The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principal components of Chinese thought.
 There are, of course, quite a number of forms of Chinese philosophy, but there are two great
 currents which have thoroughly molded the culture of China, and they are Taoism and
 Confucianism. And they play a curious game with each other. Let me start by saying something
 about Confucianism, originating with Kung Fu Tzu, or Confucius, who lived approximately
 a little after 630 BC. He is often supposed to have been a contemporary of Lao Tzu, who
 is the supposed founder of the Taoist way, but it seems more likely that Lao Tzu lived
 later than 400, according to most modern scholars. Confucianism is not a religion. It's a social
 ritual and a way of ordering society, so much so that the first great Catholic missionary
 to China, Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit, found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism
 to participate in Confucian rituals, because he saw them as something of a kind of national
 character, as one might pay respect to the flag or something of that kind in our own
 times. But he found that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism, no commitment
 to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the Catholic faith. So Confucianism is
 an order of society and involves ideas of human relations, including the government
 and the family, based on the principle of what is called in Chinese "ren," although
 Jia Fu will notice that I never get my tones right, which is an extraordinarily interesting
 word. I'm going to put some of these things on the whiteboard. This is the word "ren"
 in Chinese, and it's often translated "benevolence," but that's not a good translation at all.
 This word means "human-heartedness." That's the nearest we can get to it in English. And
 it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all virtues, but one that he always refused
 to define. It's above righteousness and justice and propriety and other great Confucian virtues.
 And it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement, including
 not only our virtuous side, but also our passionate side, also our appetites and our waywardness.
 The Hebrews have a term which they call the "yetzer hara," which means the wayward
 inclination or what I like to call the element of irreducible rascality that God put into
 all human beings, and put it there because it was a good thing. It was good for humans
 to have these two elements in them. And so a truly human-hearted person is a gentleman
 with a slight touch of rascality, just as one has to have salt in a stew. Confucius
 said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to try to be wholly righteous
 is to go beyond humanity, to try to be something that isn't human. So this gives Confucian
 approach to life and justice and all those sort of things a kind of queer humor, a sort
 of boys-will-be-boys attitude, which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human problems.
 It was, of course, for this reason that the Japanese Buddhist priests who visited China
 to study Buddhism, especially Zen priests, introduced Confucianism into Japan. Because
 despite certain limitations that Confucianism has, and it always needs the Tao philosophy
 as a counterbalance, Confucianism has been one of the most successful philosophies in
 all history for the regulation of governmental and family relationships. But of course, it
 is concerned with formality. Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships,
 linguistic, ceremonial, musical, in etiquette, in all the spheres of morals. And for this
 reason has always been twitted by the Taoists for being unnatural. You need these two components,
 you see, and they play against each other beautifully in Chinese society. Roughly speaking,
 you see, the Confucian way of life is for people involved in the world. The Taoist way
 of life is for people who get disentangled. Now, as we know, in our own modern times,
 there are various ways of getting disentangled from the regular lifestyle, say, of the United
 States. If you want to go through the regular lifestyle of the United States, you go to
 high school and college, and then you go into a profession or a business. And you own a
 standard house, and you raise a family, and you have a car or two cars, and do all that
 jazz. But a lot of people don't want to live that way. And there are lots of other ways
 of living besides that. So you could say that those of us who go along with the pattern
 correspond to the Confucians, and those who are bohemians or bums or beatniks or whatever
 don't correspond with the pattern. They are more like the Taoists. Because the Taoist
 is really--actually, in Chinese history, Taoism is a way of life for older people. Laozi,
 the name given to the founder of Taoism, means "the old boy." And the legend is that when
 he was born, he already had a white beard.
 So it's sort of like this, that when you have contributed to society, when you've contributed
 children and brought them up, and you have assumed a certain role in social life, you
 then say, now it's time for me to find out what it's all about. Who am I, ultimately,
 behind my outward personality? What is the secret source of things? And the latter half
 of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out. It's something to do when
 you have finished with the family business. I am not saying that that is a sort of unavoidable
 strict rule. Of course, one can study the Tao when very young, because it contains all
 kinds of secrets in it as to the performance of every kind of art or craft or business
 or any occupation whatsoever. But it does, in China, in a way, it plays that role of
 a kind of safety valve for the more restricted way of life that Confucianism prescribes.
