The Dao and the Field:
Exploring
an Analogy
Robert G.
Robert G.
Teaching-the-Daode-Jing
This is the task commentaries typically set for themselves, aiming at translating the text into a more current language while circling around its obscurities, lessening its paradoxes, and reducing its originality.
They reshape the document for a newer taste, fre- quently using syncretistic forms of interpretation.
33
In teaching the Laozi, one of the absolutely essential things to keep in mind is to clearly distinguish between contemporary interpretations of the text and whatever we can establish of the text's original meanings through historical hermeneutics. There is absolutely nothing wrong with discovering something of value for our contemporary world in the ideas of the Laozi. Indeed, I think its teachings on inner cultivation contain valuable insights for us. But it is important to differentiate between what we can reasonably establish about the ''original meaning'' of the text through careful examination of its history and its larger intellectual context and the contemporary philosophical positions we use to interpret it.
A Critical First-Person Approach: Reconstructive Meditation
I would like to close with a section about a new approach I have taken in teaching the Laozi that adds the critical first-person element I advocated in my introduction. This is engaging students in what I call reconstructive medita- tion, the logic of which runs as follows:
third-person and first-person approaches 25
1. The creators of the Laozi practiced a form of breath meditation that led them to deeper and deeper states of tranquility and to what they asserted was an eventual merging with the Way. 34
2. They applied the clarity of mind developed through this meditation to the tasks of everyday life, hence developing, for example, the notion of ''effortless action'' (wu-wei). 35
3. Despite vast differences in cultural contexts, human beings in the third century b. c. e. in China had essentially the same physiology of body and mind as do modern humans. This assumption is widely accepted in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. 36
4. Thus, practicing breath meditation should have largely similar phys- iological effects on us as it did on them, although we, of course, conceive of the underlying mechanisms in entirely different fashions.
Based on these assumptions, I have developed a series of reconstructive meditations for students linked to passages in the Daode jing. Herewith two examples:
Bellows Breathing
The space between heaven and earth, is it not like a bellows? Empty it out and it is not exhausted;
Activate it and it continues to come forth
Laozi 5 speaks of the space between heaven and earth being like a bellows. Early Chinese physiological hygiene texts linked this bellows to the natural movements of the diaphragm as it inhales and exhales.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position and with eyes closed (remember: ''The Five Colors blind men's eyes''; Laozi 12), imagine your diaphragm to be a bellows and simply follow its movements as you inhale and exhale. Do this for ten (or more, de- pending on prior experience of students) minutes, then stop.
Observing Consciousness While ''Holding Fast to the Center''
Attaining emptiness is the apogee (of our practice) Holding fast to the center is its governing mode.
The myriad things arise side by side
And residing here, I see them slowly return The forms of heaven are great in number But each returns to its root.
26
approaching the daode jing
Laozi 16 recommends gradually emptying out consciousness through a process of ''holding fast to the center. '' I interpret this to mean concentrating on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling as you expe- rience it in the center of your body, somewhere in your abdomen. For some of you it may be as high as the solar plexus; for others it may be as low as the spot later called the ''cinnabar field,'' three finger-widths below your abdomen.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position, concentrate on your breathing and determine where it is centered in your abdomen. Carefully follow your breathing through its cycles of inhalation and exhalation. This is ''holding fast to the center. ''
When you are established in this breathing, open your focus to allow in the various thoughts and feelings that inevitably arise when attempting to sit quietly. Pay careful attention to where they come from. Notice how they arise and invariably pass away. Pay attention to where they go to. Do not follow them; do not react to them; always maintain an awareness of your center of breathing and simply con- tinue watching thoughts and feelings as they arise and pass away. This arising of something out of nothing is basic to your con- sciousness as microcosm and to the entire cosmos as macrocosm.
Conclusions
These reconstructive meditations help give students a sense of the experiential basis underlying not a few passages in the Laozi and start to provide some insight into the possible origins of the cosmology for which the text is re- nowned. I do not by any means wish to assert that these reconstructions are the exclusive original meaning of these passages; I only wish to assert that they may point to their possible experiential bases. In the end, reconstructive meditation is just another wrench in the toolbox of the scholar and teacher of the Laozi, another way to approach its meaning without reducing it to a series of ideas intended to deliberately confuse its audience and reinforce some very Western biases about the essentially rational and profane nature of human experience. It can provide new insights into the history of the text, the ''competence'' of its authors, composers, and audience, and can also con- tribute some insights into the nature of consciousness that some may find of contemporary relevance. It is in these ways that reconstructive meditation can augment the other three approaches.
third-person and first-person approaches 27
notes
I wish to thank Henry Rosemont Jr. , Erin Kline, and Michael Slater for their helpful criticisms of this manuscript but absolve them of all blame for whatever questionable assertions and contentious opinions I decided to retain.
1. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), argues that Christian mysticism is superior to all other forms. James Ware, Alchemy, Medicine and Religion in the China of a. d. 320: The Nei Pien of Ko Hung (New York: Dover, 1963), consistently translates Dao as ''God. ''
2. Propriety (li) prevents me from being any more specific about this except to say that most of the scholars I have in mind do not work on Daoism. And that is an interesting phenomenon in itself!
3. For a good example of this, see Wayne Proudfoot's assertion in Religious Ex- perience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 128-130, that the Daode jing uses paradoxical statements about the nature of the Dao to establish its ineffability, which is thus a feature of grammar and not of experience. By implication, the Dao is not a genuine power or force but a product of the linguistic manipulations of its inventors and the subsequent beliefs of its followers.
4. Of course, Herbert Fingarette got it right in his field-revising study of the Analects: Confucius--The Secular as Sacred, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill. : Waveland, 1998).
5. The categories of ''historical hermeneutics'' and ''contemporary relevance'' are found in the writings of Michael LaFargue. The most accessible is ''Recovering the Tao-te-ching's Original Meaning,'' in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231-254.
6. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the Daode jing and Neiye and these other texts, see my book Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, in particular 144-153, 185-190.
7. Rudolph G. Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daode jing: Wang Bi's Com- mentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). See also the following essays: Rudolph G. Wagner, ''Inter- locking Parallel Style: Laozi and Wang Bi,'' Journal Asiatiques 34, no. 1 (1980): 18-58; William Boltz, ''The Religious and Philosophical Significance of the 'Hsiang erh' Lao Tzu in the Light of the Ma-wang-tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 45 no. 1 (1982): 95-117; William Boltz, ''Textual Criticism and the Ma-Wang-Tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 44, no. 1 (1984): 185-224; William Boltz, ''The Lao Tzu Text That Wang Pi and Ho-shang Kung Never Saw,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, no. 5 (1985): 493-501. The best overview of the text and commentaries of the Laozi is Boltz's Lao tzu Tao te ching, in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe, Early China Special Monograph Series no. 2 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, Univer- sity of California, 1993). For a succinct summary of the textual issues relevant to Laozi and other early philosophical texts, see Harold D. Roth, ''Text and Edition in
28 approaching the daode jing
Early Chinese Philosophical Literature,'' Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 2 (1993): 214-227.
8. D. C. Lau, Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982); Robert Henricks, Lao-Tzu: Te Tao Ching (New York: Ballantine, 1989) Victor Mair, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (New York: Bantam, 1990); Robert Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000) (translation of Guodian Laozi parallels).
9. For an excellent and detailed study of the contrasting approaches of the Wang Bi and Heshang gong commentaries, see Allan Chan, Two Visions of the Way: A Study of the Wang Pi and Ho-shang-kung Commentaries on the Lao-tzu. Albany: State Uni- versity of New York Press, 1991.
10. For details, see my review in Philosophy East and West 35, no. 2 (1985): 213-215.
11. Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, eds. , The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May, 1998, Early China Special Mono- graph Series no. 5 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, University of California, , 2000).
