The Daodejing was meant as a handbook for the ruler. He should be a sage whose actions pass so unnoticed that his very existence remains unknown. He imposes no restrictions or prohibitions on his subjects; “so long as I love quietude, the people will of themselves go straight. So long as I act only by inactivity, the people will of themselves become prosperous.” His simplicity makes the Ten Thousand Things passionless and still, and peace follows naturally. He does not teach them discrimination, virtue, or ambition because “when intellect emerges, the great artifices begin. When discord is rife in families, ‘dutiful sons’ appear. When the State falls into anarchy, ‘loyal subjects’ appear.” Thus, it is better to banish wisdom, righteousness, and ingenuity, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.
Therefore the Sage rules by emptying their hearts (minds) and filling their bellies, weakening their wills and strengthening their bones, ever striving to make the people knowledgeless and desireless.
The word “people” in this passage more likely refers not to the common people but to those nobles and intellectuals who incite the ruler’s ambition and aggressiveness.
War is condemned but not entirely excluded: “Arms are ill-omened instruments,” and the sage uses them only when he cannot do otherwise. He does not glory in victory; “he that has conquered in battle is received with rites of mourning.”
The book shares certain constants of classical Chinese thought but clothes them in an imagery of its own. The sacred aura surrounding kingship is here rationalized and expressed as “inaction” (wuwei), demanding of the sovereign no more than right cosmological orientation at the centre of an obedient universe. Survivals of archaic notions concerning the compelling effect of renunciation—which the Confucians sanctified as ritual “deference” (rang)—are echoed in the recommendation to “hold to the role of the female,” with an eye to the ultimate mastery that comes of passivity.
It is more particularly in the function attributed to the Dao, or Way, that this little tract stands apart. The term “dao” was employed by all schools of thought. The universe has its dao; there is a dao of the sovereign, his royal mode of being, while the dao of man comprises continuity through procreation. Each of the schools, too, had its own dao, its way or doctrine. But in the Daodejing, the ultimate unity of the universal Dao itself, is proposed as a social ideal. It is this idealistic peculiarity that seems to justify later historians and bibliographers in their assignment of the term Daoist to the Daodejing and its successors.
From a literary point of view, the Daodejing is distinguished for its highly compressed style. Unlike the dialectic or anecdotal composition of other contemporary treatises, it articulates its cryptic subject matter in short, concise statements. More than half of these are in rhyme, and close parallelism recurs throughout the text. No proper name occurs anywhere. Although its historical enigmas are apparently insoluble, there is abundant testimony to the vast influence exercised by the book since the earliest times and in surprisingly varied social contexts. Among the classics of speculative Daoism, it alone holds the distinction of having become a scripture of the esoteric Daoist movements, which developed their own interpretations of its ambiguities and transmitted it as a sacred text. The interpretation of Zhuangzi
Pseudohistorical knowledge of the sage Zhuangzi is even less well defined than that of Laozi. Most of Sima Qian’s brief portrait of the man is transparently drawn from anecdotes in the Zhuangzi itself and as such has no necessary basis in fact. The Zhuangzi, however, is valuable as a monument of Chinese literature and because it contains considerable documentary material, describing numerous speculative trends and spiritual practices of the Warring States period (475–221 bce).
Zhuangzi, detail, ink on silk; in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan.Courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China
Whereas the Daodejing is addressed to the sage-king, the Zhuangzi is the earliest surviving Chinese text to present a philosophy for private life, a wisdom for the individual. Zhuangzi is said to have preferred the doctrine of Laozi over all others; many of his writings strike the reader as metaphorical illustrations of the terse sayings of the “Old Master.”
Whereas Laozi in his book as well as in his life (in legend) was concerned with Daoist rule, Zhuangzi, some generations later, rejected all participation in society. He compared the servant of state to the well-fed decorated ox being led to sacrifice in the temple and himself to the untended piglet blissfully frolicking in the mire.
Here there is none of the Daodejing’s studied density. The rambling Zhuangzi opens with a sprightly fable, illustrating the incomprehension of small wildfowl of the majestic splendour of a gigantic bird. Other such parables demonstrate the relativity of all values: the sliding scales of size, utility, beauty, and perfection. There is a colloquy between the Lord of the Yellow River and the God of the Eastern Ocean, in which the complacent self-satisfaction of the lesser spirit is shaken by his unexpected meeting with inconceivable vastness. Humble artisans are depicted, who, through the perfect mastery of their craft, exemplify for their social superiors the art of mastering life. Life and death are equated, and the dying are seen to welcome their approaching transformation as a fusion with the Dao. A succession of acquiescent cripples exclaims in rapture on the strange forms in which it has pleased heaven to shape them. Those involved in state ritual are brought onstage only to be mocked, and the propositions of contemporary logic-choppers are drawn into the unending whirl of paradox, spun out to their conclusions, and so abolished. Such are a few aspects of this wild kaleidoscope of unconventional thought, a landmark in Chinese literature. Its concluding chapter is a systematic account of the preeminent thinkers of the time, and the note of mock despair on which it closes typifies the Zhuangzi’s position regarding the more formal, straitlaced ideologies that it parodies.
Among the strange figures that people the pages of Zhuangzi are a very special class of spiritualized being. Dwelling far apart from the turbulent world of men, dining on air and sipping the dew, they share none of the anxieties of ordinary folk and have the smooth, untroubled faces of children. These “supreme persons,” or “perfect persons,” are immune to the effects of the elements, untouched by heat and cold. They possess the power of flight and are described as mounting upward with a fluttering motion. Their effortless existence was the ultimate in autonomy, the natural spontaneity that Zhuangzi ceaselessly applauds. These striking portraits may have been intended to be allegorical, but whatever their original meaning, these Immortals (xian), as they came to be called, were to become the centre of great interest. Purely literary descriptions of their freedom, their breathtaking mobility, and their agelessness were construed as practical objectives by later generations. By a variety of practices, people attempted to attain these qualities in their own persons, and in time Zhuangzi’s unfettered paragons of liberty were to see themselves classified according to kind and degree in a hierarchy of the heavenly hosts (see also Zhuangzi). Basic concepts of Daoism
Certain concepts of ancient agrarian religion have dominated Chinese thought uninterruptedly from before the formation of the philosophic schools until the first radical break with tradition and the overthrow of dynastic rule at the beginning of the 20th century, and they are thus not specifically Daoist. The most important of these concepts are (1) the continuity between nature and human beings, or the interaction between the world and human society; (2) the rhythm of constant flux and transformation in the universe and the return or reversion of all things to the Dao from which they emerged; and (3) the worship of ancestors, the cult of heaven, and the divine nature of the sovereign. Concepts of the universe and natural order Cosmology