IB World Religions 1.8.2. the Human Condition: Departing from the Way Notes

1.8.2. The Human Condition: Departing from the Way

Our original nature

1. Taoists hold that the Tao is not something outside a person to be reached. It is their original nature, so a human being starts out already in accord with the Way.
2. That starting condition is pictured as an infant. The Tao Te Ching praises the newborn for its softness, for not yet knowing how to strive, and for having its energy whole and undivided.
3. The recurring image for it is p'u (Pinyin pu), the uncarved block, a piece of wood before any tool has shaped it into something in particular.
4. Uncarved does not mean unfinished. Taoists take the block to hold every possibility at once, so that each cut which makes it into one useful thing removes all the others.
5. The same is said of te (Pinyin de), the power a thing has when the Tao runs through it undisturbed. Water, a tree and a person each have a te of their own, and it works best when nobody interferes with it.
6. Nothing in this account has to be gained. Taoists describe the human problem as something acquired and then carried about, not as something missing from the start.

Nothing is evil

1. Taoism has no doctrine of a fallen creation. Taoists hold that nothing in the world is evil in itself, and that heaven, earth and the ten thousand things go on doing what their nature moves them to do.
2. There is therefore no first sin to be inherited and no rebellion to be punished. What has gone wrong is described as a matter of arrangement rather than of guilt.
3. Taoists prefer the language of balance. Things are said to be out of balance, out of season or out of place, much as a body can be neither wicked nor virtuous but simply well or unwell.
4. This shapes how Taoists speak about wrongdoing. A grasping ruler is described less as a criminal than as a man who has lost his footing and is dragging his people down with him.
5. It also shapes what counts as a remedy. If nothing is evil then nothing has to be destroyed, and the work is to let things settle back into the places they naturally occupy.
6. Taoists do not conclude that conduct is unimportant. The claim is about the nature of the problem, and the tradition is severe about greed, cruelty and meddling.

Balance and its loss

1. The Taoist word for the well ordered state of things is ho (Pinyin he), harmony or balance. It names the condition in which heaven, earth and human beings each keep to their own measure.
2. Chinese thought describes the world's movement through the paired forces yin and yang, yin being dark, yielding and receptive, yang being bright, active and assertive. Neither is good or bad, and health lies in their proportion.
3. Excess is the standard Taoist diagnosis. Too much of anything, including too much of a good thing, turns into its opposite, so that a full cup spills and a sharpened blade quickly dulls.
4. The body is treated as a small version of the world. Taoist medicine reads illness as a loss of balance among the body's energies rather than as an invader to be fought off.
5. Society is read the same way. A state in which the ruler takes too much, the people want too much and the officials do too much is a state out of balance, and disorder follows from it.
6. Balance in this account is not a fixed midpoint. It shifts with the seasons and the circumstances, which is why Taoists talk about timing and yielding rather than about rules.

Desire, knowledge and striving

1. Taoists trace the departure to particular human habits rather than to a single event. The first is desire, the restless wanting that the Tao Te Ching says leaves people never satisfied and never still.
2. The second is cleverness, what the text attacks as chih (Pinyin zhi), the knowledge that measures, compares and improves. It advises rulers to keep people simple rather than sharp.
3. The third is striving. Taoists describe contention, ambition and the chase after reputation as effort spent against the grain of things.
4. Naming and distinction come in for the same criticism. Once beautiful is named, ugly appears alongside it, and the Chuang Tzu argues that much human conflict grows in the gap between such labels.
5. What is lost in the process is tzu-jan (Pinyin ziran), literally self so, the quality of a thing doing what it does without calculation. A person who acts in order to be seen acting has already lost it.
6. Taoists do not present this as a condition anyone escapes by birth. Every human being is held to pick up the habits, and the tradition treats undoing them as the work of a lifetime.

Civilization and nature

1. The strongest form of the Taoist diagnosis is aimed at civilization itself. Taoists hold that human attempts to improve on nature are what produced conflict and chaos.
2. The Tao Te Ching puts it as a sequence of losses. When the Way was lost people began to speak of te (virtue), then of jen (human heartedness), then of i (righteousness), and at last of li (ritual propriety).
3. Read that way, moral teaching is a symptom rather than a cure. Taoists take the stress that Confucius and his followers placed on jen and li as evidence that the natural feeling behind them has already gone.
4. The criticism extends to law and government. The text observes that the more prohibitions there are the poorer the people become, and that sharp weapons and clever devices bring disorders of their own.
5. Against the busy state the text sets a small village whose people are content with their food and clothing, hear the dogs of the next village, and never trouble to go there.
6. Many Taoists today read these passages as an argument about the environment. The claim that improving on nature ends in chaos is applied to intensive farming, engineered rivers and the wider costs of industrial life.