12. Edmund Ryden, ''Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi A, B, and C, and Tai Yi Sheng Shui from Guodian Tomb Number One,'' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 187-231.
13. Harold D. Roth, ''Some Methodological Issues in the Study of the Guodian Laozi Parallels. '' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 71-88.
14. William Baxter, ''Situating the Language of Lao-tzu: The Probable Date of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 231-254.
15. A. C. Graham, ''The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan,'' 1981, in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Singapore: Institute for East Asian Philosophies, 1986), 111-124. An edited version appears in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao- tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 23-40.
16. Livia Kohn, ''The Lao-Tzu Myth,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao- te-ching, 41-62; Anna Seidel, La divinization de Lao-tseu dan le Taoisme du Han (1969; Paris: E ? cole Franc ? aise d'Extr^eme-Orient, 1992).
17. Michael LaFargue, Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). LaFargue earlier published a summary of his arguments from this volume together with a radically rearranged translation in Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
18. For further details, see Roth, Original Tao, chap. 5.
19. A. C. Graham, ''How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write? ,'' in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 283-321; Liu Xiaogan, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, trans. William Savage (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994).
20. Graham initially proposed the latter two categories to represent two major authorial voices in the Zhuangzi. Liu Xiaogan preferred the categories ''anarchist''
third-person and first-person approaches 29
and ''huang-lao'' to Graham's ''primitivist and ''syncretist,'' but, unlike Graham, he related these voices in Zhuangzi to larger intellectual movements. In this aspect,
I follow Liu. For the references, see the previous note.
21. I accept the Mawangdui variants of fu yan and fu zhi instead of the received text's bu yan and bu zhi. The negative adverb fu implies a direct object, whereas the adverb bu does not and is therefore more vague. The received text contains many examples of this sort, where a relatively clear text has been made vaguer and thus more ''mystical. '' See Lau, Chinese Classics, 218, 80.
22. For examples of this kind, see my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis,'' in Mark Csikszentmihalyi and P. J. Ivanhoe, eds. , Religious and Philosophical Aspects of Laozi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, 59-96. This is an excellent collection and provides a philosophical complement to the Kohn and LaFargue collection.
23. Lau, Chinese Classics, p. xl.
24. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 206.
25. Donald Harper, ''The Bellows Analogy in Laozi V and Warring States Mac-
robiotic Hygiene,'' Early China 20 (1995): 381-392.
26. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 207.
27. I read the last character in the line, tu (sincere, serious, solid), as a loan
for tu (also sincere, but can mean supervisor, to inspect, to correct), which when combined with the character mai (meridian) in Chinese medicine refers to the central supervisory meridian that controls the flow of yang qi in the human body. This is the reading in the Mawangdui recension. I interpret this passage to mean that the dominant mode by which emptiness is attained is by concentrating on the center.
I think the center here refers to the center of the body where breathing is experi- enced, and thus the passage commends focusing on breathing in order to attain emptiness.
28. LaFargue, Tao of the Tao Te Ching, 62-63.
29. Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.
30. The twelfth essay of the Huainanzi, ''The Responses of the Way,'' consists of
a series of narratives presented to illustrate various statements from the Laozi. Each narrative ends with the formula, ''And so the Laozi, says . . . '' This ''reverse com- mentary'' genre is also found in the ''Commenting on Laozi'' and ''Explaining Laozi'' chapters of the Hanfeizi.
31. Allan Chan, ''A Tale of Two Commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 89-118, is a sum- mary of his book on the same subject. Isabelle Robinet, ''Later Commentaries: Textual Polysemy and Syncretistic Interpretations,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 119-142, is a masterful essay in which the late Professor Robinet provides insights from many Laozi commentaries that are virtually unknown to modern scholarship, both East Asian and Western.
32. Julia Hardy, ''Influential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 165-185.
33. Robinet, ''Later Commentaries,'' 121.
30 approaching the daode jing
34. The justification for this is detailed in my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis. ''
35. This is one example of a more pervasive pattern of early Daoist meditation. For further details, see my essay ''Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295-314.
36. Evolutionary biology posits that all human beings (Homo sapiens) share a common genetic pool, whether they live in North America or in China, whether they live today or three thousand years ago. According to geneticist F. S. Collins, human beings are ''99. 9% genetically identical. '' ''Genome Research: The Next Generation,'' in The Genome of Homo Sapiens, ed. Bruce Stillman and David Stewart (Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y. : CSHL Press, 2003), 50. Geneticists Y. Sasaki et al. state, ''Homo sapiens is a unique organism characterized by its highly developed brain, use of complex languages, bipedal locomotion, and so on. These unique features have been acquired by a series of mutation and selection events during evolution in the human lineage and are mainly determined by genetic factors encoded in the human genome. ''Hu- man versus Chimpanzee Chromosome-wide Sequence Comparison and Its Evolu- tionary Implications,'' in Stillman and Stewart, The Genome of Homo Sapiens, 455. This common genetic heritage leads to the common physiology and neurophysiology that distinguishes human beings from the other higher hominids.
?
The Dao and the Field: Exploring an Analogy
Robert G. Henricks
Several years ago while looking for a way to explain to a class the meaning of Laozi's Dao (the Way, literally a road or a path), I hit upon an analogy that has proved to be quite fruitful. It is an anal- ogy that provides us with a model for understanding the nature of the Dao and the nature of its operations. It also provides us with a way to understand Laozi's moral philosophy, and it may help us understand what Laozi believed with regard to life after death/ immortality.
The analogy is drawn between the Dao and a field--not a farmer's field which is groomed and cultivated for the purpose of raising a single, hybrid crop, but a ''natural'' field, one left un- tended, one that is barren and deserted in the winter but filled with a host of different wildflowers throughout the spring and summer.
The appropriateness of this analogy and its usefulness for understanding the thought of Laozi will become clear once we see what Laozi himself said about the Dao. And to begin this task there is probably no better place to start than with the beginning of the book itself, the opening lines of chapter 1:
The Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao:
The name that can be named is not the eternal name. 1
A cryptic start to a cryptic book. Laozi tells us that anything he says about a Dao, after all, will not be about a true, eternal, or
32 approaching the daode jing
constant Dao. But at the same time he seems to confirm, in this backward way, that there is some such reality. Whatever the Dao might be, it is eternal and abiding. Moreover, there might be a name that is appropriate to it, a name that is equal to its reality, an eternal name, but the names we use do not qualify for such status.
All in all, the opening lines seem to suggest what is often suggested in mystic literature: that there is a transcendent, eternal reality, with which we may come into contact but that lies beyond the realm of precise description. All attempts to talk about it somehow fall short of conveying a true sense of what it is. That this is Laozi's meaning seems to be confirmed, as a matter of fact, in the very next line of chapter 1, where he calls the Dao the ''Nameless. '' He adds, moreover, that in this aspect it is the origin of the phenomenal world, the beginning of all things: ''The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth. ''2
But the label ''Nameless'' can be understood in two different ways. It can mean, as we have suggested, something for which an appropriate name cannot be found. But it might also refer to a time or a condition of things--undiffer- entiated reality--when distinct phenomenal forms had not yet appeared, a state lacking nameable realities. The Chinese for ''Nameless'' (wu ming) allows both of these interpretations (i. e. , not having a name and not having names), and as it turns out the Dao for Laozi is ''nameless'' in both ways. The Dao is that elusive, difficult to describe, single reality that existed prior to, and gave rise to, all other existing things.
Thus in chapter 14, where problematically ''names'' are assigned to the Dao, we find the following:
We look at it and do not see it: Its name is The Invisible.
We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is The Inaudible.
We touch it and do not find it:
Its name is The Subtle (formless).