 And there is a sort of type in China who is known as the old rogue. He's a sort of intellectual
 bum, often found among scholars, who is admired very much, and a type of character which had
 an enormous influence on the development of the ideals of Zen Buddhist life. He is one,
 you see, who goes with nature rather than against nature.
 Well now, first of all, I'm going to talk about ideas which come strictly out of Lao
 Tzu's book, The Tao Te Ching. And of course, the basic thing in the whole philosophy is
 the conception of Tao. This word has many meanings, and the book of Lao Tzu starts out
 by saying that the Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. Or you can, there's
 a pun in there which you can't quite put into English. You can't give all the meanings.
 Because the word Tao means both the way or course of nature or of everything. It also
 means to speak.
 So the actual opening phrase of the book, following this word Tao, is this. And the
 character is repeated again. You see? And this character means can be, or can, able,
 something like that. So the way which can be, then give it its second meaning, spoken,
 described, uttered. But it also means the way that can be weighed. Not W-E-I-G-H, but
 W-A-Y-E-D. You know, you'd have to invent that word. The way that can be traveled, perhaps,
 is not the eternal way. In other words, there is no way in which the Tao, or following the
 Tao, there's no recipe for it. I can't give you any do-it-yourself instructions, A, B,
 C, D, as to how it's done.
 It was like when Louis Armstrong was asked, "What is jazz?" He said, "If you have to ask,
 you don't know." Now that's awkward, isn't it? But we can gather what it is by absorbing
 certain atmospheres and attitudes connected with those who follow it. And from the art
 and the poetry and all the expressions and the anecdotes and stories that illustrate
 the philosophy of the way.
 So this word, then, the way or the course of things, is not--you must understand this--some
 Christian missionaries translated Tao as the Logos. Taking as their point of departure
 the opening passage of St. John's Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word." Now if you
 look up a Chinese translation of the Bible, it says, "In the beginning was the Tao." And
 the Tao was with God and the Tao was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All
 things were made by it, and without it was not anything made that was made. So they've
 substituted Tao there. Now that may make a very funny effect on a Chinese philosopher,
 because the idea of things being made by the Tao is absurd. The Tao is not a manufacturer
 and it's not a governor. It doesn't rule as it were in the position of a king. Although
 the book, the Tao Te Ching, is written for many purposes, but one of its important purposes
 is as a manual of guidance for a ruler. And what it tells him is, essentially, "Rule by
 not ruling. Don't lord it over the people." And so he says, "The great Tao flows everywhere,
 both to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord
 it over them. And when good things are accomplished, it lays no claim to them." In other words,
 the Tao doesn't stand up and say, "I have made all of you. I have filled this earth
 with its beauty and glory. Fall down before me and worship." The Tao, having done anything,
 you know, always escapes and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgement,
 because it loves obscurity. And Lao Tzu said, "The Tao is like water. It always seeks the
 low level which human beings abhor." So it's a very mysterious idea. Tao, then, is not
 really equivalent with any Western or Hindu idea of God, because God is always associated
 with being the Lord. Even in India, the Brahman is often called the Supreme Lord, although
 that was the term more strictly applicable to Ishvara, the manifestation of Brahman in
 the form of a personal God. But Bhagavan, the Lord, Krishna, his song is the Bhagavad
 Gita, the song of the Lord. There's always the idea of the king and the ruler attached,
 but not in the Chinese Tao philosophy. The Tao is not something different from nature,
 from ourselves, from our surrounding trees and waters and air. The Tao is the way all
 that behaves. And so the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it's an organism.
 And as we shall see when we get on to Zhuangzi, who is the sort of elaborator of Lao Tzu,
 he sees everything operating together so that nowhere can you find the controlling center.
