“A ce moment, la Chine reste surprenante, inquiétante, dérangante. Pour essayer de mieux les comprendre il faut souligner certain particularités qui tiennent à son mode de pensée, à son mode d’écrire, mais aussi à la réalité historique, géographique, qui rendent la civilization Chinoise assez différent des autres civilizations nés sur la continent et d’européens.“
C. Javary [1]
There is a fly walking on the window pane. The window is ajar, hanging open on its hinges and a hot wind from the Garonne is seeping through the gap, but the fly is confounded: the gaudy matrices of its eyes are trained on bushes and buildings, tabletops and me. Somehow it does not see the glass. An alien membrane, only visible obliquely.
Tomorrow morning as I “construct myself” over breakfast, transparent walls will glide silently into place, cutting me off from swathes of the city, until I see only the narrow path to work. Almost as quickly as I know who I am, I will be left with a choice between the tram and the bicycle. Perhaps I will feel tired and decide to take the tram – join the ragged file of students and young professionals, each with their own complex internal psycho-geography, converging quietly on two opposing platforms in the grey of the morning. We will be coiffed, perfumed, secure between the walls. But suppose a man were to step out from our company and onto the tram rails? Perhaps he bends at the waist and removes his shoes, placing them neatly one beside the other, then dances jerkily up and down the length of the platform like an animated scarecrow. I expect many of us onlookers would exchange amused or quizzical glances, but ironically it is those of us in the audience who would feel ridiculous. We would be looking at the glass walls from that magic angle where the light is reflected and the surface becomes partially opaque. The man has afforded us a brief glimpse of the contingency of our situation, the shape of our egos, which is an essential ingredient of wu wei.
Wu wei is a defining principle of Taoism which continues to exert enormous influence on Chinese politics, philosophy, medicine and martial arts. Its literal translation from the Chinese – non-agir, or inaction – may give the misleading impression that Taoist doctrine is predicated on doing nothing. A more faithful translation is probably “ne pas forcer les choses” [2], or “not forcing” [3]. The idea is to try to follow the natural rhythms inherent in all things. By moving in accordance with Nature, with Cosmic law, one is able to act in the most powerful, most efficient possible way. A practitioner of wu wei is therefore characterized by an extreme receptivity to the course of events. They are an embodiment of water: supple and yielding at one moment and irresistible the next.
People who hold too tightly to their preconceptions live with a skewed interpretation of the world. Only when your ego has been sufficiently diminished, when you can faithfully follow the eternal mêlée of yin and yang, can you begin to apply wei wu wei (or agir-sans-agir) to further your own projects. Both the I Ching and the Tao Te Ching use the philosophy of wu wei to point to prudent or worthy actions, which probably goes a long way towards explaining its importance in Chinese culture. In Chapter 38 of the Tao Te Ching, for example, a virtuous action is presented as a thing done effortlessly [4]:
“The highest good is not to seek to do good,
but to allow yourself to become it.
The ordinary person seeks to do good things,
and finds that they cannot do them continually.
“The Master does not force virtue on others,
thus she is able to accomplish her task.
The ordinary person who uses force,
will find that they accomplish nothing.”
A truly virtuous person has honed their mind to such an extent that doing good is now an automatic operation. They do not bemoan their fate. They recognize their own limitations and those of other people with compassion, acting only and precisely when they need to. It is important to note that this hypothetical final state of goodness is permanent and it is the business of all major practical philosophies to try to push the mind of the individual towards a similar state of dynamic perfection. Ultimately, this is similar in spirit to the philosophy of Bushido, or indeed the boy scouts.
Kung Fu is one discipline where wu wei has been given obvious practical application, but the same principles have penetrated into the Chinese visual artistic tradition as well. In a video interview earlier this year, French sinologue Cyrille Javary recalled watching members of the Chinese public as they reacted to an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy in Chengdu [2]:
“… Dans cette exposition de calligraphie à Chengdu, je voyais les chinois qui commencent par s’approcher pour voir la teneur de l’encre… et après ils se réculaient pour voir la calligraphie… et à ce moment là, inconsciamment, avec leur main ils le ré–écrivait en l’air… Parce que ce qu’ils voyaient, ce qui… leur procurer une émotion, c’était le tracer. C’était pas ce qui à été écrit.”
Here Javary describes how the Chinese interest themselves almost as much in the physical procedure of writing calligraphy as the calligraphic form itself. The artist is implicated in the artwork because they have taken an internal – intellectual or spiritual – beauty and given it external form. Put another way, the artist has tried to find the essence – the Qi – of their subject within themselves and allowed it to disgorge spontaneously onto the page. In this way, one can consider the artist’s studio a place of “applied philosophy” [5]. The connection is clearer, perhaps, when we watch a musician perform and we can almost see the music being pulled out of the person in front of us.
