Thomas Merton on Taoism

Getting your 'wu wei' on

In the first chapter of the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu distinguished between the Eternal Tao “that can not be named,” which is the nameless and unknowable source of all being, and the Tao “that can be named,” which is the “Mother of all things.” Confucius may have had access to the manifest aspects of the Tao “that can be named,” but the basis of all Chuang Tzu’s critique of Ju philosophy is that it never comes near to the Tao “that can not be named,” and indeed takes no account of it.

Until relatively late works like the Doctrine of the Mean which are influenced by Taoism, Confucius refused to concern himself with a Tao higher than that of man precisely because it was “unknowable” and beyond the reach of rational discourse. Chuang Tzu held that only when one was in contact with the mysterious Tao which is beyond all existent things, which cannot be conveyed either by words or by silence, and which is apprehended only in a state which is neither speech nor silence (xxv. II.) could one really understand how to live. To live merely according to the “Tao of man” was to go astray. The Tao of Ju philosophy is, in the words of Confucius, “threading together into one the desires of the self and the desires of the other.” This can therefore be called an “ethical Tao” or the “Tao of man,” the manifestation in act of a principle of love and justice.

Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, pp. 20-21

For a long time, I've felt a deep resonance with pretty much everything I've read about Taoism—more so than Buddhism¹—but I've not made a serious study of it. A few years ago, I came across Merton's book excerpted above, and it provided a portal for me to go a little deeper with it. The publication of this “translation” of Chuang Tzu was kind of a big deal in 1965 when it came out a few years before his death in '68. The Dalai Lama even wrote a preface for it. And several Taoist scholars have given the translation high marks for penetrating to the spirit of this ancient text, even though Merton had close to zero Chinese.

He collaborated with John Wu, a Chinese-American Taoist scholar, who provided technical assistance in understanding the original Chuang Tzu text, and Wu came to think that Merton "got" Chuang Zu better than many Taoist scholars did because of Merton's vocation as a contemplative and Trappist monk. At the deepest level, Merton and Chuang Zu were in touch with the Tao in a way that he typical scholar or expert is not.

I think that Merton's book helps me understand my own attraction to Taoism, not so much for what it tells me about Chinese religion and culture, about which I know very little, but how it opens up an interesting point of entry into the Western Tradition, particularly the apophatic tradition that comes down to us through the ancient Israelites, Plato, the Church Fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite through Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and finally the great Florentine translator of Plato and the Hermetica, Marsilio Ficino in the late 1400s.

Apophaticism is simply the assertion that the ground of all Being is utterly transcendent and beyond human comprehension. There is nothing that can be said about it, and any attempt to say anything about it is going to be more wrong than right.² And yet we can be in relationship with it. Indeed, the living relationship between what is below and what is above is essential for the health of any society.

This older, profounder way of relating to and imagining reality in the West pretty much went underground after the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. It surfaces again from time to time in the arts, but it plays zero role now in shaping our public imagination. But that doesn't mean it doesn’t remain fundamentally true in its deepest insights into what is real and important and what isn't. What we learned from science doesn't contradict any of it, rather science is—or should be—deepened and enriched by it.

This same valuation about what's most deeply true is reflected in the excerpt above in the contrast between Lao Tzu and Confucius. Confucius has his role to play, but social Taoism, what Merton calls the ‘ethical Tao’ or the ‘Tao of Man’, cannot work in the long run without its remaining in an intimate relationship with what Lao Tzu is pointing to, which is its unspeakable ground, the eternal Tao. The two work together in the balanced tension that defines the Yang/Yin dynamic. Yang radiates its creative energies, but it needs the human Yin response to be effective in the world. But humans cannot respond if they have become insensible of these energies working in their lives.

In the West, this philosophical/theological tradition that I described a few paragraphs above was an accomplishment of thought and imagination that provided the infrastructure for a civilization. This is not primarily a work of faith. Clearly people of faith played a critical role in shaping this civilizational project, but as a construct of thought and imagination, it is accessible to all people of intelligence, decency, and good sense. The same is true of Taoism. Both provided for their respective civilizations a metaphysical imagination that enriches human experience and one's sense of connection to what's most deeply, if inarticulably, Real.³ They both give a reasonable account of the world if you accept their fundamental premise that Mind rather than Matter is ontologically primary.⁴ Once one takes that step, rich possibilities open up for human possibility that are simply not available to us in our current materialistic metaphysical imaginary.