 There isn't any. The world is a system of interrelated components, none of which can
 survive without each other. Just as in the case of bees and flowers. You will never find
 bees around in a place where there aren't flowers, and you will never find flowers around
 in a place where there aren't bees or insects that do the equivalent job. And what that
 tells us secretly is that although bees and flowers look different from each other, they're
 inseparable. They, to use a very important Taoist expression, they arise mutually. This
 is one of the great phrases from the second chapter of Lao Tzu's book, where he says,
 this character means "to have" or "to be." And this next one is a very important character
 in Taoist philosophy. It means "no," negative, "wu" in Chinese, "not to be." And then this
 curious expression, for which we don't have a really good corresponding idea in traditional
 Western thought. So, "to be" and "not to be" mutually arise. This character is based on
 the picture of a plant, something that grows out of the ground. So, you could say positive
 and negative, to be and not to be, yes and no, light and dark arise mutually, come into
 being. None is cause and effect, it's not that relationship at all. It's like the egg
 and the hen. So, as the bees and the flowers coexist in the same way as high and low, back
 and front, long and short, loud and soft, all those experiences are experienceable only
 in terms of their polar experience. So, the Chinese idea of nature is that all the various
 species arise mutually because they interdepend. And this total system of interdependence is
 the Tao. It involves certain other things that go along with Tao, but this mutual arising
 is the key idea to the whole thing. And if you want to understand Chinese and Oriental
 thought in general, it is the most important thing to grasp. Because, you see, we think
 so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe today in Aristotelian and
 Newtonian ways. And in that philosophy, the world is all separated. It's like a huge amalgamation
 of billiard balls. And they don't move until struck by another, or by a cue. And so everything
 is going "toc, toc, toc, toc, toc, toc, toc, toc, toc, toc, toc, toc" all over the place.
 One thing starting off another in a mechanical way. But of course, from the standpoint of
 twentieth-century science, we know perfectly well now that that's not the way it works.
 We know enough about relationships to see that that mechanical model which Newton devised
 was all right for certain purposes. But it breaks down now, because we understand Relativity.
 And we see how things go together in a kind of connected net, rather than in a chain of
 billiard balls banging each other around. So, in the philosophy of the Tao, it is said
 -- it's always being said -- you read this in every art book about Chinese art, that
 in Chinese painting, man is always seen as in nature, rather than dominating it. You
 get a painting entitled "Poet Drinking by Moonlight," and you see a great landscape,
 and after some search with a magnifying glass, at last you see the poet stuck away in a corner
 somewhere drinking wine. Whereas, if we painted the subject "Poet Drinking by Moonlight,"
 the poet would be the most obvious thing in the picture. There he would be, dominating
 the whole thing, the landscape off somewhere behind him. But all the Chinese painters put
 man... I mean, the painters of the great classical tradition. There are Chinese painters who
 specialize in family portraits, and do these very formal paintings of someone's ancestor
 sitting on a throne. It's quite a different category. But the Taoist-inspired painters,
 the Zen-inspired painters, have this view of man as an integral part of nature, something
 in it just as everything else is in it -- flowers and birds -- and not their ascent into this
 world commissioned by some sort of supernatural being to come into this world and farm it
 and dominate it. So then, the whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating, self-governing,
 indeed democratic organism. But it has a totality. It all goes together, and this totality is
 the Tao. So then we move to a second term that is extremely important. The expression
 "Zi Ran" is the term that we translate "nature" when we translate "Chinese." But this term
 expresses this whole point of view. It doesn't say "nature," "natura," which means, in a
 way, "class of things." It means, literally, "self-so." What is so of itself? What happens
 of itself? And thus, spontaneity. And in the Tao Te Ching, early on, Lao Tzu says, "The
 Tao's method is to be so of itself." Now, we might translate that "automatic," were it
 not that the word "automatic" has a mechanical flavor. "Zi Ran," as this is called, or "Shizen"
 in Japanese, means "spontaneous," yes. It happens as your heart beats. You don't do
 anything about it. You don't force your heart to beat. You don't make it beat. It does it
 by itself. Now, figure a world in which everything happens by itself. It doesn't have to be controlled.
 It's allowed. Whereas, you might say, the idea of God involves the control of everything
 going on, the idea of the Tao is the ruler who abdicates and trusts all the people to
 conduct their own affairs, to let it all happen.
 So this doesn't mean, you see, that there isn't a unified organism, and everything is
 in chaos. It means that the more liberty you give, the more love you give, the more you
 allow things in yourself and in your surroundings to take place, the more order you will have.
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