The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [11]
Thus the basic principles of Taoism begin to unfold themselves. There is, first of all, the Tao–the indefinable, concrete “process” of the world, the Way of life. The Chinese word means originally a way or road, and sometimes “to speak,” so that the first line of the Tao Te Ching contains a pun on the two meanings:
The Tao which can be spoken is not eternal Tao.3 f
But in trying at least to suggest what he means, Lao-tzu says:
There was something vague before heaven and earth arose. How calm! How void! It stands alone, unchanging; it acts everywhere, untiring. It may be considered the mother of everything under heaven. I do not know its name, but call it by the word Tao. (25)
And again:
The Tao is something blurred and indistinct.
How indistinct! How blurred!
Yet within it are images.
How blurred! How indistinct!
Yet within it are things.
How dim! How confused!
Yet within it is mental power.
Because this power is most true,
Within it there is confidence. (21)
“Mental! power” is ching, g a word which combines the ideas of essential, subtle, psychic or spiritual, and skillful. For the point seems to be that as one’s own head looks like nothing to the eyes yet is the source of intelligence, so the vague, void-seeming, and indefinable Tao is the intelligence which shapes the world with a skill beyond our understanding.
The important difference between the Tao and the usual idea of God is that whereas God produces the world by making (wei h), the Tao produces it by “not-making” (wu-wei i)–which is approximately what we mean by “growing.” For things made are separate parts put together, like machines, or things fashioned from without inwards, like sculptures. Whereas things grown divide themselves into parts, from within outwards. Because the natural universe works mainly according to the principles of growth, it would seem quite odd to the Chinese mind to ask how it was made. If the universe were made, there would of course be someone who knows how it is made–who could explain how it was put together bit by bit as a technician can explain in one-at-a-time words how to assemble a machine. But a universe which grows utterly excludes the possibility of knowing how it grows in the clumsy terms of thought and language, so that no Taoist would dream of asking whether the Tao knows how it produces the universe. For it operates according to spontaneity, not according to plan. Lao-tzu says:
The Tao’s principle is spontaneity. (25) j
But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not work according to plan, according to a (one-at-a-time) order of thought. Yet the concrete evidence of such an intelligence is right to hand in our own thoughtlessly organized bodies.3a For the Tao does not “know” how it produces the universe just as we do not “know” how we construct our brains. In the words of Lao-tzu’s great successor, Chuang-tzu:
Things are produced around us, but no one knows the whence. They issue forth, but no one sees the portal. Men one and all value that part of knowledge which is known. They do not know how to avail themselves of the Unknown in order to reach knowledge. Is not this misguided?4
The conventional relationship of the knower to the known is often that of the controller to the controlled, and thus of lord to servant. Thus whereas God is the master of the universe, since “he knows about it all! He knows! He knows!,” the relationship of the Tao to what it produces is quite otherwise.
The great Tao flows everywhere,
to the left and to the right.
All things depend upon it to exist,
and it does not abandon them.
To its