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.

“If you cannot trust your own nature, how can you trust your own mistrusting of it? How do you know that your mistrust is not wrong as well?”

Taoism regards the entire natural world as the operation of the Tao, a process that defies intellectual comprehension.

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

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.

you cannot characterize reality, or life itself, as either being or non-being, as either form or emptiness, or by any pair of opposites that you might think of.

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

A dictionary cannot really completely define itself; ultimately it can only put words together that correspond to other words.

since man is an integral part of the natural universe, he cannot hope to control it as if it were an object quite separate from himself.

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

the activity of nature is not self-obstructive.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you were saying because I was listening so hard.”

when we try to be loving, or to be virtuous, or to be sincere, we actually think about trying to do it

wu wei means easy does it.

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

the superior kind of virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue, and thus really is virtue. But the inferior kind of virtue is so anxious to be virtuous that it loses its virtue altogether.

The truly virtuous person is unobtrusive.

It is not that they are affectedly modest; instead they are what they are quite naturally.

the greatest intelligence appears to be stupidity, the greatest eloquence sounds like a stammer, and the greatest brig...

true virtue, Te, is the living of human life in such a fashion as not ...

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.

You know how it is when you get in your own light or get in your own way — when it becomes desperately essential that you hurry to catch a train or plane, for example, instead of your muscles being relaxed and ready to run, your anxiety about not getting there in time immediately stiffens you up and you start stumbling over everything.

And so, 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.

men in the West do not realize how much softness is strength.

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

so much of what we fear from the outside gets to us because we fear our own weakness on the inside.

you can always be sure that when a man pretends to be 100 percent male on the outside, he is in doubt of his manhood somewhere on the inside.

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.

The philosophy of balance is the first thing that all students of judo and akido have to learn,

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.

The second principle, beyond understanding and keeping balance, is not to oppose strength with strength.

When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground.

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 the world is very different from the order we create with the rules of our syntax and grammar.

Our confusion of the order of logic and of words with the order of nature is what makes everything seem so problematic to us.

When we say that we are trying to make sense out of life, that means that we are trying to treat the real world as if it were a collection of words.

tsu, which means “the order of things as measured,” or “the order of things as written down.”

li, for the actual order of nature.

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.

our first task is to learn the different names for everything. In this way we learn to treat all of the things of the world as separate objects.

We are also taught to behave consistently, almost as if we are characters in a book,

If we were actually consistent in life it would be very boring,

we are always expected to be able to rationalize our actions in words.

When we try to accomplish this we develop a kind of second self inside us, which in Zen is called the observing self.

we have a kind of interior picture, a vague sense of who we are, and of what the reaction of other people to us says about who we are.

this image becomes interiorized — a second self who is commenting all the time upon what the first one is doing

The difficulty with this is that although it is exceedingly important for all purposes of civilized intercourse and personal relationships to be able to make sense of what we are doing, and of what other people are doing, and to be able to talk about it all in words, this nevertheless warps us.

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