These three cannot be further inquired into, And hence merge into one. 3
And in chapter 25 we have this:
There was something undifferentiated and yet complete,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call [or, I would style it] Dao. If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. 4
This is a telling statement on the nature of the Dao. It reports motifs that we already know: that the Dao is eternal, undifferentiated, the source of the phe- nomenal world, and something vague and elusive. But to this is now added the sense that the Dao is a reality that continues to be functional after creation, insofar as it is something that operates everywhere, and of course this also tells us that it is omnipresent. Moreover, the distinction that is made here between ''name'' (ming), which we do not know, and ''style'' (zi--Wing-tsit Chan ''calls it''), is informative. In China a person's name (personal name, that is, not surname) is given at birth; it is personal and rarely used in direct address. But the ''style'' is taken at capping age (around 20), and it is less personal, more publicly used, and less a part of that person's reality--who he or she really is. The word Dao has this ''style'' kind of relation to the reality at hand.
Laozi does venture here, when forced of course, to find some name to use for this reality, choosing the word da, the Great. But Kaltenmark has probably caught the import of this when he says, ''It is clear that he [Laozi] is using da in an absolute sense: the Immense, the Incommensurable. ''5
There is one more thing that Laozi tells us in chapter 25 which is important for our understanding of the nature of the Dao. He says, ''It may be considered the mother of the universe. '' When we move into the realm of image and metaphor, we find that Laozi depicts the Dao as a very feminine reality indeed. And to be more precise, as the line here makes clear, as something like a mother.
Three kinds of evidence can be called forth to support this and draw it out. To begin with, Laozi explicitly refers to the Dao as the ''Mother'' in no fewer than five different chapters. In addition to the reference already noted in chapter 25, in chapter 1, picking up the text where we left off, we find: ''The Named is the mother of all things [literally, the ten thousand things]. ''6 In chapter 20 Laozi laments that he alone values ''drawing sustenance from Mother (Dao). ''7 Chapter 52 begins, ''There was a beginning of the universe, Which may be called the Mother of the universe. ''8 And in chapter 59 the statement is made, ''He who possesses the Mother (Dao) of the state will last long. ''9
Second, the Dao is often pictured as womblike or vagina-like in its capacity as the source and originator of all forms. At the end of chapter 1, womb and vagina symbolism are both quite explicit. The Dao is said to be ''deeper and more profound, the door of all subtleties. ''10 An inexhaustible womb is the image portrayed at the opening of chapter 4: ''Dao is empty (like a bowl). It may
the dao and the field 33
34 approaching the daode jing
be used but its capacity is never exhausted. ''11 As a womb the Dao would contain all things in essence or seedlike form, and chapter 21 seems to me to support this:
The all-embracing quality of the great virtue follows alone from the Dao.
The thing that is called Dao is eluding and vague. Vague and eluding, there is in it the form [or forms]. Eluding and vague, in it are things.
Deep and obscure, in it is the essence.
The essence is very real; in it are evidences. 12
Chapter 6, without question, is the best chapter to cite in this regard. Called here the ''spirit of the valley,'' the valley itself being a symbol of constant fertility, the Dao is again described in terms of womb and vagina. But again in contrast to its mammalian counterpart, this is a source that can never be used up, one that will last forever:
The spirit of the valley never dies.
It is called the subtle and profound female.
The gate of the subtle and profound female.
Is the root of Heaven and Earth.
It is continuous, and seems to be always existing. Use it and you will never wear it out. 13
The third point to be made on behalf of the maternal nature of the Dao is that the Dao not only contains all things and brings them forth to life, but it also continues to function in a maternal way in the rearing of its children. That is to say, it nourishes them and protects them and brings them to maturity and completion. And in providing sustenance and care for all things, it has no favorites. Yet in contrast to its human counterpart, it does not seek to control and direct that growth, nor does it ever claim credit for the work it has done.
There are two chapters in the text that make this point, chapters 34 and 51. Chapter 34 reads:
The great Dao flows everywhere.
It may go left or right.
All things depend on it for life, and it does not turn away from them. It accomplishes its task, but does not claim credit for it.
It clothes and feeds all things, but does not claim to be master
over them.
Always without desires, it may be called the Small.
All things come to it and it does not master them; it may be called the Great.
Therefore (the sage) never strives himself for the great, and there by the great is achieved. 14
In chapter 51 two points of interest are added: the Dao and its virtue (really Power) are ''naturally'' honored and esteemed for what they do even though they promise no reward (in contrast, perhaps, to the honor and esteem ac- corded state rulers), and the involvement of the Dao in the complete life cycle of its children is neatly underscored:
The Dao brings them to life and virtue nourishes them.
Substance gives them form and ability completes them.
Therefore the 10,000 things honor the Way and esteem virtue.
No one rewards this honoring of the Way and esteeming of virtue. And yet they are constantly so of themselves.
The Way brings them to life, nourishes them, develops them, rears them, rests them, makes them secure, cares for them, and protects them.
It brings them to life, and yet it does not possess them.
It brings them to action, and yet it does not make them dependent. It brings them to completion, and yet it does not rule over them. This is called the Profound Virtue. 15
We may now turn with benefit to explore the analogy. My contention is that in the model of a field of wildflowers passing through the seasons we have an almost perfect model for grasping the nature of the Dao in its totality--we can see it, as it were, prior to, during, and after creation.
Let us approach it this way. Were we to go to an untended field in the midst of the winter, we might see no form of life whatsoever. There would be nothing but a still, silent void, with nothing for the senses to grasp. Did we not know better, we would presumably conclude that there was no relationship whatso- ever between this inert mass and the variety of forms, sounds, and smells that we know as summer life.
But were we to return to that field sometime in mid-June, we would find that the most marvelous of transformations had occurred. The very same field that had been barren and still is now the scene of bustling activity, covered with ten thousand (as it were) different forms of life. There are sunflowers and nightshade and butter-and-eggs and chicory, hundreds of kinds of wildflowers, all different shapes and colors and sizes, some tall and some short, some with one big flower, others in tiny clusters, to say nothing of the many nonflowering
the dao and the field 35
36 approaching the daode jing
grasses. And just as there seems to be an infinite number of kinds, there is as well an infinite number of each kind.
It would now seem clear to our minds that what had appeared to us in winter to be an inert, sterile void was in reality a fecund, perhaps inexhaustible womb, containing the seeds for all forms of life. Had we dug into the earth in winter, of course, we would never have detected these forms--there would have been only one, undifferentiated, homogeneous earth. And yet somehow, mysteriously, in the most minute, infinitesimal forms, the seeds of all these many plants, as yet indistinguishable, were there all the time.
The work of the field does not stop with springtime creation. Just as it made no distinctions in bringing forth a variety of forms, so too it remains impartial through the summer in providing support and nourishment for all, bringing all of the plants to completion of their natural life cycles. It does this all, however, somewhat mysteriously, with no sign of any ''action'' on its part at all. It, like the Dao, does indeed do everything by seeming to do nothing at all. 16 And the marvel of it all is that though none of this would have come to be without the soil--the earth--the field itself never claims any credit. Instead, it remains in the background, assuming a low and withdrawn position. We lose sight of the real source for all this beauty; our senses are captivated by the variety of forms and colors and smells. After all, the field, in contrast, is drab and uninteresting.
In discussing our field point for point have we not in fact also been talking about Laozi's Dao? They are both, before they give birth, still and tranquil, the undifferentiated one. They might appear to be lifeless but are in fact fecund wombs. They both bring into being a multitude of forms and provide nour- ishment for all alike. They bring all things to completion but claim no credit and act without force. It is only in its cyclical character that the field seems to vary from the Dao. The field passes through cycles of creation and destruction, of evolution and devolution of plant life. But although the Dao's forces may wax and wane, total cosmic reabsorption, a swallowing up periodically of even Heaven and Earth, does not seem to be part of its movement.
