This paper is a revised and very abbreviated version of a paper originally published as “‘Nature’ as part of human culture in Taoism” in Taoism and Ecology: Ways within a cosmic landscape. Ed. N.J. Girardot, James Miller, Liu Xiaogan. (Harvard University Press. Cambridge: 2001)
I begin with an excerpt from a writing by John Blofeld, who traveled visiting Buddhist and Daoist communities in China in the 1930’s, before the Communist revolution. Blofeld gives the following description of his visit to a remote Daoist hermitage in China:
Not far from where the hermitage clung to the steep rock-face… where the path took a sharp turn towards a stone stairway leading to the main gate, it could be seen that the recluses’ love of unspoiled beauty had not deterred them from lending nature a helping hand. The immediate environs of the Valley Spirit Hermitage gave the impression of a series of rocks and caverns, overhung by ferns and luxuriant plants, which just happened to emerge from the undergrowth in this vicinity, adding enormously to its picturesqueness. What aroused my suspicion was that no other section of the mountain, apart from the chasms and waterfall, looked so exactly like the original of a Daoist painting. There was, of course, no obvious symmetry, but yet a sense of underlying harmony that was just a shade too pronounced to be altogether natural. Whoever had been responsible for making the ‘guided wildness’ of the approach to the hermitage even lovelier than nature’s untouched handiwork had surely been a master of subtlety, for there was not an object within sight of the stairway of which one could confidently affirm it had been tampered with.
Daoists, the ancient progenitors of several horticultural arts now widely associated with Zen, such as flower-arrangement, certain kinds of landscape gardening and the growing of dwarf trees, were wont to employ loving artistry in subtly modifying nature… In landscaping, the underlying principle was to avoid artificiality not by refraining from improving on natural forms, but by bringing out or highlighting shapes — beautiful, amusing or grotesque — already inherent in the objects worked upon. A square should not be rounded, but a rough sphere could be made rounder; a shrub should be made to resemble a stork only if the stork already existed potentially in the plant’s natural shape; water might be diverted from one pile of rocks to another to heighten the beauty of a cataract, but only if there were nothing inherently unnatural in the resulting flow and fall. Nature could be assisted to achieve masterly effects, but the concept in the improver’s mind must in itself be based on intimate knowledge of nature’s manifestations. In short, the aim in most cases was to assist nature to do what it might under more favourable circumstances have done for itself. (From John Blofeld, The Secret and the Sublime: Taoist mysteries and magic. London: George Allyn and Unwin, Ltd. 1973. p. 116-118).
I once injected the ideas from this passage into a conversation among college professors discussing Lynn Whyte’s now famous essay on Christianity’s contribution to modern Western “dominating” attitudes toward nature. I meant this as a serious contribution to a discussion of what our attitudes toward nature ought to be, but it was greeted by dismissive laughter and amusement at these naively self-contradictory Daoist hermits.
When I read this passage to students, invariably several were offended at the “hypocritical” attitude toward nature that they see reflected in Blofeld’s description. The hermits seem to be pretending to be “nature lovers” while at the same time betraying that attitude most offensive to modern nature-lovers, the arrogant, “anthropocentric” assumption that human values and human ideas about how the world ought to be, are superior to nature in its pure untouched state. Wouldn’t a true nature lover simply leave nature alone?
These responses seem to reflect a strictly disjunctive view of the relation between “nature” and “human culture.” Blofeld’s hermits clearly do not share this disjunctive view, but favor a kind of “cultivated nature,” a nature that is part of human culture.
I’m not sure we can take everything in Blofeld’s rather journalistic book as representative of the Daoist tradition, but I would argue that what he says in this passage does reflect a view of things that closely matches the views expressed in the Zhuangzi and the Laozi, from whom my next two passages are taken.
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My Zhuangzi passage tells how Woodcarver Ching went about carving an awesomely beautiful bellstand:
When the bellstand was complete, those who saw it were amazed, [because it] seemed like [something belonging to the realm of] spirits. The Marquis of Lu went to see it, and then asked, “By what secret art did you make this?”
[Ching] answered, “Your servant is [only] an artisan, how could I have a “secret art”? However, there is one thing. Suppose your servant is going to make a bellstand. I dare not let my qi dissipate. I make sure to fast, to still my mind. After fasting three days, I no longer presume to think of recognition and reward, of rank and salary. After fasting five days, I no longer presume to think of praise or blame, of skill or clumsiness. After seven days, I am so concentrated that I forget I have four limbs or a body. By this time [for me] there is no Duke or court. The skill [for the work] concentrates and outside distractions disappear.
