The Way of Chuang Tzu

by Thomas Merton

Whatever may be the value of “life in the world” there have been, in all cultures, men who have claimed to find something they vastly prefer in solitude.

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. They are things that he sees to be right and good in themselves.

utilitarianism (the “profit motive” of Mo Ti). The life of 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.”

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 eliminate the evils; between his own idea of right and wrong, and the contrary idea of right and wrong held by some other philosophical school. And so on.

The more one seeks “the good” outside oneself as something to be acquired, the more one is faced with the necessity of discussing, studying, understanding, analyzing the nature of the good. The more, therefore, one becomes involved in abstractions and in the confusion of divergent opinions. The more “the good” is objectively analyzed, the more it is treated as something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes.

The way of Tao is to begin with the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence. Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanishes when we look at it and becomes intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life, and this way is analogous (at least psychologically) to the Christian “life of faith.” It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one’s effort.

“My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness … Perfect joy is to be without joy … if you ask ‘what ought to be done’ and ‘what ought not to be done’ on earth to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have [a fixed and predetermined] answer” to suit every case.

“if you persist in trying to attain what is never attained … in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed.” On the other hand, if he can only “know when to stop,” be content to wait, listen, and give up his own useless strivings, “this melts the ice.” Then he will begin to grow without watching himself grow, and without any appetite for self-improvement.

The “man of Tao” will prefer obscurity and solitude.

The “man of Tao” does not make the mistake of giving up self-conscious virtuousness in order to immerse himself in an even more self-conscious contemplative recollection.

All deliberate, systematic, and reflexive “self-cultivation,” whether active or contemplative, personalistic or politically committed, cuts one off from the mysterious but indispensible contact with Tao, the hidden “Mother” of all life and truth.

A contemplative and interior life which would simply make the subject more aware of himself and permit him to become obsessed with his own interior progress would, for Chuang Tzu, be no less an illusion than the active life of the “benevolent” man who would try by his own efforts to impose his idea of the good on those who might oppose this idea—and thus in his eyes, become “enemies of the good.”

The true tranquillity sought by the “man of Tao” is Ying ning, tranquillity in the action of non-action, in other words, a tranquillity which transcends the division between activity and contemplation by entering into union with the nameless and invisible Tao.

No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers. Like Lao Tzu, Master Chuang preaches an essential humility: not the humility of virtuousness and conscious self-abasement, which in the end is never entirely free from the unctuousness of Uriah Heep, but the basic, one might say, “ontological,” or “cosmic” humility of the man who fully realizes his own nothingness and becomes totally forgetful of himself, “like a dry tree stump … like dead ashes.”

for Chuang this paradise is not something that has been irrevocably lost by sin and cannot be regained except by redemption. It is still ours, but we do not know it, since the effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not. It is this self-awareness, which we try to increase and perfect by all sorts of methods and practices, that is really a forgetfulness of our true roots in the “unknown Tao” and our solidarity in the “uncarved block” in which there are as yet no distinctions.

happiness can be found, but only by non-seeking and non-action. It can be found, but not as the result of a program or of a system.

As Fung Yu Lan sums it up in his Spirit of Chinese Philosophy (p. 77), the sage will “accompany everything and welcome everything, everything being in the course of being constructed and in the course of being destroyed. Hence he cannot but obtain joy in freedom, and his joy is unconditional.”

one basic characteristic of the sage is that he recognizes himself to be as other men are. He does not set himself apart from others and above them. And yet there is a difference; he differs “in his heart” from other men, since he is centered on Tao and not on himself. But “he does not know in what way he is different.” He is also aware of his relatedness to others, his union with them, but he does not “understand” this either. He merely lives it.

What is impossible today may suddenly become possible tomorrow. What is good and pleasant today may, tomorrow, become evil and odious.

happiness, when pushed to an extreme, becomes calamity. That beauty, when overdone, becomes ugliness. Clouds become rain and vapor ascends again to become clouds. To insist that the cloud should never turn to rain is to resist the dynamism of Tao.

the superior work of art proceeds from a hidden and spiritual principle which, in fasting, detachment, forgetfulness of results, and abandonment of all hope of profit, discovers precisely the tree that is waiting to have this particular work carved from it. In such a case, the artist works as though passively, and it is Tao that works in and through him.

The “right way” of making things is beyond self-conscious reflection, for “when the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten.” In the teaching of philosophy, Chuang Tzu is not in favor of putting on tight shoes that make the disciple intensely conscious of the fact that he has feet—because they torment him!

It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being “reasonable” that we become, ourselves, unreasonable.