But even in societies whose metaphysical imaginaries are not hostile to the idea of an inarticulable, vital ground of Being that sustains everything that exists, the problem lies in that such societies still need rules, laws, codes, and customs--and ideally those laws are aligned with the ‘eternal Tao’. This was the Confucian project: to keep the Tao of Man, the social customs and codes, in alignment with the eternal Tao even if there is nothing that can be said about eternal Tao in itself. But even in societies where there is still some living awareness of the eternal Tao, these laws and codes can become ends in themselves, and when they do, they become rigid and lifeless, and they then begin to serve other, mostly malign purposes. The code becomes becomes an idol of the mind and a jail for the human spirit.⁵ This is how civilizations die.

Confucius knew that both the eternal Tao and the Tao of Man needed to be in a living, dynamic relationship; the problem lay in that subsequent generations of Confucians forgot it. And that's exactly our predicament in the West now. Morality degenerates into a soulless, algorithmic moralism, a fussy obsession with correct form rather than with developing a deeper, living connection to the unspeakable spirit of the Good that is its source.

Merton says that the Ju philosophy of the Confucians rigidified in this way. And so as a lived experience of the Good became less accessible for their thought, a vicious circle ensues--

...one concentrates on the means to be used to attain it [the Good/Tao]. And as the end becomes more remote and more difficult, the means become more elaborate and complex, until finally the mere study of the means becomes so demanding that all one’s effort must be concentrated on this, and the end is forgotten. Hence the nobility of the Ju scholar becomes, in reality, a devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing means which lead nowhere. This is, in fact, nothing but organized despair: “the good” that is preached and exacted by the moralist thus finally becomes an evil, and all the more so since the hopeless pursuit of it distracts one from the real good which one already possesses and which one now despises or ignores. (p. 23)

Remember Chidi, the professor of moral philosophy in The Good Place? He was in ‘the Bad Place' for good reason.

And so the same for us. Ethics becomes all about rules and duties and calculi of utility. Morality becomes not about being or growing the good that is already in us, but about appearing good. This was what Jesus condemned when he accused the Pharisees in his time of being 'whited sepulchers'--they presented beautiful, pure white exteriors while housing a fetid, rotting, dead thing within them.⁶

But how then does one know what to do? Well one must become less self-consciously performative, and more like the child at play. This is wu wei. Merton goes on--

If one is in harmony with Tao—the cosmic Tao, “Great Tao”—the answer will make itself clear when the time comes to act, for then one will act not according to the human and self-conscious mode of deliberation, but according to the divine and spontaneous mode of wu wei, which is the mode of action of Tao itself, and is therefore the source of all good.

The other way, the way of conscious striving, even though it may claim to be a way of virtue, is fundamentally a way of self-aggrandizement, and it is consequently bound to come into conflict with Tao. Hence it is self-destructive, for “what is against Tao will cease to be.” This explains why the Tao Teh Ching, criticizing Ju philosophy, says that the highest virtue is non-virtuous and “therefore it has virtue.” But “low virtue never frees itself from virtuousness, therefore it has no virtue.” Chuang Tzu is not against virtue (why should he be?), but he sees that mere virtuousness is without meaning and without deep effect either in the life of the individual or in society. (p. 24)

I think that what Merton and Chuang Zu are pointing to here is the same thing that I was trying to get at in my Cathedral Lectures when talking about Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar in Emile and what Schiller, in his Aesthetic Education, later calls the Beautiful Soul animated by the spieltrieb or ‘play drive’. And I'd argue it's what Aristotle means by eudaemonia and the Christian tradition means by being in the state of grace. There is tremendous convergence here. The goal is not just to do the good as one's duty but to act out the innate goodness in oneself in an effortless, spontaneous, unselfconscious, and childlike way.⁷

Being childlike does not mean being childish. There is a pattern of development from childish narcissism, through a dutifully ethical ‘adulting’, to a final stage few attain—to be genuinely childlike, which is wu wei. Merton and Chuang Zu talk about what it is and isn’t, but they don't have much to say about how you attain wu wei. And let's face it, most of us, even if we have some inkling about what they're talking about, would never claim to be in a very intimate relationship with the Tao as they describe it. But we would like to be, right? But who's even talking about such a thing these days? Why isn't it a part of our moral discourse?