We can continue with the analogy. Although the field makes no demands on the plants for which it provides, there is one obvious condition that must be met for any flower that wants to realize its given nature, destiny, and life span, that condition being that it must keep its roots in the ground. A sunflower will never realize its ''sunflowerness'' and will never live the four to eight weeks possible for its species if it forgets its origins and tries to make it on its own, uprooting itself from its very source of sustenance.
It is the same for man, I think, in Laozi's terms. The only way for a man to realize his particular way of being human, and to realize his given span of years,
is somehow to keep his roots planted in the Dao. Laozi himself tells us (in chapter 20) that he, at least, values drawing sustenance from the Mother. And in chapter 52 he talks of holding on to the Mother, even after we have become aware of her sons, and he says that one who does so will remain free from harm throughout his life:
There was a beginning of the universe
Which may be called the Mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Dao)
And thereby understands her sons (things),
And having understood the sons,
Still keeps to its [their] mother,
Will be free from danger throughout his lifetime. 17
Our analogy, however, perhaps breaks down at this point, in that Laozi seems to assume that this is precisely what most people do not do. In contrast to our flowers in the field, people can and do go against the natural way of things: they turn their backs on the mother and become uprooted. Or, to put it another way, as Laozi does in chapter 53, people ought to stay on the Great Way, a road that is broad and smooth, but somehow they all delight in bypaths. 18
Thus, in the case of man a rupture occurs. And if a man is to be what he can be, if he is to realize his nature and destiny, a return must be made: he must get back to the highway, get back to mother Dao. Laozi speaks of re- turning to the roots in chapter 16, and perhaps this is what he means:
Attain complete vacuity.
Maintain steadfast quietude.
All things come into being,
And I see thereby their return.
All things flourish,
But each one returns to its root.
This return to its root means tranquility.
It is called returning to its destiny.
To return to destiny is called the eternal (Dao).
To know the eternal is called enlightenment.
Not to know the eternal is to act blindly to result in disaster. 19
The fitness of the field analogy for understanding the nature of the Dao ought to be clear by now. That it works so well might not be all that remarkable. One of the names used for the Dao at certain places in the Zhuangzi is in fact
the dao and the field 37
38 approaching the daode jing
the ''great Clod'' (that is, the great lump of earth). 20 And the Dao that Laozi talks about sounds in many ways like the Mother Earth deities that we find in other cultures at other times. To take but one example, when the Sioux holy man Black Elk speaks of the earth in the following passage, we are reminded of things Laozi says about the Dao: how it is the source for all things and how he himself draws nourishment from it.
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children? And the hide upon the mouthpiece here [Black Elk is describing a holy pipe],which should be bison hide, is for the earth, from whence we came and at whose breast we suck as babies all our lives, along with all the ani- mals and birds and trees and grasses. 21
Of course, the Dao is not exactly the same as Mother Earth. For example, in Black Elk's statement at least, the fecundity of the Earth is in some part dependent on the sky-father: life-giving rain and the heat of the sun come from him. Conversely, the Dao's creativity seems to be self-contained, and the Dao as a conception of ultimate reality is both more transcendent and more universal than that which we find in the Earth Mother. 22 The Dao is an eternal, unchanging, invisible reality that is somehow present everywhere, not localized in space. And the Dao gives birth to the entire universe, including Heaven and Earth, not just to man, the animals, and plants. Moreover, the use of the name Dao or Way for this reality underscores the identity of it with the ongoing process of change and transformation in the universe as a whole, just as it underscores the fact that there is a Way for man to live, that is, to remain in touch with the Way.
Still, the correspondence of Dao and Mother Earth is interesting, and it is tempting to think that somewhere behind Laozi's conception of the Dao lies an earlier belief in or veneration of a Mother Earth deity in China. However, we find little indication of this in the religious beliefs and practices of dynastic times. There is, apparently, evidence in the oracle bones of Shang (c. 1766- 1122 b. c. ) of sacrifices to the Earth, and the Zhou (c. 1122-249 b. c. ) did offer periodic sacrifices to the Earth, or at least to the Gods of the Land, at the she altars. 23 But in both cases, that is, in both the Shang and the Zhou, the masculine deities in the heavens, Shangdi (the Lord on High) and Tian (Heaven), and the royal ancestors held center stage. 24
This is a question that could be further explored. Perhaps this is simply another indication of Laozi's southern origins; the goddess form and the sacredness of the earth were perhaps more important in Chu. 25
I claimed at the start that the field analogy also sheds light on other aspects of Laozi's thought, and I would like to show how this works with two issues in particular: morality and immortality.
Although there are passages in the Laozi that could be interpreted to suggest that Laozi's ideal sage is harsh, calculating, and inhumane,26 the overall tenor of the text is moral. To put it more precisely, Laozi seems to have little quarrel with the Confucian ideal of the ''good man,'' namely, the man who is filial to his parents, compassionate to his children, loyal to his prince, and genuine in all his relationships. Laozi's quarrel with the Confucians is rather one of method. He implies that left alone, people would naturally manifest these traits, and that consciousness of virtue--that there is a ''good'' way to act that needs to be cultivated--in fact destroys the possibility of genuineness and spontaneity, without which there can be no true virtue.
This is what I conclude from reading the two passages where he attacks the Confucian virtues of humaneness (ren), righteousness (yi), and propriety (li), first in chapters 18 and 19 (which should be read as continuous) and then in chapter 38. From chapter 18:
When the great Dao declined,
The doctrine of humanity and righteousness arose.
When knowledge and wisdom appeared,
There emerged great hypocrisy.
When the six family relationships are not in harmony,
There will be advocacy of filial piety and deep love to children. When a country is in disorder,
There will be the praise of loyal ministers.
From chapter 19:
Abandon sageliness and discard wisdom;
Then the people will benefit a hundredfold.
Abandon humanity and discard righteousness;
Then the people will return to filial piety and deep love. Abandon skill and discard profit;
Then there will be no thieves and robbers.
From chapter 38:
The man of superior virtue is not (conscious of) his virtue, And in this way he really possesses virtue.
The man of inferior virtue never loses sight of his virtue,
the dao and the field 39
40
approaching the daode jing
And in this way he loses his virtue.
The man of superior virtue takes no action,
but has no ulterior motive to do so.
The man of inferior virtue takes action,
And has an ulterior motive to do so.
The man of superior humanity takes action,
But has no ulterior motive to do so.
The man of superior righteousness takes action,
and has an ulterior motive to do so.
The man of superior propriety takes action,
And when people do not respond to it, he will stretch his arms
and force it on them.
Therefore when Dao is lost, only then does the doctrine of
virtue arise.
When humanity is lost, only then does the doctrine of righteous-
ness arise.
When righteousness is lost, only then does the doctrine of propri-
ety arise.
Now, propriety is a superficial expression of loyalty and faithful-
ness and the beginning of disorder.
Those who are the first to know have the flowers of Dao but are
the beginning of ignorance.
For this reason the great man dwells with the thick, and does not rest
with the thin.
He dwells with the fruit, and does not rest with the flower. Therefore he rejects the one, and accepts the other. 27
The analogy to the field might make this clearer. I interpret Laozi to be saying that all people feel and express compassion, filial piety, loyalty, and humaneness, and perhaps righteousness and propriety, just as all black-eyed susans have yellow flowers with a brown cone, daisylike heads of ten to twenty rays, and hairy stems of one to three feet in length. This is the natural condition of things, and just as in the natural field black-eyed susans grow this way spontaneously, unaware of it, in a sense effortlessly, so too, when the Dao has not declined, do people feel and express these attitudes spontaneously, effort- lessly, and without self-consciousness.