Only after all this do I go into the mountain forest.
[There I set about] observing the [inner] nature of Heaven [‘s work].
[When I discover wood whose] form and substance have reached perfection
Only after this is [everything] complete, [enabling me to] see the bellstand.
Only after this do I set my hand to work.
[If things do] not [happen] like this, I give up.
Thus I join Heaven to Heaven.
This is probably the reason why the bellstand seems like something from the spirit-world.
The first thing I want to point out is the way that this passage seems from a modern point of view to illustrate a confusion between nature and human culture similar to that in the Blofeld passage. Clearly Woodcarver Ching is a kind of “nature lover,” in that he got the inspiration for his bell-stand by a kind of careful and reverential observation of nature. On the other hand, the result of his nature-observation was not a grasp of how nature works, but an ability to “see” in a tree a very useful human product, a bellstand. And his “reverence for nature” did not express itself in admiration of trees as they exist in their natural habitat themselves, but rather in chopping down and carving up a “natural” tree to produce a luxury item for the court of a local duke.
Several aspects of this passage are worth commenting on. In translating this passage I have tried for a rather literal rendering, and printed the last sentences on separate lines because the wording especially in these last lines is very interesting and significant in several places. First, after entering the forest, and before he was able to “see” the bellstand, the text says that Ching spent some time guan tian xing (guan/observing tian/Heaven’s xing/nature.
Xing is often translated as “nature.” It usually refers to some core tendency of a being, not itself immediately visible, but which is the root of visible conduct. (As for example one passage in the Mencius says that people’s desire to rescue a child from a well is a manifestation of a inner core tendency toward empathy and compassion; a manifestation of an internal “commiserating xing.”).
When the text says that Ching is observing Heaven’s nature, “Heaven” in the context seems to refer to what we call “Nature” in a different sense, Nature as a personification of the forces operative in the natural world of the forest, outside human control. A literal translation of guan tian xing might then be “observing Nature’s nature.”
The context seems to indicate that Woodcarver Ching spends time carefully observing the shapes of trees in the mountain forest, contemplating that kind of beauty observable in naturally occurring forms. He thinks of this as learning about “Nature’s nature” the inner spirit of Nature. This contemplation is what eventually enables him “see a bellstand” in a piece of wood “[whose] form and substance have reached perfection.” That is, a piece of wood is said to have “reached perfection” (chi) when it exemplifies this “natural” kind of beauty, this “Nature’s nature” to a very high degree — exhibiting this beauty of course in the form of a plausible bellstand.
Ching says that when everything comes together in this way, he is able to “join Heaven to Heaven.” One “Heaven” here is clearly the xing of Heaven/Nature that Ching spent time observing, which he now sees in the wood. Following suggestions evident in other Zhuangzi passages, the other “Heaven” is most likely Ching’s own mind, the mental state he was in as a result of conserving his qi, fasting, stilling his mind, and ridding himself of all the concerns for fame and social advantages that Zhuangzi rails against, and to which Ching as a court artisan would have usually been susceptible. This kind of mental self-cultivation is what gave Ching a “Heavenly” mind. The finished bellstand was “like a spirit” (gui-shen) to people who saw it – it had that mysteriously awesome aura that Chinese associated with spirits – precisely because it was the result of combining Ching’s “Heavenly” state of mind with the Heavenly beauty of natural forms he was able to perceive by his careful study of naturally occurring forms in the forest.
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The final text I want to discuss is ch. 64 of the Daodejing. This chapter is crucial I think to understand the themes of wu wei (“not doing”) and ziran (“naturalness”) in this work. These themes are notoriously paradoxical. Taken literally, wu wei seems to advocate not interfering in any way at all with the course of things in the world; from this point of view, the world would clearly be better off without any ruler. And yet it is difficult to ignore the fact that the Daodejing is (among other things) a manual for ruling well. It gives advice on how a ruler should go about gaining the allegiance and cooperation of the people (ch. 66). It advises the ruler to imitate water whose “soft” strategy allows it to “overcome” opposing forces that are hard and strong, and ch. 36 gives examples of how this soft strategy can be used to “weaken” things and “bring them down.”
