all subtle mystery and dark-enigma vision:
they were deep beyond knowing,
so deep beyond knowing
we can only describe their appearance:
Perfectly cautious, as if crossing winter streams,
and perfectly watchful, as if neighbors threatened;
perfectly reserved, as if guests,
perfectly expansive, as if ice melting away,
and perfectly simple as if uncarved wood;
perfectly empty, as if open valleys,
and perfectly shadowy, as if murky water.
Who’s murk enough to settle slowly into pure clarity,
and who still enough to awaken slowly into life?
If you nurture this Way, you never crave fullness.
never crave fullness
and you’ll wear away into completion.
—Laozi Stanza 151
I have woven together what I hope you will find a compelling and informative handbook for achieving personal evolution that leads to peaceful social revolution. I would like to think that the process of reading, considering, and sharing the ideas herein can catalyze true change in you and organically generate those vaunted qualities of humility, frugality, and compassion. The flow of things is as follows:
•Specific personal and political calls to action
•Inspirational references
•Key snippets from Chinese history
•A philosophical travel guide
•Stories about the transformational power of Daoist ideas
•Teachings of famous sages
In presenting the material, I follow the exact model Daoist practice does, namely the precise progression from considering the work we do on ourselves to considering how that work affects the world. Accordingly, we begin with relaxing and rectifying the physical body, move to awakening our minds, proceed to contributing to community and improving culture, continue to consider how Daoist ideas manifest in culture, commerce, and government, review the relationship between sensitivity and the environment, and finally engage with the role of spirit and service in an awakened life. Within each section, there are thematically arranged groups, with the occasional stubborn thought that may not fit perfectly with the others but deserves consideration nonetheless.
As you read, please remember that truth is invariably more complicated than we like it to be, that there are layers upon interrelated layers to what we call reality. Things are often smaller, larger, constantly shifting, a piece of something else, and an intersection of happenings and forces. There is always a great unfolding. I hope you’ll think deeply about these ideas, share them with others, and season them with the wisdom of your own insights and experience.
There are a variety of systems to transliterate Chinese to English. The Chinese government’s standard Pinyin system, despite some awkwardness, is rapidly becoming the gold standard, so I have cleaved to it in this book. Each section ends with a quote from the much-vaunted Daodejing. I have chosen my favorite translations of the many available in English, so as to render the old master as widely and clearly as possible through various voices.
In anticipation of your kind attention, I offer nine grateful bows.
The seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes launched centuries of confusion about neuroanatomy and the reality of material existence with the famous dictum: “I think, therefore I am.” Daoist experience instantiates a contravening notion, namely that all distinctions between body and mind are specious. Some years ago, I attended a traveling exhibit called “BODIES: The Exhibition,” which revealed human structures in their full glory through the injection of liquid plastics that filled up and fleshed out all our systems. Perhaps the most startling revelation of the exhibit was the fact that the nervous system is not merely the brain and spinal cord, but rather, a vast, jellyfish-like array of tissue that pervades us from top to bottom, innervating our organs, including our digestive tract—where a second brain, the size of a cat, gives us our so-called “gut feelings”—as well as the skin on the very tips of our fingers and toes.
Beyond anatomy, proof that the brain and body are inextricably interdigitated comes from both anecdotes and experiments that demonstrate the mortal effects of either fearing or wishing for impending death. Most recently, experiments in the field of epigenetics—beginning by stressing colonies of bacteria and progressing to examining changes in human DNA pursuant to various forms of stress—illustrate definitively that our emotions play a key part in gene expression, turning up and down the “volume” on the expression of genetic characteristics, ranging from a predisposition to cancer to the course of puberty and other developmental changes. Given the inseparability of the body and mind, the Daoist axiom that heightened consciousness and increased awareness depend upon a strong body makes perfect sense.
The body may or may not be the temple of the soul, but we completely rely upon it either way. In the Daoist ideal, a healthy body is relaxed, soft, pliable, and yielding. Like a palm tree bending in a storm, our softness allows us to endure life’s harsh winds and strong storms. There are passages in Laozi’s Daodejing that exhort us not only to recover the simple innocence of childhood but also to find in adult life the physical suppleness we had as infants, when our limbs could be led, naturally and without training, into postures to rival any yogini’s. In contrast to a palm tree, an oak can grow a fine and showy canopy but, by virtue of being rigid, will snap when assailed by weather or even by climbing children.
Once the body is relaxed, we can begin to rectify it. Rectification of the body means setting things straight by implementing new and positive changes. We fix our posture, straighten our spine, and treat physical inflammation or dysfunction primarily with diet and exercise. We integrate the body from hand to foot, meaning that any work done with our hands while standing is subtly felt in every part of the body, all the way to the feet. We gain that sensitivity through relaxation, meditation, and the cultivation of simple habits, like moving back as far as possible in our chair while sitting, so as to work the abdominal muscles that give us the strength to maintain this position.
Our next step is to rectify the mind. This means inspecting our habits, our preconceptions, tendencies, foibles, beliefs, and whatever limitations we unnecessarily accept. By carefully considering so much of what we all take for granted, we move off the stultifying platform of certainty and comfort and into the realm of healthy questioning and unease. This is a healthy place, despite the challenges, and good prescriptions naturally arise from dwelling in it.
The magnificent Daoist sage, Zhuangzi, is generally believed to have lived during the fourth century BC. His short stories, together comprising one of the earliest works of Asian literature, are well known to every Chinese schoolchild. In one of the most famous passages of Eastern philosophy, he meets a friend at an inn for tea and recounts a dream in which he was a butterfly zooming across the landscape, flapping his beautiful wings and enjoying the power, freedom, and perspective of flight. He tells his friend he isn’t entirely sure whether he is a man who has just dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man.
This preoccupation with identity—the nature of individual existence and the rectification of the self—is a hallmark of Daoism. Indeed, the great preponderance of Daoist