In teaching the Laozi, one of the absolutely essential things to keep in mind is to clearly distinguish between contemporary interpretations of the text and whatever we can establish of the text's original meanings through historical hermeneutics. There is absolutely nothing wrong with discovering something of value for our contemporary world in the ideas of the Laozi. Indeed, I think its teachings on inner cultivation contain valuable insights for us. But it is important to differentiate between what we can reasonably establish about the ''original meaning'' of the text through careful examination of its history and its larger intellectual context and the contemporary philosophical positions we use to interpret it.
A Critical First-Person Approach: Reconstructive Meditation
I would like to close with a section about a new approach I have taken in teaching the Laozi that adds the critical first-person element I advocated in my introduction. This is engaging students in what I call reconstructive medita- tion, the logic of which runs as follows:
third-person and first-person approaches 25
1. The creators of the Laozi practiced a form of breath meditation that led them to deeper and deeper states of tranquility and to what they asserted was an eventual merging with the Way. 34
2. They applied the clarity of mind developed through this meditation to the tasks of everyday life, hence developing, for example, the notion of ''effortless action'' (wu-wei). 35
3. Despite vast differences in cultural contexts, human beings in the third century b. c. e. in China had essentially the same physiology of body and mind as do modern humans. This assumption is widely accepted in evolutionary biology and neuroscience. 36
4. Thus, practicing breath meditation should have largely similar phys- iological effects on us as it did on them, although we, of course, conceive of the underlying mechanisms in entirely different fashions.
Based on these assumptions, I have developed a series of reconstructive meditations for students linked to passages in the Daode jing. Herewith two examples:
Bellows Breathing
The space between heaven and earth, is it not like a bellows? Empty it out and it is not exhausted;
Activate it and it continues to come forth
Laozi 5 speaks of the space between heaven and earth being like a bellows. Early Chinese physiological hygiene texts linked this bellows to the natural movements of the diaphragm as it inhales and exhales.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position and with eyes closed (remember: ''The Five Colors blind men's eyes''; Laozi 12), imagine your diaphragm to be a bellows and simply follow its movements as you inhale and exhale. Do this for ten (or more, de- pending on prior experience of students) minutes, then stop.
Observing Consciousness While ''Holding Fast to the Center''
Attaining emptiness is the apogee (of our practice) Holding fast to the center is its governing mode.
The myriad things arise side by side
And residing here, I see them slowly return The forms of heaven are great in number But each returns to its root.
26
approaching the daode jing
Laozi 16 recommends gradually emptying out consciousness through a process of ''holding fast to the center. '' I interpret this to mean concentrating on the feeling of inhaling and exhaling as you expe- rience it in the center of your body, somewhere in your abdomen. For some of you it may be as high as the solar plexus; for others it may be as low as the spot later called the ''cinnabar field,'' three finger-widths below your abdomen.
Instructions: Sitting upright in a comfortable position, concentrate on your breathing and determine where it is centered in your abdomen. Carefully follow your breathing through its cycles of inhalation and exhalation. This is ''holding fast to the center. ''
When you are established in this breathing, open your focus to allow in the various thoughts and feelings that inevitably arise when attempting to sit quietly. Pay careful attention to where they come from. Notice how they arise and invariably pass away. Pay attention to where they go to. Do not follow them; do not react to them; always maintain an awareness of your center of breathing and simply con- tinue watching thoughts and feelings as they arise and pass away. This arising of something out of nothing is basic to your con- sciousness as microcosm and to the entire cosmos as macrocosm.
Conclusions
These reconstructive meditations help give students a sense of the experiential basis underlying not a few passages in the Laozi and start to provide some insight into the possible origins of the cosmology for which the text is re- nowned. I do not by any means wish to assert that these reconstructions are the exclusive original meaning of these passages; I only wish to assert that they may point to their possible experiential bases. In the end, reconstructive meditation is just another wrench in the toolbox of the scholar and teacher of the Laozi, another way to approach its meaning without reducing it to a series of ideas intended to deliberately confuse its audience and reinforce some very Western biases about the essentially rational and profane nature of human experience. It can provide new insights into the history of the text, the ''competence'' of its authors, composers, and audience, and can also con- tribute some insights into the nature of consciousness that some may find of contemporary relevance. It is in these ways that reconstructive meditation can augment the other three approaches.
third-person and first-person approaches 27
notes
I wish to thank Henry Rosemont Jr. , Erin Kline, and Michael Slater for their helpful criticisms of this manuscript but absolve them of all blame for whatever questionable assertions and contentious opinions I decided to retain.
1. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), argues that Christian mysticism is superior to all other forms. James Ware, Alchemy, Medicine and Religion in the China of a. d. 320: The Nei Pien of Ko Hung (New York: Dover, 1963), consistently translates Dao as ''God. ''
2. Propriety (li) prevents me from being any more specific about this except to say that most of the scholars I have in mind do not work on Daoism. And that is an interesting phenomenon in itself!
3. For a good example of this, see Wayne Proudfoot's assertion in Religious Ex- perience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 128-130, that the Daode jing uses paradoxical statements about the nature of the Dao to establish its ineffability, which is thus a feature of grammar and not of experience. By implication, the Dao is not a genuine power or force but a product of the linguistic manipulations of its inventors and the subsequent beliefs of its followers.
4. Of course, Herbert Fingarette got it right in his field-revising study of the Analects: Confucius--The Secular as Sacred, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill. : Waveland, 1998).
5. The categories of ''historical hermeneutics'' and ''contemporary relevance'' are found in the writings of Michael LaFargue. The most accessible is ''Recovering the Tao-te-ching's Original Meaning,'' in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231-254.
6. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the Daode jing and Neiye and these other texts, see my book Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, in particular 144-153, 185-190.
7. Rudolph G. Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daode jing: Wang Bi's Com- mentary on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). See also the following essays: Rudolph G. Wagner, ''Inter- locking Parallel Style: Laozi and Wang Bi,'' Journal Asiatiques 34, no. 1 (1980): 18-58; William Boltz, ''The Religious and Philosophical Significance of the 'Hsiang erh' Lao Tzu in the Light of the Ma-wang-tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 45 no. 1 (1982): 95-117; William Boltz, ''Textual Criticism and the Ma-Wang-Tui Silk Manuscripts,'' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 44, no. 1 (1984): 185-224; William Boltz, ''The Lao Tzu Text That Wang Pi and Ho-shang Kung Never Saw,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 48, no. 5 (1985): 493-501. The best overview of the text and commentaries of the Laozi is Boltz's Lao tzu Tao te ching, in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe, Early China Special Monograph Series no. 2 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, Univer- sity of California, 1993). For a succinct summary of the textual issues relevant to Laozi and other early philosophical texts, see Harold D. Roth, ''Text and Edition in
28 approaching the daode jing
Early Chinese Philosophical Literature,'' Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 2 (1993): 214-227.
8. D. C. Lau, Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1982); Robert Henricks, Lao-Tzu: Te Tao Ching (New York: Ballantine, 1989) Victor Mair, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (New York: Bantam, 1990); Robert Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000) (translation of Guodian Laozi parallels).
9. For an excellent and detailed study of the contrasting approaches of the Wang Bi and Heshang gong commentaries, see Allan Chan, Two Visions of the Way: A Study of the Wang Pi and Ho-shang-kung Commentaries on the Lao-tzu. Albany: State Uni- versity of New York Press, 1991.
10. For details, see my review in Philosophy East and West 35, no. 2 (1985): 213-215.
11. Sarah Allan and Crispin Williams, eds. , The Guodian Laozi: Proceedings of the International Conference, Dartmouth College, May, 1998, Early China Special Mono- graph Series no. 5 (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, University of California, , 2000).
12. Edmund Ryden, ''Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi A, B, and C, and Tai Yi Sheng Shui from Guodian Tomb Number One,'' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 187-231.
13. Harold D. Roth, ''Some Methodological Issues in the Study of the Guodian Laozi Parallels. '' In Allan and Williams, The Guodian Laozi, 71-88.