In the West, we have remarkably few overtly Chinese elements in our popular culture. We do, however, have the writings of Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip K. Dick, who have quietly folded Taoist philosophy into their fiction to the delight of adults and children alike. LeGuin’s approach in her Earthsea novels was to create a fantasy world with many superficial elements of Western culture – a school of magic like a British boy’s public school, dragons that breathe fire and hoard treasure – but painted over a substructure of Chinese philosophy. In her first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, LeGuin’s protagonist is a young boy called Ged. He is born on an island where the people live in rustic fashion by fishing and farming. Magical ability is a rare gift of birth and used mainly for practical tasks like working of the weather, or for mending and charming boats and tools. Like human technology, LeGuin’s magic has no moral dimension – only a power and a cost. The most puissant mages in Earthsea use magic sparingly because they understand that to divert the course of nature in one place will often cause an unlooked-for change elsewhere. There is Ogion, a famous mage who lives simply as a goatherd and refuses to use even an elementary weatherworking spell when caught out in a storm; then there are the seven Masters of the wizarding school on Roke, each of whom counsels extreme prudence when working magic. In the words of the Master Summoner [6]:
“The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
Much of A Wizard of Earthsea charts the repercussions that follow when Ged forgets this fundamental principle. Goaded on by a rival sorcerer, Ged resolves to prove his mastery and summon a spirit from the dead. On the night of the Long Dance, with the stars hanging cold and watchful above the island of wizardry, he walks to the top of Roke Knoll with a small group of young wizards and pronounces the invocation. A keening wind begins to blow and a pale luminescence waxes in the darkness. Yet even as Ged successfully breaches the fabric between the lands of the living and the dead, he looses a shadow into the world – a shadow of himself, deadly and ravenous – that tries over the course of the novel to possess him and work evil. It is a theme that returns over and again in the tales of Earthsea: a disturbance in the natural order pitches the world towards an extreme and the characters must work hard, within the limits of wu wei, to restore a stable equilibrium.
Later in the book, Ged travels to the land of Osskil where he is shown a precious stone called Terrenon. Caught in the jewel is an ancient spirit with knowledge of the past and future [7]:
“Time is nothing to it. If you lay your hand upon it and ask a question of it, it will answer, according to the power that is in you. It has a voice, if you know how to listen.”
This description will be familiar to anyone who has ever seriously tried to use the I Ching.
And yet, despite the efforts of LeGuin and others, how little we in the West know of Chinese culture…! Information about China is nearly always mediated by journalists and mired in geopolitics. The closest many of us come to meeting Chinese people is to watch their student offspring giggling in bubble tea bars, or wandering the streets in white puffer jackets and designer trainers. News reporters seem almost to take pleasure in presenting China as a monstrous perplexity/synecdoche. It is reassuring for the East-West narrative if we in the “West” are dealing with a “dragon”: a totalitarian government that, in Xinjiang province, has achieved possibly the most advanced system of control in the history of man, but which can simultaneously produce startling positive social change in parts of the world, like Africa, where the West has completely failed. I think more diplomatic progress would be made with a better public understanding of China’s cultural achievements. Politicians do not operate in a vacuum. They drink the copious effluvium of Think Tanks, but they also read books, watch films, plays – they may even play video games – and this is where the seat of their convictions ultimately lies.
[1] C. Javary. Cyrille Javary – La souplesse du dragon, les fondamentaux de la culture chinoise, Librairie Mollat, URL: https://youtu.be/teIU4l3pFhA [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]
[2] C. Javary. Un Entretien avec Cyrille Javary sur Wu Wei, URL: https://youtu.be/rSfp8UTsqX4 [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]
[3] A. Watts. Alan Watts – The Principle of Not Forcing, https://youtu.be/ZzaUGhhnlQ8 [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]
[4] J. H. McDonald. Tao Te Ching – A Translation for the public domain (1996)
[5] A. de Botton, EASTERN PHILOSOPHY: Wu Wei, The School of Life, https://youtu.be/NvZi7ZV-SWI [Last Accessed: 2 Dec 2022]
[6] U. K. LeGuin, Earthsea: The First Four Books, Penguin Random House, pp.48 (2016)
[7] U. K. LeGuin, Earthsea: The First Four Books, Penguin Random House, pp.108-109 (2016)
Philip Bradford 