Because it’s so alien to our way of thinking since the 1500s. We don’t think of Goodness as something that one grows within oneself. And if in this sense it is an “achievement” of sorts, it is not achieved in the willful, Tiger Woodsy way we ordinarily understand what achieving entails. It is attained rather than accomplished. And it is attained in stages. If we lived in a healthy culture, a society in which it would be ‘easier to be good’, it would be a natural progression for most.

This was still understood not so long ago. As I discussed in the Cathedral Lectures, for Friedrich Schiller the progression had three stages: the Savage, Barbarian, and then the Beautiful Soul. For Kierkegaard it was the Aesthetic, Ethical, and then the Religious. Even Nietzsche had three stages that he called the Camel, Lion, and then the Child. In the 20th century the last gasp of this kind of thinking about moral progression was found in thinkers like Kohlberg's moral development of children in three stages: Pre-conventional, Conventional, and Post Conventional. And then there’s Maslow and Jung, of course.

And I'd argue that it isn't something we talk about human development like this anymore because there is nothing than it more subversive of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix and its project to redefine the human being as machine. And so all of our mainstream cultural institutions have become allergic to this ancient, universally acknowledged, profound idea about what the human being is and what is its good. It is utterly invisible in our culture, whether lowbrow or highbrow. This largely derives from our Calvinist heritage. There are good people and bad people, each predestined from all eternity to be good or bad. There is no choice or real moral freedom. There is no ‘becoming the good’. Moral behavior degenerates into mere performance of what appears for the moment to be socially acceptable.

And people in the universities and arts wonder why the humanities are no longer popular with students. Well, because there is no longer anything about what the these traditions thought the human being was to be found in the way the humanities are taught anymore. If these ancestral thinkers and their ideas are taught, it's as an antiquarian curiosity, not because they have any relevance for the way we live now.

But never was there a greater need to better understand these ideas and the history of ideas that has led us to this critical moment. Ideas matter because they shape the way we work in the world, and the way we work in the world in turn shapes how we think and imagine reality. Ideas are the code that run societies and their imaginations about what's possible and what isn't, what's true and what isn't, what's important and what isn't. And the argument that I've been making in my classes and here on this blog is that the ideas that run American society and other societies of the developed world are so profoundly out of balance because deeply out of alignment with the Deep Real, the Tao. And because this is true, the future of the human project is jeopardized in a historically unprecedented way.

Restoring the balance isn't just a fanciful idea concocted by some ancient metaphysician. It derives from a profound insight into how things work both then and now whether we are aware of them or not, or whether we believe in them or not. It's the law. We used to understand that in the West, but we rejected it for the idea that we could lawlessly bend Nature to our will and make it do as we please. And so we live in an ideas world where the Deep Real plays no role whatsoever in the way we think about the future of humanity, much less about decisions we make about the environment or technology.

So while all this might not be interesting to the average person, it is important for our intelligentsia to understand and value this tradition more than it currently does. Why? Because ideas got us into this predicament, and they will be important for getting us out. Ideas matter because they create the conditions that open up or close down possibilities for the way we relate to the Deep Real, and right now our relationship to it is completely whack.

Notes

1. But Merton points out —

There have never been lacking authorities like Daisetz T. Suzuki, the Japanese Zen scholar, who declare Chuang Tzu to be the very greatest of the Chinese philosophers. There is no question that the kind of thought and culture represented by Chuang Tzu was what transformed highly speculative Indian Buddhism into the humorous, iconoclastic, and totally practical kind of Buddhism that was to flourish in China and in Japan in the various schools of Zen. Zen throws light on Chuang Tzu, and Chuang Tzu throws light on Zen. (pp. 15-16).