14. William Baxter, ''Situating the Language of Lao-tzu: The Probable Date of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 231-254.
15. A. C. Graham, ''The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan,'' 1981, in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Singapore: Institute for East Asian Philosophies, 1986), 111-124. An edited version appears in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao- tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 23-40.
16. Livia Kohn, ''The Lao-Tzu Myth,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao- te-ching, 41-62; Anna Seidel, La divinization de Lao-tseu dan le Taoisme du Han (1969; Paris: E ? cole Franc ? aise d'Extr^eme-Orient, 1992).
17. Michael LaFargue, Tao and Method: A Reasoned Approach to the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). LaFargue earlier published a summary of his arguments from this volume together with a radically rearranged translation in Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
18. For further details, see Roth, Original Tao, chap. 5.
19. A. C. Graham, ''How Much of Chuang Tzu Did Chuang Tzu Write? ,'' in Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 283-321; Liu Xiaogan, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters, trans. William Savage (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994).
20. Graham initially proposed the latter two categories to represent two major authorial voices in the Zhuangzi. Liu Xiaogan preferred the categories ''anarchist''
third-person and first-person approaches 29
and ''huang-lao'' to Graham's ''primitivist and ''syncretist,'' but, unlike Graham, he related these voices in Zhuangzi to larger intellectual movements. In this aspect,
I follow Liu. For the references, see the previous note.
21. I accept the Mawangdui variants of fu yan and fu zhi instead of the received text's bu yan and bu zhi. The negative adverb fu implies a direct object, whereas the adverb bu does not and is therefore more vague. The received text contains many examples of this sort, where a relatively clear text has been made vaguer and thus more ''mystical. '' See Lau, Chinese Classics, 218, 80.
22. For examples of this kind, see my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis,'' in Mark Csikszentmihalyi and P. J. Ivanhoe, eds. , Religious and Philosophical Aspects of Laozi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999, 59-96. This is an excellent collection and provides a philosophical complement to the Kohn and LaFargue collection.
23. Lau, Chinese Classics, p. xl.
24. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 206.
25. Donald Harper, ''The Bellows Analogy in Laozi V and Warring States Mac-
robiotic Hygiene,'' Early China 20 (1995): 381-392.
26. Ryden, Edition of the Bamboo-Slip Laozi, 207.
27. I read the last character in the line, tu (sincere, serious, solid), as a loan
for tu (also sincere, but can mean supervisor, to inspect, to correct), which when combined with the character mai (meridian) in Chinese medicine refers to the central supervisory meridian that controls the flow of yang qi in the human body. This is the reading in the Mawangdui recension. I interpret this passage to mean that the dominant mode by which emptiness is attained is by concentrating on the center.
I think the center here refers to the center of the body where breathing is experi- enced, and thus the passage commends focusing on breathing in order to attain emptiness.
28. LaFargue, Tao of the Tao Te Ching, 62-63.
29. Henricks, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching.
30. The twelfth essay of the Huainanzi, ''The Responses of the Way,'' consists of
a series of narratives presented to illustrate various statements from the Laozi. Each narrative ends with the formula, ''And so the Laozi, says . . . '' This ''reverse com- mentary'' genre is also found in the ''Commenting on Laozi'' and ''Explaining Laozi'' chapters of the Hanfeizi.
31. Allan Chan, ''A Tale of Two Commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 89-118, is a sum- mary of his book on the same subject. Isabelle Robinet, ''Later Commentaries: Textual Polysemy and Syncretistic Interpretations,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 119-142, is a masterful essay in which the late Professor Robinet provides insights from many Laozi commentaries that are virtually unknown to modern scholarship, both East Asian and Western.
32. Julia Hardy, ''Influential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching,'' in Kohn and LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 165-185.
33. Robinet, ''Later Commentaries,'' 121.
30 approaching the daode jing
34. The justification for this is detailed in my essay ''The Laozi in the Context of Early Daoist Mystical Praxis. ''
35. This is one example of a more pervasive pattern of early Daoist meditation. For further details, see my essay ''Evidence for Stages of Meditation in Early Taoism,'' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60, no. 2 (June 1997): 295-314.
36. Evolutionary biology posits that all human beings (Homo sapiens) share a common genetic pool, whether they live in North America or in China, whether they live today or three thousand years ago. According to geneticist F. S. Collins, human beings are ''99. 9% genetically identical. '' ''Genome Research: The Next Generation,'' in The Genome of Homo Sapiens, ed. Bruce Stillman and David Stewart (Cold Spring Harbor, N. Y. : CSHL Press, 2003), 50. Geneticists Y. Sasaki et al. state, ''Homo sapiens is a unique organism characterized by its highly developed brain, use of complex languages, bipedal locomotion, and so on. These unique features have been acquired by a series of mutation and selection events during evolution in the human lineage and are mainly determined by genetic factors encoded in the human genome. ''Hu- man versus Chimpanzee Chromosome-wide Sequence Comparison and Its Evolu- tionary Implications,'' in Stillman and Stewart, The Genome of Homo Sapiens, 455. This common genetic heritage leads to the common physiology and neurophysiology that distinguishes human beings from the other higher hominids.
?
The Dao and the Field: Exploring an Analogy
Robert G. Henricks
Several years ago while looking for a way to explain to a class the meaning of Laozi's Dao (the Way, literally a road or a path), I hit upon an analogy that has proved to be quite fruitful. It is an anal- ogy that provides us with a model for understanding the nature of the Dao and the nature of its operations. It also provides us with a way to understand Laozi's moral philosophy, and it may help us understand what Laozi believed with regard to life after death/ immortality.
The analogy is drawn between the Dao and a field--not a farmer's field which is groomed and cultivated for the purpose of raising a single, hybrid crop, but a ''natural'' field, one left un- tended, one that is barren and deserted in the winter but filled with a host of different wildflowers throughout the spring and summer.
The appropriateness of this analogy and its usefulness for understanding the thought of Laozi will become clear once we see what Laozi himself said about the Dao. And to begin this task there is probably no better place to start than with the beginning of the book itself, the opening lines of chapter 1:
The Dao that can be told of is not the eternal Dao:
The name that can be named is not the eternal name. 1
A cryptic start to a cryptic book. Laozi tells us that anything he says about a Dao, after all, will not be about a true, eternal, or
32 approaching the daode jing
constant Dao. But at the same time he seems to confirm, in this backward way, that there is some such reality. Whatever the Dao might be, it is eternal and abiding. Moreover, there might be a name that is appropriate to it, a name that is equal to its reality, an eternal name, but the names we use do not qualify for such status.
All in all, the opening lines seem to suggest what is often suggested in mystic literature: that there is a transcendent, eternal reality, with which we may come into contact but that lies beyond the realm of precise description. All attempts to talk about it somehow fall short of conveying a true sense of what it is. That this is Laozi's meaning seems to be confirmed, as a matter of fact, in the very next line of chapter 1, where he calls the Dao the ''Nameless. '' He adds, moreover, that in this aspect it is the origin of the phenomenal world, the beginning of all things: ''The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth. ''2
But the label ''Nameless'' can be understood in two different ways. It can mean, as we have suggested, something for which an appropriate name cannot be found. But it might also refer to a time or a condition of things--undiffer- entiated reality--when distinct phenomenal forms had not yet appeared, a state lacking nameable realities. The Chinese for ''Nameless'' (wu ming) allows both of these interpretations (i. e. , not having a name and not having names), and as it turns out the Dao for Laozi is ''nameless'' in both ways. The Dao is that elusive, difficult to describe, single reality that existed prior to, and gave rise to, all other existing things.
Thus in chapter 14, where problematically ''names'' are assigned to the Dao, we find the following:
We look at it and do not see it: Its name is The Invisible.
We listen to it and do not hear it; Its name is The Inaudible.
