Core Themes: Tao, Wu Wei & Naturalness

This page looks at how the three actually function in this book, chapter by chapter rather than as general concepts. The related page in the introductory section explains the vocabulary of Taoist thought at large; here the question is narrower and more useful: what does this particular text do with these words, what is it arguing against when it uses them, and where do the standard translations go wrong.

Tao in this book

The word was ordinary before this text used it. It meant a road, a route, a method, and by extension a doctrine or a way of doing something; it was also a verb meaning to speak or to explain. Confucian writers used it constantly, and so did everyone else. Nothing about it was mysterious.

What the Tao Te Ching does is take this ordinary word and apply it to something that is not a road, not a method and not a doctrine, while keeping enough of the ordinary sense that the reader is not entirely lost. The opening line exploits the verbal sense of the word in a play on words that no translation reproduces: the way that can be spoken is not the constant way.

The most important thing to notice is that the text says outright that the name is a stopgap. In one chapter it states that it does not know what to call the thing and is forcing a designation on it. That admission changes how the rest should be read. The word is a label of convenience for something the author holds to be unnameable, not a technical term with a definition.

Why the refusal to define is a logical position

Readers often take the text's refusal to say what the Tao is as mysticism or evasion. It is better read as an argument, and the argument is short.

Definitions work by exclusion: to define something is to mark it off from what it is not. That procedure works for things that are one item among others. If what you are pointing at is not one item among others but the pattern within which items appear, then marking it off from other things is not a mistake in execution but an error in kind.

This is why the text approaches the subject by negation and by image rather than by statement. It says what the Tao is not, and it offers comparisons — water, a valley, an unworked block, an empty vessel, a mother — chosen for particular properties rather than as poetry. Water is the most persistent: it takes the low place, it yields, it wears away what is harder, and it is essential without being valued.

Three distinct uses

Translations tend to smooth the word into a single meaning. In the text it is doing at least three different jobs, and separating them clarifies a great deal.

Sometimes it names an origin: that from which things come, described as prior to the distinctions we make and as inexhaustible. Sometimes it names a pattern: the way things actually behave, including the tendency of extremes to reverse and of forced action to produce the opposite of its aim. And sometimes it names a course of conduct: what a person or a ruler does who acts in accordance with that pattern.

The three are connected in the text's own terms, but they are not the same claim, and a passage that makes sense as a statement about conduct may be nonsense as a statement about cosmology. When a chapter seems incoherent, ask which of the three uses is in play.

De, the other half of the title

The second term of the title is regularly translated as virtue, and the translation is misleading in a specific way that is worth spelling out.

The word does mean virtue in Confucian usage, in the moral sense. In this text it is closer to the older meaning: the particular capacity or potency that something has, what it is able to do by being what it is. The nearest English is the archaic usage in a phrase like the virtue of a medicine — its efficacy, not its righteousness.

The text sets its own sense against the Confucian one explicitly. It distinguishes a higher form which does not present itself as virtue from a lower form which does, and it treats the visible cultivation of moral qualities as evidence that something has already gone wrong. It also uses a compound meaning dark or hidden potency, which makes the point plainly: this is a capacity that does not display itself.

The relation between the two title terms, as the text presents it, is that the second is what the first amounts to in a particular thing. A thing's potency is its share of the pattern. This is why the book can move between cosmology and conduct without changing subject.

Wu wei: what the characters say

The phrase is two words: a negative and a verb meaning to do, to act, to make. Rendered flatly it is non-doing, and rendered flatly it is wrong, because the text plainly recommends a great deal of activity.

The verb in question carries a strong sense of contriving, of acting deliberately in order to bring about a result, of interfering. What is being negated is not activity but a particular relation to activity: forcing, imposing, working against the grain of a situation. The text pairs the phrase with expressions meaning to act without contriving, and with a formula stating that by not contriving nothing is left undone — which is incomprehensible if the phrase means doing nothing.

