What Is Tao?

by Alan W. Watts

Living close to the earth one sees the wisdom of not interfering with the course of life, and of letting things go their way. This is the wisdom that also tells us not to get in our own way, and to paddle with the current, split wood along the grain, and seek to understand the inner workings of our nature instead of trying to change it.

We have inherited a doctrine of original sin, which tells us not to be too friendly, and to be very cautious of our own human nature. It has taught us that as reasoning and willing beings we should be suspect of our animal and instinctual nature.

a human being will always be greater than anything they can say about themselves, and anything they can think about themselves.

Confucius was the first to say that he would rather trust human passions and instincts than trust human ideas about what is right, for like the Taoists he realized that we have to allow all living things to look after themselves.

Traditionally this emblem is one of the basic symbols of the philosophy of Taoism. It is the symbol of the yang, or the male, and the yin, the female, of the positive and the negative, the yes and the no, the light and the dark. We always have to divide the world into opposites or categories in order to be able to think about it.

Tao and Te, of the Way and its power.

The core of Lao-tzu’s written philosophy deals with the art of getting out of one’s own way, learning how to act without forcing conclusions, and living in skillful harmony with the processes of nature instead of trying to push them around.

The word has two general meanings. One is perhaps best rendered into English as “the way,” “the way of things,” or “the way of nature.” The other sense of the word means “to speak,”

“Those who speak, do not know; those who know, do not speak.”

Remember that your heart beats “self-so” — and, if you give it a chance, your mind can function “self-so,” although most of us are afraid to give it a chance.

We soon find that the tension between our idea of things and things as they are puts us out of accord with the way of things.

In Chinese the second principle is called wu wei, and it means literally “not doing,” but would be much better translated to give it the spirit of “not forcing” or “not obstructing.”

Wu wei is also applied to human activity, and refers to a person who does not get in his or her own way.

Look out for the grain of things, the way of things. Move in accord with it and work is thereby made simple.

true virtue, Te, is the living of human life in such a fashion as not to get in its own way.

In all this you will see that there are three stages. There is first what we might call the natural or the childlike stage of life in which self-consciousness has not yet arisen. Then there comes a middle stage, which we might call one’s awkward age, in which one learns to become self-conscious. And finally the two are integrated in the rediscovered innocence of a liberated person.

the secret in Taoism is to get out of one’s own way, and to learn that this pushing ourselves, instead of making us more efficient, actually interferes with everything we set about to do.

Lao-tzu also said that while being a man, one should retain a certain essential feminine element, and that he who does this will become a channel for the whole world.

The ideal of the hundred-percent tough guy, the rigid, rugged fellow with muscles like steel, is really a model for weakness.

when a man pretends to be 100 percent male on the outside, he is in doubt of his manhood somewhere on the inside. If he can allow himself to be weak, he can allow himself to experience what is really his greatest strength.

The philosophy of the Tao has a basic respect for the balance of nature, and if you are sensitive you don’t upset that balance. Instead you try to find out what it is doing, and go along with it.

Part of the understanding of balance in judo is to learn to walk in such a way that you are never off center: your legs form the base of a triangle, and your body is on the apex, and when you turn you always try to keep your feet approximately under your shoulders, and in this way you are never off balance. This is a good practice in everyday life as well as in judo.

So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat.

One reason life seems problematic to us, and one reason why we look to philosophy to try to clear it all up, is that we have been trying to fit the order of the universe to the order of words. And it simply does not work.

The order of li, of the infinite complexity of organic pattern, is also the order of our own bodies, and of our brains and nervous systems.

We have all admired the spontaneity and freshness of children, and it is regrettable that as children are brought up they become more and more self-conscious. In this way people often lose their freshness, and more and more human beings seem to be turned into creatures calculated to get in their own way.

Humans get in their own way because they are always observing and questioning themselves.

And therefore the children lose their naturalness and spontaneity.

For this reason we admire the people, whether they be sages or artists, who have the ability to return in their mature life to a kind of child likeness and freshness. They are not bothered any more by what people are thinking or saying. This is the charm that surrounds the Taoist sages of ancient China

In China the symbol in the center is also known as Tai Chi, the symbol for the two fundamental principles, the positive and the negative, the yang and the yin that are held to lie at the root of all phenomena in the world.

The Chinese character for the word yang looks like a fish; it represents the light side, and means the southern or bright side of a mountain.

The character for yin is the black fish; it represents the shady or dark side of a mountain. Respectively, as we have seen, they represe...

Notice the symbolism of a light and dark side of a mountain — you do not find a mountain with only one side; the two sides must always go together. And so, in the same way, the Chinese feel that the positive and the negative, the light and the dark, the male and the female, the auspicious and the inauspicious alway...

True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward.

THE IMAGE Mountains standing close together: The image of keeping still. Thus the superior man Does not permit his thoughts To go beyond his situation.

But the movements of the heart — that is, a man’s thoughts — should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. All thinking that goes beyond this only makes the heart sore.

we never really know whether the outcome of a decision will be a failure or a success in the long run, because only the unknown — only what comes next — will show whether it was good or bad. And the unknown stretches infinitely before us.

The wiser person, therefore, is one who has the sensibility to see those things in themselves, and to know that beauty lies in the variability of experience from one situation to another.

It is instead the startling recognition that in the place where we are now, we have already arrived. This is it. What we are seeking is, if we are not totally blind, already here.

For if you must follow that trail up the mountainside to its bitter end, you will discover that it leads eventually right back into the suburbs.

And this is why the compulsively investigative mind is always ending up in what it believes to be the hard and bitter reality of the actual facts. Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair. The stars in heaven are, after all, only radioactive rocks and gas. But this is nothing more than the delusion that truth is to be found only by picking everything to pieces like a spoiled child picking at its food.

So it is not by pushing relentlessly and aggressively beyond those hills that we discover the unknown and persuade nature to disclose her secrets. What is beyond is also here.

Any place where we are may be considered the center of the universe. Anywhere that we stand can be considered the destination of our journey.

To put it another way, we have to come to terms with nature by wooing her rather than fighting her, and instead of holding nature at a distance through our objectivity as if she were an enemy, realize rather that she is to be known by her embrace.

Do we want to be some kind of omnipotent god, in control of it all, or do we want to enjoy it instead? After all, we can’t enjoy what we are anxiously trying to control.

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.