We touch it and do not find it:
Its name is The Subtle (formless).
These three cannot be further inquired into, And hence merge into one. 3
And in chapter 25 we have this:
There was something undifferentiated and yet complete,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change. It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call [or, I would style it] Dao. If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. 4
This is a telling statement on the nature of the Dao. It reports motifs that we already know: that the Dao is eternal, undifferentiated, the source of the phe- nomenal world, and something vague and elusive. But to this is now added the sense that the Dao is a reality that continues to be functional after creation, insofar as it is something that operates everywhere, and of course this also tells us that it is omnipresent. Moreover, the distinction that is made here between ''name'' (ming), which we do not know, and ''style'' (zi--Wing-tsit Chan ''calls it''), is informative. In China a person's name (personal name, that is, not surname) is given at birth; it is personal and rarely used in direct address. But the ''style'' is taken at capping age (around 20), and it is less personal, more publicly used, and less a part of that person's reality--who he or she really is. The word Dao has this ''style'' kind of relation to the reality at hand.
Laozi does venture here, when forced of course, to find some name to use for this reality, choosing the word da, the Great. But Kaltenmark has probably caught the import of this when he says, ''It is clear that he [Laozi] is using da in an absolute sense: the Immense, the Incommensurable. ''5
There is one more thing that Laozi tells us in chapter 25 which is important for our understanding of the nature of the Dao. He says, ''It may be considered the mother of the universe. '' When we move into the realm of image and metaphor, we find that Laozi depicts the Dao as a very feminine reality indeed. And to be more precise, as the line here makes clear, as something like a mother.
Three kinds of evidence can be called forth to support this and draw it out. To begin with, Laozi explicitly refers to the Dao as the ''Mother'' in no fewer than five different chapters. In addition to the reference already noted in chapter 25, in chapter 1, picking up the text where we left off, we find: ''The Named is the mother of all things [literally, the ten thousand things]. ''6 In chapter 20 Laozi laments that he alone values ''drawing sustenance from Mother (Dao). ''7 Chapter 52 begins, ''There was a beginning of the universe, Which may be called the Mother of the universe. ''8 And in chapter 59 the statement is made, ''He who possesses the Mother (Dao) of the state will last long. ''9
Second, the Dao is often pictured as womblike or vagina-like in its capacity as the source and originator of all forms. At the end of chapter 1, womb and vagina symbolism are both quite explicit. The Dao is said to be ''deeper and more profound, the door of all subtleties. ''10 An inexhaustible womb is the image portrayed at the opening of chapter 4: ''Dao is empty (like a bowl). It may
the dao and the field 33
34 approaching the daode jing
be used but its capacity is never exhausted. ''11 As a womb the Dao would contain all things in essence or seedlike form, and chapter 21 seems to me to support this:
The all-embracing quality of the great virtue follows alone from the Dao.
The thing that is called Dao is eluding and vague. Vague and eluding, there is in it the form [or forms]. Eluding and vague, in it are things.
Deep and obscure, in it is the essence.
The essence is very real; in it are evidences. 12
Chapter 6, without question, is the best chapter to cite in this regard. Called here the ''spirit of the valley,'' the valley itself being a symbol of constant fertility, the Dao is again described in terms of womb and vagina. But again in contrast to its mammalian counterpart, this is a source that can never be used up, one that will last forever:
The spirit of the valley never dies.
It is called the subtle and profound female.
The gate of the subtle and profound female.
Is the root of Heaven and Earth.
It is continuous, and seems to be always existing. Use it and you will never wear it out. 13
The third point to be made on behalf of the maternal nature of the Dao is that the Dao not only contains all things and brings them forth to life, but it also continues to function in a maternal way in the rearing of its children. That is to say, it nourishes them and protects them and brings them to maturity and completion. And in providing sustenance and care for all things, it has no favorites. Yet in contrast to its human counterpart, it does not seek to control and direct that growth, nor does it ever claim credit for the work it has done.
There are two chapters in the text that make this point, chapters 34 and 51. Chapter 34 reads:
The great Dao flows everywhere.
It may go left or right.
All things depend on it for life, and it does not turn away from them. It accomplishes its task, but does not claim credit for it.
It clothes and feeds all things, but does not claim to be master
over them.
Always without desires, it may be called the Small.
All things come to it and it does not master them; it may be called the Great.
Therefore (the sage) never strives himself for the great, and there by the great is achieved. 14
In chapter 51 two points of interest are added: the Dao and its virtue (really Power) are ''naturally'' honored and esteemed for what they do even though they promise no reward (in contrast, perhaps, to the honor and esteem ac- corded state rulers), and the involvement of the Dao in the complete life cycle of its children is neatly underscored:
The Dao brings them to life and virtue nourishes them.
Substance gives them form and ability completes them.
Therefore the 10,000 things honor the Way and esteem virtue.
No one rewards this honoring of the Way and esteeming of virtue. And yet they are constantly so of themselves.
The Way brings them to life, nourishes them, develops them, rears them, rests them, makes them secure, cares for them, and protects them.
It brings them to life, and yet it does not possess them.
It brings them to action, and yet it does not make them dependent. It brings them to completion, and yet it does not rule over them. This is called the Profound Virtue. 15
We may now turn with benefit to explore the analogy. My contention is that in the model of a field of wildflowers passing through the seasons we have an almost perfect model for grasping the nature of the Dao in its totality--we can see it, as it were, prior to, during, and after creation.
Let us approach it this way. Were we to go to an untended field in the midst of the winter, we might see no form of life whatsoever. There would be nothing but a still, silent void, with nothing for the senses to grasp. Did we not know better, we would presumably conclude that there was no relationship whatso- ever between this inert mass and the variety of forms, sounds, and smells that we know as summer life.
But were we to return to that field sometime in mid-June, we would find that the most marvelous of transformations had occurred. The very same field that had been barren and still is now the scene of bustling activity, covered with ten thousand (as it were) different forms of life. There are sunflowers and nightshade and butter-and-eggs and chicory, hundreds of kinds of wildflowers, all different shapes and colors and sizes, some tall and some short, some with one big flower, others in tiny clusters, to say nothing of the many nonflowering
the dao and the field 35
36 approaching the daode jing
grasses. And just as there seems to be an infinite number of kinds, there is as well an infinite number of each kind.
It would now seem clear to our minds that what had appeared to us in winter to be an inert, sterile void was in reality a fecund, perhaps inexhaustible womb, containing the seeds for all forms of life. Had we dug into the earth in winter, of course, we would never have detected these forms--there would have been only one, undifferentiated, homogeneous earth. And yet somehow, mysteriously, in the most minute, infinitesimal forms, the seeds of all these many plants, as yet indistinguishable, were there all the time.
The work of the field does not stop with springtime creation. Just as it made no distinctions in bringing forth a variety of forms, so too it remains impartial through the summer in providing support and nourishment for all, bringing all of the plants to completion of their natural life cycles. It does this all, however, somewhat mysteriously, with no sign of any ''action'' on its part at all. It, like the Dao, does indeed do everything by seeming to do nothing at all. 16 And the marvel of it all is that though none of this would have come to be without the soil--the earth--the field itself never claims any credit. Instead, it remains in the background, assuming a low and withdrawn position. We lose sight of the real source for all this beauty; our senses are captivated by the variety of forms and colors and smells. After all, the field, in contrast, is drab and uninteresting.
In discussing our field point for point have we not in fact also been talking about Laozi's Dao? They are both, before they give birth, still and tranquil, the undifferentiated one. They might appear to be lifeless but are in fact fecund wombs. They both bring into being a multitude of forms and provide nour- ishment for all alike. They bring all things to completion but claim no credit and act without force. It is only in its cyclical character that the field seems to vary from the Dao. The field passes through cycles of creation and destruction, of evolution and devolution of plant life. But although the Dao's forces may wax and wane, total cosmic reabsorption, a swallowing up periodically of even Heaven and Earth, does not seem to be part of its movement.
