While it is true that these arts employ what are, to us, highly difficult technical disciplines, it is always recognized that they are instrumental and secondary, and that superior work has the quality of an accident. This is not merely a masterful mimicry of the accidental, an assumed spontaneity in which the careful planning does not show. It

arriving at decisions spontaneously, decisions which are effective to the degree that one knows how to let one’s mind alone, trusting it to work by itself. This is wu-wei, since wu means “not” or “non-” and wei means “action,” “making,” “doing,” “striving,” “straining,” or “busyness.”

“Mental power” is ching,

The important difference between the Tao and the usual idea of God is that whereas God produces the world by making (weih), the Tao produces it by “not-making” (wu-wei i)-which is approximately what we mean by “growing.”

Taoism and Confucianism

recognizes nothing outside the powers of its jurisdiction.

second becomes inevitable, where such palliatives

from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.

tzu-janb or “self-so-ness.”