IB World Religions 1.8.4. How Do We Get There? Wu-wei, Yin and Yang, and Ch'i Notes

1.8.4. How Do We Get There? Wu-Wei, Yin and Yang, and Ch'i

Wu-wei

1. The central Taoist instruction is wu-wei (Pinyin wuwei), usually translated as non-action. It means not interfering, and Taoists use it for action that goes with the grain of a situation instead of forcing it.
2. The Tao Te Ching states the paradox directly, saying that the sage does nothing and yet nothing is left undone. What is ruled out is straining, meddling and imposing, not activity as such.
3. Nature is the model. Taoists point out that the seasons turn, rivers reach the sea and plants grow with nobody organising any of it, and they hold that human effort works best on the same terms.
4. Applied to government, wu-wei means a light hand. The text advises governing a large state as one would cook a small fish, which is to say with as little turning over as possible.
5. Applied to a person, it means giving up the effort to control outcomes. Taoists describe pushing at a situation before its own moment as the reliable way to spoil it.
6. Timing carries much of the weight. Wu-wei is described less as never acting than as acting exactly when a situation is ready and not a moment earlier.

Yin and yang

1. Taoists describe the movement of everything through yin and yang, the two poles of a single pattern. In the traditional correlations yin is dark, yielding, receptive and female, and yang is bright, active, assertive and male.
2. Neither pole is good and neither is bad. Health in a body or in a society is held to lie in their proportion, and trouble is held to come from too much of either.
3. The pair does not sort the world into two kinds of thing. Anything can be yin beside one thing and yang beside another, in the way a hillside is shaded in the morning and sunlit in the afternoon.
4. Each is said to contain the other. The familiar t'ai-chi diagram shows the two halves curled together with a dot of each colour inside the other, and the curve records how each is already turning into its opposite.
5. Taoism is unusual in the honour it gives to the yin side. The Tao Te Ching repeatedly praises the valley, the female, the low place and the yielding, on the ground that these outlast what is hard and high.
6. The correlations are applied everywhere in practice. Chinese medicine, diet, martial arts and the timing of festivals all work with them, and Taoists treat balancing them as ordinary maintenance rather than as a special exercise.

Reconciling opposites

1. The Chuang Tzu goes further and asks how the opposites arise at all. It argues that pairs such as right and wrong, or useful and useless, are produced by the standpoint of whoever is judging.
2. Its remedy is neither to pick a side nor to split the difference. Taoists describe a move to a wider view from which both members of a pair can be seen as parts of one thing.
3. The book calls the place from which that becomes possible the hinge of the Way, tao shu. It is the still point around which the endless pairs turn.
4. This is presented as a change in consciousness rather than as an argument won. Taoists rely here on direct intuition, on seeing how things stand, rather than on reasoning a case out step by step.
5. The result is described as ease in the face of disagreement. A person at the hinge is said to stop needing others to be wrong and to stop being shaken when circumstances reverse.
6. The practical payoff is the one wu-wei points to. If the opposites are two faces of a single pattern, then working against either of them is working against the whole.

Ch'i and its flow

1. Everything in this account is animated by ch'i (Pinyin qi), usually translated as life force or vital breath. Taoists hold that it moves through the body, through the landscape and through the whole of nature.
2. The word first means breath or vapour, which is why breathing practice sits at the centre of Taoist cultivation. Slow, deep and quiet breathing is treated as working on the life force directly.
3. Health is described as ch'i moving freely. Illness, tension and exhaustion are read as ch'i that has become blocked, scattered or stuck, so the aim is to release it rather than to acquire more.
4. Acupuncture works from this map, treating points along channels through which ch'i is held to travel. The needle is understood to clear an obstruction rather than to deliver a substance.
5. Movement practices do the same work. T'ai chi ch'uan and ch'i-kung use slow continuous movement and steady attention to the breath in order to keep ch'i circulating.
6. Inner alchemy takes the project furthest. Its practitioners work on breath, stillness and attention over many years in order to refine their ch'i into a more lasting form.

The contemplative life

1. Taoists describe all of this as a life to be lived rather than a doctrine to be held. The classic setting is a contemplative life close to nature, at a distance from courts, markets and ambition.
2. The mountains carry that ideal. Taoist temples and hermitages stand on peaks such as Wu-tang and Hua-shan, and hermits still live on some of them.
3. Meditation is central and deliberately quiet. Tso-wang (sitting and forgetting) lets go of the sense of a separate self, and hsin-chai (fasting of the heart and mind) empties the attention so that things can be met as they are.
4. The Tao Te Ching names three treasures for daily conduct: compassion, frugality, and not daring to be first. Each of the three is a way of not overreaching.
5. Most Taoists have never lived on a mountain. Lay practice means temple visits, festivals, breathing and movement, seasonal food, and a settled preference for enough over more.
6. The pieces are meant to work as one. Taoists hold that wu-wei, the balance of yin and yang, and the free flow of ch'i are a single way of living, and that living it is what returning to the Tao consists of.