Although it is not easy to offer a definition of Taoism, thinkers classed as philosophical Taoists do share one basic insight – that, while all other things move spontaneously on the course proper to them, man has stunted and maimed his spontaneous aptitude by the habit of distinguishing alternatives, the right and the wrong, benefit and harm, self and others, and reasoning in order to judge between them. To recover and educate his knack he must learn to reflect his situation with the unclouded clarity of a mirror, and respond to it with the immediacy of an echo to a sound or shadow to a shape. For Chuang-tzŭ the fundamental error is to suppose that life presents us with issues which must be formulated in words so that we can envisage alternatives and find reasons for preferring one to the other. People who really know what they are doing, such as a cook carving an ox, or a carpenter or an angler, do not precede each move by weighing the arguments for different alternatives. They spread attention over the whole situation, let its focus roam freely, forget themselves in their total absorption in the object, and then the trained hand reacts spontaneously with a confidence and precision impossible to anyone who is applying rules and thinking out moves. ‘When I chisel a wheel,’ says the carpenter to Duke Huan,4 ‘if the stroke is too slow it slides and does not grip, if too fast it jams and catches in the wood. Not too slow, not too fast; I feel it in the hand and respond from the heart, the tongue cannot put it into words, there is a knack in it somewhere which I cannot convey to my son and which my son cannot learn from me.’
In another tale5 a swimmer is asked how he stays afloat in a whirlpool, and answers: ‘I enter with the inflow and emerge with the outflow. I follow the Way of the water and do not impose my selfishness on it … That it is so without me knowing why it is so is destiny.’ Such stories about special knacks were popular in the school of Chuang-tzŭ; only one of them, the tale of Cook Ting carving the ox,6 belongs to the Inner chapters which can be confidently ascribed to Chuang-tzŭ himself, but as concrete illustrations of the Taoist approach they are as instructive to the modern reader as they evidently were to ancient apprentices of the school.
In responding immediately and with unsullied clarity of vision one hits in any particular situation on that single course which fits no rules but is the inevitable one (Chuang-tzŭ is fond of the term ‘inevitable’,7 which he uses rather as when we speak of the inevitability of an artist’s casually drawn line). This course, which meanders, shifting direction with varying conditions like water finding its own channel, is the Tao, the ‘Way’, from which Taoism takes its name; it is what patterns the seeming disorder of change and multiplicity, and all things unerringly follow where it tends except that inveterate analyser and wordmonger man, who misses it by sticking rigidly to the verbally formulated codes which other philosophical schools present as the ‘Way of the sage’ or ‘Way of the former kings’. The spontaneous aptitude is the te, the ‘Power’, the inherent capacity of a thing to perform its specific functions successfully. (As an English equivalent of te many translators prefer ‘virtue’, to be understood however as in ‘The virtue of cyanide is to poison’ rather than as in ‘Virtue is its own reward’). Like the Way, it belongs to man no more or less than to other things; we read in one Chuang-tzŭ story that the training of a fighting cock ends when its te is complete.8 In ancient Chinese thinking, which has no dichotomy of mind and body, the ‘Power’ even in man includes not only the full potentialities of the sage but such physical powers as eyesight and hearing, and Chuang-tzŭ sees it as a difficulty requiring explanation that perfection of Power does not ensure that the body will grow up strong and beautiful.9 The concepts of Tao and te make a pair, as in the alternative title of Lao-tzŭ, the Tao te ching, ‘Classic of the Way and of Power’.10
How am I to train the Power in me so that I am prompted to act without the aid of reasons, ends, moral and prudential principles? By cultivating the spontaneous energies, which Chuang-tzŭ conceives in terms of the physiological ideas current in his time. He assumes that the organ of thought is not the brain but the heart, and also that everything in motion in the universe is activated by ch’i, ‘breath, energy’, conceived as a fluid which in its purest state is the breath which vitalises us. Inside the body the ch’i alternates between phases of activity, as the ‘Yang’, and of passivity, as the ‘Yin’, as in breathing out and in. He shares such assumptions of Chinese medicine as that birth and growth are Yang and ageing is Yin, that illness is an imbalance of the two, and that changes of mood from exhilaration to depression are the Yang energies climaxing and reverting to the Yin phase.11 In the main tradition of Chinese cosmology (already represented in the Outer chapters of Chuang-tzŭ) all energies not only in the body but throughout the cosmos are classed as Yin or Yang, accounting for the alternations of dark and light and of all other opposites. Chuang-tzŭ himself, however, seems to follow an older scheme of ‘Six Energies’, Yin and Yang, wind and rain, dark and light.12 Thinking in terms of the traditional physiology, he recommends us to educate the spontaneous energies rather than use the heart to think, name, categorise and conceive ends and principles of action. (But the only specific technique which he mentions, and that only casually, is controlled breathing.)13 Then we shall respond a new to the totality of every new situation, as the swimmer adapts to the varying pulls and pressures of the whirlpool, aware that it would not help but harm him to pause and ask himself ‘How shall I escape?’, even entertain the thought about himself ‘I want to escape’.
With the abandonment of fixed goals, the dissolution of rigid categories, the focus of attention roams freely over the endlessly changing panorama, and responses spring directly from the energies inside us. For Chuang-tzŭ this is an immense liberation, a launching out of the confines of self into a realm without limits. A word which regularly quickens the rhythm of his writing is yu, ‘roam, travel’, used rather like the ‘trip’ of psychedelic slang in the 1960s. In his first chapter, ‘Going rambling without a destination’, he begins by imagining the flight of a giant bird and asking how the air can carry its weight, and proceeds to the flight, which does not depend even on the air, of the sage who ‘rides a true course between heaven and earth, with the changes of the Six Energies as his chariot, to travel into the infinite’.14 But he is not thinking only of ecstatic experience; even a diplomat on a difficult mission is advised to consider only the objective conditions and ‘let the heart roam with other things as its chariot, and trust yourself to the inevitable in order to nurture the centre of you’.15