Tao: The Watercourse Way

The yin-yang principle is not, therefore, what we would ordinarily call a dualism, but rather an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity. The two principles are, as I have suggested, not opposed like the Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, but in love, and it is curious that their traditional emblem is that double helix which is at once the

We should probably think of cho as “going and pausing” (Wieger [1], p. 789), and thus as “rhythmic movement,” where going is yang and pausing is yin.

This may be illustrated by the Taoist story of a farmer whose horse ran away. That evening the neighbors gathered to commiserate with him since this was such bad luck. He said, “May be.” The next day the horse returned, but brought with it six wild horses, and the neighbors came exclaiming at his good fortune. He said, “May be.” And then, the follo

The yin-yang view of the world is serenely cyclic. Fortune and misfortune, life and death, whether on small scale or vast, come and go everlastingly without beginning or end, and the whole system is protected from monotony by the fact that, in just the same way, remembering alternates with forgetting.

This is called “flowing with the moment,” though it can happen only when it is clear that there is nothing else to do, since there is no experience which is not now. This now-streaming ( nunc fluens ) is the Tao itself, and when this is clear innumerable problems vanish. For so long as there is the notion of ourselves as something different from th

Just as water follows gravity and, if trapped, rises to find a new outlet, so wu-wei is the principle that gravity is energy, and the Taoist finds in gravity a constant stream which may be used in the same way as the wind or a current. Falling with gravity constitutes the immense energy of the earth spinning in its orbit around the sun.

AT THE VERY ROOTS of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid

But it should be understood that Alan never saw “the watercourse way” in human affairs as a flabby, irresponsible, lackadaisical manner of living. The stream does not merely move downhill. The water, all moisture, transpires from the earth, streams, rivers, the ocean, to the upper air, a “breathing out,” and then there is the “breathing in” when th

Wu-wei is thus the life-style of one who follows the Tao, and must be understood primarily as a form of intelligence—that is, of knowing the principles, structures, and trends of human and natural affairs so well that one uses the least amount of energy in dealing with them. But this intelligence is, as we have seen, not simply intellectual; it is