We can continue with the analogy. Although the field makes no demands on the plants for which it provides, there is one obvious condition that must be met for any flower that wants to realize its given nature, destiny, and life span, that condition being that it must keep its roots in the ground. A sunflower will never realize its ''sunflowerness'' and will never live the four to eight weeks possible for its species if it forgets its origins and tries to make it on its own, uprooting itself from its very source of sustenance.
It is the same for man, I think, in Laozi's terms. The only way for a man to realize his particular way of being human, and to realize his given span of years,
is somehow to keep his roots planted in the Dao. Laozi himself tells us (in chapter 20) that he, at least, values drawing sustenance from the Mother. And in chapter 52 he talks of holding on to the Mother, even after we have become aware of her sons, and he says that one who does so will remain free from harm throughout his life:
There was a beginning of the universe
Which may be called the Mother of the universe. He who has found the mother (Dao)
And thereby understands her sons (things),
And having understood the sons,
Still keeps to its [their] mother,
Will be free from danger throughout his lifetime. 17
Our analogy, however, perhaps breaks down at this point, in that Laozi seems to assume that this is precisely what most people do not do. In contrast to our flowers in the field, people can and do go against the natural way of things: they turn their backs on the mother and become uprooted. Or, to put it another way, as Laozi does in chapter 53, people ought to stay on the Great Way, a road that is broad and smooth, but somehow they all delight in bypaths. 18
Thus, in the case of man a rupture occurs. And if a man is to be what he can be, if he is to realize his nature and destiny, a return must be made: he must get back to the highway, get back to mother Dao. Laozi speaks of re- turning to the roots in chapter 16, and perhaps this is what he means:
Attain complete vacuity.
Maintain steadfast quietude.
All things come into being,
And I see thereby their return.
All things flourish,
But each one returns to its root.
This return to its root means tranquility.
It is called returning to its destiny.
To return to destiny is called the eternal (Dao).
To know the eternal is called enlightenment.
Not to know the eternal is to act blindly to result in disaster. 19
The fitness of the field analogy for understanding the nature of the Dao ought to be clear by now. That it works so well might not be all that remarkable. One of the names used for the Dao at certain places in the Zhuangzi is in fact
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38 approaching the daode jing
the ''great Clod'' (that is, the great lump of earth). 20 And the Dao that Laozi talks about sounds in many ways like the Mother Earth deities that we find in other cultures at other times. To take but one example, when the Sioux holy man Black Elk speaks of the earth in the following passage, we are reminded of things Laozi says about the Dao: how it is the source for all things and how he himself draws nourishment from it.
Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children? And the hide upon the mouthpiece here [Black Elk is describing a holy pipe],which should be bison hide, is for the earth, from whence we came and at whose breast we suck as babies all our lives, along with all the ani- mals and birds and trees and grasses. 21
Of course, the Dao is not exactly the same as Mother Earth. For example, in Black Elk's statement at least, the fecundity of the Earth is in some part dependent on the sky-father: life-giving rain and the heat of the sun come from him. Conversely, the Dao's creativity seems to be self-contained, and the Dao as a conception of ultimate reality is both more transcendent and more universal than that which we find in the Earth Mother. 22 The Dao is an eternal, unchanging, invisible reality that is somehow present everywhere, not localized in space. And the Dao gives birth to the entire universe, including Heaven and Earth, not just to man, the animals, and plants. Moreover, the use of the name Dao or Way for this reality underscores the identity of it with the ongoing process of change and transformation in the universe as a whole, just as it underscores the fact that there is a Way for man to live, that is, to remain in touch with the Way.
Still, the correspondence of Dao and Mother Earth is interesting, and it is tempting to think that somewhere behind Laozi's conception of the Dao lies an earlier belief in or veneration of a Mother Earth deity in China. However, we find little indication of this in the religious beliefs and practices of dynastic times. There is, apparently, evidence in the oracle bones of Shang (c. 1766- 1122 b. c. ) of sacrifices to the Earth, and the Zhou (c. 1122-249 b. c. ) did offer periodic sacrifices to the Earth, or at least to the Gods of the Land, at the she altars. 23 But in both cases, that is, in both the Shang and the Zhou, the masculine deities in the heavens, Shangdi (the Lord on High) and Tian (Heaven), and the royal ancestors held center stage. 24
This is a question that could be further explored. Perhaps this is simply another indication of Laozi's southern origins; the goddess form and the sacredness of the earth were perhaps more important in Chu. 25
I claimed at the start that the field analogy also sheds light on other aspects of Laozi's thought, and I would like to show how this works with two issues in particular: morality and immortality.
Although there are passages in the Laozi that could be interpreted to suggest that Laozi's ideal sage is harsh, calculating, and inhumane,26 the overall tenor of the text is moral. To put it more precisely, Laozi seems to have little quarrel with the Confucian ideal of the ''good man,'' namely, the man who is filial to his parents, compassionate to his children, loyal to his prince, and genuine in all his relationships. Laozi's quarrel with the Confucians is rather one of method. He implies that left alone, people would naturally manifest these traits, and that consciousness of virtue--that there is a ''good'' way to act that needs to be cultivated--in fact destroys the possibility of genuineness and spontaneity, without which there can be no true virtue.
This is what I conclude from reading the two passages where he attacks the Confucian virtues of humaneness (ren), righteousness (yi), and propriety (li), first in chapters 18 and 19 (which should be read as continuous) and then in chapter 38. From chapter 18:
When the great Dao declined,
The doctrine of humanity and righteousness arose.
When knowledge and wisdom appeared,
There emerged great hypocrisy.
When the six family relationships are not in harmony,
There will be advocacy of filial piety and deep love to children. When a country is in disorder,
There will be the praise of loyal ministers.
From chapter 19:
Abandon sageliness and discard wisdom;
Then the people will benefit a hundredfold.
Abandon humanity and discard righteousness;
Then the people will return to filial piety and deep love. Abandon skill and discard profit;
Then there will be no thieves and robbers.
From chapter 38:
The man of superior virtue is not (conscious of) his virtue, And in this way he really possesses virtue.
The man of inferior virtue never loses sight of his virtue,
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40
approaching the daode jing
And in this way he loses his virtue.
The man of superior virtue takes no action,
but has no ulterior motive to do so.
The man of inferior virtue takes action,
And has an ulterior motive to do so.
The man of superior humanity takes action,
But has no ulterior motive to do so.
The man of superior righteousness takes action,
and has an ulterior motive to do so.
The man of superior propriety takes action,
And when people do not respond to it, he will stretch his arms
and force it on them.
Therefore when Dao is lost, only then does the doctrine of
virtue arise.
When humanity is lost, only then does the doctrine of righteous-
ness arise.
When righteousness is lost, only then does the doctrine of propri-
ety arise.
Now, propriety is a superficial expression of loyalty and faithful-
ness and the beginning of disorder.
Those who are the first to know have the flowers of Dao but are
the beginning of ignorance.
For this reason the great man dwells with the thick, and does not rest
with the thin.
He dwells with the fruit, and does not rest with the flower. Therefore he rejects the one, and accepts the other. 27
The analogy to the field might make this clearer. I interpret Laozi to be saying that all people feel and express compassion, filial piety, loyalty, and humaneness, and perhaps righteousness and propriety, just as all black-eyed susans have yellow flowers with a brown cone, daisylike heads of ten to twenty rays, and hairy stems of one to three feet in length. This is the natural condition of things, and just as in the natural field black-eyed susans grow this way spontaneously, unaware of it, in a sense effortlessly, so too, when the Dao has not declined, do people feel and express these attitudes spontaneously, effort- lessly, and without self-consciousness.
