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 When we turn to ancient Chinese society, we find two philosophical traditions
 playing complementary parts, Confucianism and Taoism.
 According to tradition, the originator of Taoism, Lao Tse, was an older contemporary of Confucius.
 Lao Tse is said to have been the author of the Tao Te Ching, a short book of aphorisms
 setting forth the principles of the Tao and its power of virtue, Te.
 But traditional Chinese philosophy ascribes both Taoism and Confucianism to a still earlier source,
 to a work which lies at the very foundation of Chinese thought and culture,
 dating anywhere from 3000 to 1200 BC.
 This is the I Ching, the Book of Changes.
 The I Ching is ostensibly a book of divination.
 It consists of oracles based on 64 abstract figures, each of which is composed of six lines.
 The lines are of two kinds, divided, or negative, and undivided, or positive.
 And the six-line figures, or hexagrams, are believed to have been based on the various ways
 in which a tortoise shell will crack when heated.
 But an expert in the I Ching need not necessarily use tortoise shells or yarrow stalks.
 He can see a hexagram in anything, in the chance arrangement of a bowl of flowers,
 in objects scattered upon a table, in the natural markings on a pebble.
 A modern psychologist will recognize in this something not unlike a Rorschach test,
 in which the psychological condition of a patient is diagnosed from the spontaneous images
 that the patient sees in a complex inkblot.
 On the other hand, we feel that we decide rationally
 because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand.
 We do not depend upon such irrelevant trifles as the chance tossing of a coin,
 or the patterns of tea leaves, or cracks in a shell.
 We go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way,
 and then, just because of a hunch, or because we are tired of thinking,
 or because the time has come to decide, we act.
 By far the greater part of our important decisions depend upon hunch,
 in other words, upon the peripheral vision of the mind.
 Thus, the reliability of our decisions rests ultimately upon our ability to feel the situation,
 upon the degree to which this peripheral vision has been developed.
 Every exponent of the I Ching knows this.
 He knows that the book itself does not contain an exact science,
 but rather a useful tool which will work for him if he has a good intuition,
 or if, as he would say, he is in the Tao.
 The I Ching had given the Chinese mind some experience in arriving at decisions spontaneously,
 decisions which are effective to the degree that one knows how to let one's mind alone,
 trusting it to work by itself.
 This is wu-wei, since wu means not or non,
 and wei means action, making, doing, striving, straining, or busyness.
 To return to the illustration of eyesight,
 the peripheral vision works most effectively, as in the dark,
 when we see out of the corners of the eyes and do not look at things directly.
 Similarly, when we need to see the details of a distant object, such as a clock,
 the eyes must be relaxed, not staring, not trying to see.
 So too, no amount of working with the muscles of the mouth and tongue
 will enable us to taste our food more acutely.
 The eyes and the tongue must be trusted to do the work by themselves.
 The mental or psychological equivalent of this is the special kind of stupidity
 to which Lao Tse and Chuan Tse so often refer.
 It is not simply calmness of mind, but non-graspingness of mind.
 Wu-shin, literally "no mind," which is to say, unselfconsciousness.
 It is a state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily.


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