Other chapters advise the ruler to actively oppose the spread of knowledge and ambition among the people: “Empty their minds and fill their bellies, weaken their ambitions and strengthen their bones” (ch. 3); “ancients who excelled in doing Dao used it to keep people ignorant” (ch. 65). Ch. 37 advocates “restraining” people when they become “desirous and active.” The last line of the last chapter (in the received Wangbi version) says that the wise person “works (wei) but does not contend.”
Ch. 64 presents us with this paradox in a quite blatant form, and I think its last lines give us the key needed to resolve it. The chapter begins with some very interventionist lines:
[When] sitting still, [things are] easy to hold down
[when] there are no omens yet, [it is] easy to plan
[when things are] fragile, [they are] easy to break[when things are] small, [they are] easy to scatter
Work on it (wei chi) when it isn’t yet
Put it in order when it is not yet disordered.
This passage assumes that there are undesirable things happening that one wants to hold down, break, and scatter, and the advice is to “nip it in the bud,” stop undesirable developments before they get a chance to start. This is explicitly described as “working on it,” wei chi, a phrase sometimes used of governing (for example wei kuo means “govern the state”); the word I translate “put it in order” is also a common word describing the act of governing.
The paradox comes only a few lines later, which says “Working (wei) ruins… and so the wise person does not work (wu wei).”
The paradox is resolved in the final lines, which says that the wise person “assists (fu) the naturalness (ziran) of the 10,000 things, without daring to work (wei).”
Again, from a modern perspective, “assisting naturalness” doesn’t make sense. “Natural” designates precisely what happens by itself, without any deliberate human “assistance.” But this passage reflects a concept of “natural” similar to the two passages discussed above, and very different from the modern concept. For the Daodejing’s authors, ziran does not designate the actual state of affairs, whatever that might be, but an ideal state of affairs. It is assumed that things the way we find them are often not in their “natural” state, and need to be assisted to become so. And just as Woodcarver Ching had to cultivate a particular mental state in order to see the “natural” bellstand in the wood and make it manifest by his carving, so ch. 64 of the Daodejing precedes the description of “assisting the naturalness” by a saying describing a kind of self-cultivation:
The wise person “desires to be desireless… learns to be unlearned, turns back to the place all others have passed by, so that (yi) he can assist the naturalness of the ten thousand things without presuming to work.”
The point: The ideal ruler indeed should not impose on a society ideas hatched completely in his own head, to make his mark on the world for his own glory – this I think is the meaning of wu wei in the Laozi. But neither does the ideal ruler stand aside and literally “do nothing,” no matter what is happening. He is carefully attentive to the subtleties of the unique structure and dynamics of the society in his charge, and works hard to bring out the best in this particular society, “the best” being inevitably informed by his own feeling for what this society would be like at its best. Thus the “naturalness” (ziran) of the society which he “helps along” does not represent society as it would function if it had no ruler at all. It is what we would perhaps think of as a rather “romantic” notion of naturalness, a state both in accord with the spontaneous impulses of the community, but also in accord with an early Daoist notion of an ideal society.
I’ve argued elsewhere that the key value in the Laozi is that of organic harmony. By organic harmony I mean that kind of harmony that arises out of spontaneous mutual adjustment among many elements and forces in a given system, in contrast to that kind of order that is imposed by some dominant force or goal outside the system, or that kind of order resulting from subordination of all elements and forces to one dominant center. Organic harmony refers to a stable, homeostatic order that arises out of the mutual adjustment of parts, in contrast to a random, disorderly, and unstable situation that might also sometimes be produced when different parts develop according to their own spontaneous (competitive and individualistic) impulses. An organic harmony tends to be more homeostatic and stable than an order brought about by a dominating external influence, because it does not require such a great degree of continued work to maintain.
A “low maintenance garden,” is a good example. Gardens are “high maintenance” when the plants are not naturally suited to the given environment and so need constant intervention by the gardener. A low maintenance garden needs to form an organic, homeostatic system with its environment. Still, creating such a garden requires that a gardener, somewhat like woodcarver Ching, spend a good deal of time trying to understand details about plants, soil, water, and climate conditions.
I want to note, finally, that I do not intend here to appeal to the Daodejing or the Daoist tradition as a source of authoritative norms that I think ought to be regarded as authoritative by everyone today. I think that careful study of older traditions is useful because they often invite us into ways of thinking that otherwise might not easily occur to us, and are worth thinking about.
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