therefore productive of happiness. He sees “happiness” and “the good” as “something to be attained,” and thus he places them outside himself in the world of objects.

In so doing, he becomes involved in a division from which there is no escape: between the present, in which he is not yet in possession of what he seeks, and the future in which he thinks he will have what he desires: between the wrong and the evil, the absence of what he seeks, and

the good that he hopes to make present by his efforts to e...

the whole concept of “happiness” and “unhappiness” is ambiguous from the start, since it is situated in the world of objects.

From the moment they are treated as “objects to be attained,” these values lead to delusion and alienation.

“When all the world recognizes good as good, it becomes evil,” because it becomes something that one does not have and which one must constantly be pursuing until, in effect, it becomes unattainable.

as the end becomes more remote and more difficult, the means become more elaborate and complex, until finally the mere study of the means becomes so demanding that all one’s effort must be concentrated on this, and the end is forgotten.

devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing means which lead nowhere.

nothing but organized...

It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one’s effort.

wu wei, the non-doing, or non-action,