A useful test when reading: replace the translation with the words “without forcing” and see whether the sentence improves. It usually does.

Wu wei in three settings

The text applies the idea in three areas, and the same principle looks quite different in each.

For a ruler, it is a policy recommendation, and this is the most frequent use. Fewer laws, fewer prohibitions, lighter taxation, no display of wealth, no wars of ambition, no elaborate promotion of standards of merit. The argument is causal rather than sentimental: prohibitions create the categories of crime they punish; promoting standards creates competition for them; visible wealth creates theft.

For a person acting in the world, it is an account of skill. Competence is described as fitting an action to the shape of a situation rather than overpowering it, and the standard examples in the wider tradition are craftsmen. The characteristic mark is that opposition is absent.

For self-cultivation, it is a warning about effort. Striving after a condition is treated as one of the reliable ways of not reaching it, which produces a genuine difficulty the tradition never fully resolves: the recommendation cannot be followed by trying to follow it.

Ziran: self-so

The third term is usually translated as nature or naturalness, and this is the most damaging of the three translations, because it imports a contrast that the text does not have.

The two characters mean self and so, thus, in that manner. The compound means being so of itself, without external cause. In modern Chinese it is the ordinary word for nature in the sense of the natural world, and it is very easy to read that later meaning back into the classical text.

The difference matters. The English word nature carries an opposition to the artificial, the cultural, the man-made. The classical term carries no such opposition. It contrasts with being made to be so by something else. A ruler who governs by not forcing allows what happens under him to be self-so; the point is not that he prefers forests to cities.

One line in the text is worth dwelling on because it puzzled commentators for centuries. It says that the Tao takes ziran as its law. If nothing is above the Tao, this appears to make no sense. The standard resolution is that ziran here is not a further thing but a description: what the Tao follows is its own being-so. Read that way the line is a strong statement of the whole position — there is nothing behind the pattern, and no lawgiver.

The three as one argument

Stated together the three terms make a single connected claim, and it is worth having in one place.

There is a pattern in how things behave, and it is not the product of design. Things have their own capacities, which are their share of that pattern, and those capacities operate best without being managed. Intervention that works against the pattern produces the opposite of what it intends, reliably, because extremes reverse. Therefore the competent course, for a ruler, a craftsman or an individual, is to act in a way that does not force, allowing what is self-so to proceed. And the central claim, in one sentence: things work better when they are not forced.

That is a substantive position, and it is arguable. It is not a mood, and reducing it to a mood is what most popular presentations do.

How each term is misused

Tao is misused when it is treated as a name for a being, an energy, or a hidden truth. The text explicitly denies that the word names anything nameable, and any sentence of the form “the Tao wants” or “the Tao will provide” has already left the book behind.

Wu wei is misused when it becomes a licence for avoidance. Declining to act because acting would be forcing is available as an excuse for almost anything, and the political chapters make clear that the recommendation is about how to act, not about whether to.

Ziran is misused when it does moral work. Calling something natural in order to approve of it, and unnatural in order to condemn it, is a modern habit that the classical term does not support, since the term marks the absence of external compulsion and not membership of a preferred category.

A general test for all three: ask which character the English word translates, and whether the sentence still holds when the character's actual range is substituted.

Key points

• Tao was an ordinary word for road, method and doctrine, and the text states outright that using it here is a stopgap.
• The refusal to define is a logical position, not evasion: definitions exclude, and what is being indicated is not one item among others.
• The word does three jobs — origin, pattern, and course of conduct — and separating them resolves much apparent incoherence.
• De is closer to efficacy or potency than to moral virtue, and the text sets its sense against the Confucian one on purpose.
• Wu wei negates contriving and forcing, not activity; “without forcing” is a better working translation than “non-action”.
• Ziran means being so of itself and carries no contrast with the artificial; the line saying the Tao follows ziran denies that anything stands behind the pattern.