2. I think that the ban here is not on the human attempt to make “raids on the unspeakable” as in poetry in its use of analogy and metaphor, but to think that any statements about God can be in any normal sense propositionally true, as in the sense of ‘Today is Wednesday’. This leads to the propositional tyranny known as fundamentalism.

Apophaticism is also at the heart of the forbidding of images regarding the godhead that is particularly strong in Judaism and Islam. It’s a good corrective against the tendency to imagine God as a bearded, grumpy old man throwing lightning bolts at wrongdoers. When most people say they are atheists, they are saying that they don't believe in some Divine Superego figure up in the clouds, and they are right to reject such a childish, infantilizing projection. But that doesn't mean that there isn't cosmic law, aka the Tao, (aka the Logos in the West). And it doesn't mean that we humans are incapable of being in some kind of conscious awareness of how we are in relationship with it--or ought to be—and that there is a way of living lawfully that isn’t just stuff that humans make up for whatever arbitrary reason.

And while this is not the place to get into it in detail, there’s a difference between idol and icon. The first reduces the infinite to the finite object; the second uses the finite object as a portal into the infinite.

3. Faith is something different. It's a gift and it’s personal—not civilizational. But it makes a difference for people of faith to be able to live in a civilization that is consonant with their faith and promotes its deepening. Clearly, we're not living in such a society now, and so it is extraordinarily difficult for faith to flourish. Indeed, the presuppositions of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix are actively hostile toward it—and so it is no wonder that the churches languish.

4. Arguing for the ontological priority of Mind is the purpose of David Bentley Hart’s book published this year, All Things are Full of Gods. Anybody with a philosophical bent who is not a fanatical dogmatic materialist will find his arguments compelling. It remains to be seen whether the moment is right for it to break through to the broader intellectual culture. Probably not, but it’s an important effort in laying the groundwork for a shift that I believe must happen sooner or later.

5. This is what Iain McGilchrist is getting at in his recounting Nietzsche's tale of the Master and the Emissary in the Introduction of his book of that title:

There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

The meaning of this story is as old as humanity, and resonates far from the sphere of political history. I believe, in fact, that it helps us understand something taking place inside ourselves, inside our very brains, and played out in the cultural history of the West, particularly over the last 500 years or so. Why I believe so forms the subject of this book. I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some time been in a state of conflict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary. (p. 14)

6. As I’m writing this I’m reminded of how In Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov this distinction is rendered by the contrast between the two monks Zossima and Ferapont. Zossima was the embodiment of a simple, childlike spontaneous Goodness, while Ferapont was the perfect ascetic, a prodigy of willful spiritual performance. He was the Tiger Woods of ascetics, but a man in whom a competitive, meanness of spirit dominates. But Ferapont for many in their monastic community was the more admirable figure because such a prodigy, while Zossima was the less strictly observant and so the less accomplished spiritual athlete.

7. There is a difference between childish and childlike. Dickens’ man-child Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is the classic narcissist that that is clearly a form of emotional/spiritual retardation.

Neither is this an endorsement of an antinomianism that asserts that one should not perform his or her duties, but an assertion that anyone, i.e., almost everybody, for whom duty is a burden has not developed to the more mature stage where doing the good does not feel like a burden. In Christian terms, the yoke is easy, the burden light. In Kierkegaard, the 'ethical', the doing of one's duty in the Kantian sense, is the necessary middle stage of moral development, but not the end of moral development. I think that there’s also the implication that one who has attained this third stage knows spontaneously without much anguish what is his or her duty, no matter the cost, and is willing to pay it. For Kant, the more difficult and anguished the moral deed, the more morally profound. He knew nothing of this third stage.

So how do we find our way to this Way? Merton says—

The “Little Way” of Therese of Lisieux is an explicit renunciation of all exalted and disincarnate spiritualities that divide man against himself, putting one half in the realm of angels and the other in an earthly hell. For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it. There is an affirmation of the world that is nothing but ruin and loss. There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves man in his own home, which is God’s world. In any event, the “way” of Chuang Tzu is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a “way out.” Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost. (pp. 11-12)