Ep. 34 – Confucianism vs. Taoism

title: Ep. 34 – Confucianism vs. Taoism
author: Alan Watts Being in the Way
contenttype: podcast
publication: Alan Watts Being in the Way
published: 2025-01-30T20:11:44
sourceurl: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/rss.art19.com/episodes/54bf6b2e-dd0f-4ea0-8a82-d8acdc0b55ea.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg9mZWVkcGFyc2VyBjoGRVQ%3D--6249cc52a45c5995843f2b1fcedbd2955c2d7057

word_count: 7017

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As the calendar turns to February, it's like love is in the air. The month is full of flowers, candy, stuffed animals, and of course, lots of talk about dating and relationships. Sometimes, it can feel like everyone has their love lives together, except for you. The truth is that almost everybody is still figuring it out. The path of love isn't easy, no matter if you're married, dating, single, or just focusing on yourself. Therapy can help you find your way and see more clearly where you want to be. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served more than 6 million people globally. Plus, they do the initial matching work for you, so you can focus on your therapy goals. If you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash Allen. That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash Allen. Welcome to the Allen Watts Podcast, being in the way, and I'm your host, Mark Watts. And today we're going to revisit one of our earliest podcasts and sample Taoist way of dropping out from Karma, which is one of the first talks on Taoism that we ever released. And then we're going to complement that with one of the most recent talks on Taoism. It's called Wisdom of the Watercourse, and these two talks complement each other beautifully. I think you'll enjoy the flow, and we're going to start with a little bit of my introduction from the original episode one, and then we're going to go right into the second recording on Wisdom of the Watercourse. I think the philosophy of the Tao or the way, as it is in Chinese, was uniquely elegant, very simple, and it's based on everything having its own path or course, the Tao of things. And it originated as a form of folk wisdom, or what we might describe as kitchen table wisdom. And in early rural culture in China, it was observed that there were better and worse approaches to things, or let's just say ones that were more effective. And these are typically described as splitting wood with the grain, or even putting up a sail instead of rowing. There's a lot of ingenuity in the way that these practices were explained to people. And so finally, after probably many generations of existing as an oral tradition, these were codified, theoretically as a manual for the rulers, who at that time during the warring states period were not doing much of a job of it. So we're going to delight in sharing both these newly discovered works, and also some of the classics, some of the things that have been lighting up the internet in recent years. So we're going to begin with a seminar that was recorded at the Esland Institute, Taoist Way of Dropping Out from Karma. And in the second session, you'll hear him talking about the Indian idea of karma, and how it relates to our participation in the world. And we start today with Taoist Way of Dropping Out from Karma. 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. Confucius said the goodie goodies are the thieves of virtue, meaning that to try to be holy 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. 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, and etiquette in all the spheres of morals. And for this reason has always been twisted by the Taoists for being unnatural. You need these two components, you see, and they play against each other beautifully in Chinese society. Basically 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 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 in 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 a pattern correspond to the Confucians, and those who are Bohemians, or Bums, or Beatniks, or whatever, and 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. So the answer, the name given to the founder of Taoism, means the old boy, and the legend is that when he was born, he was 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 restricted more restricted way of life that Confucianism prescribes. And there is a sort of type in China, who's known as the old rogue, he's a sort of intellectual bum, often found among scholars, who is admired very much, and who 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. So now, first of all, I'm going to talk about ideas which come strictly out of Lao Tzu's book, The Tao De Jing. 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, there's this, you see, 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-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, can, there's no recipe for it. I can't give you any, do it yourself instructions, ABCD as to how it's done. It does 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 make a very funny effect on a Chinese philosopher, because the idea of things being made by the Tao is observed. 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 Dowaging, 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 laud 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 laud 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 in worship. The Tao, having done anything, always escapes and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgement, because it loves obscurity. And Laudzer said the Tao is like water. It's always seeks the low level which human beings abhor. So it's a very mysterious idea. While 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 Isvara, the manifestation of Brahman in the form of a personal God. Bhagavan, the Lord, a 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 Chinese, the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it's an organism. And as we shall see, when we get onto Dwanzar, who is the sort of elaborator of Laudzer, 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. To use a very important Taoist expression, they arise mutually. This is one of the great phrases from the second chapter of Laudzer'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, woo, 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. There's none is cause and effect, it's not that relationship at all. It's like the egg in 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 is 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 queue. And so everything is going, all over the place. One thing starting off another in a mechanical way. But of course, from the standpoint of 20th 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 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'll get a painting entitled Poet Drinking by Moonlight. And you'll see a great landscape. And after some search for the magnifying glass, at last you'll 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 a 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 ancestors sitting on a throne. It's quite a different category, but the Taoist inspired painters, 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 scent 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 that Zirang 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 Daodajing, early on, Laozi 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. Zirang, as this is called, or she's in 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 lets all the people, 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, 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. It is believed generally in India that when a person sets out on the way of liberation, his first problem is to become free from his past karma. The popular theory of karma, the word that literally means action or doing in Sanskrit, so that when we say that something that happens to you is your karma, it's like saying in English it's your own doing, but in popular Indian belief, karma is a sort of built-in moral law or a law of retribution, such that all the bad things you do and all the good things you do have consequences which you have to inherit. And so long as karmic energy remains stored up, you have to work it out. And what the sage endeavours to do is a kind of action which in Sanskrit is called nishkama karma, nishkama means without passion or without attachment, karma action. And so whether he, whatever action he does, he renounces the fruits of the action so that he acts in a way that doesn't generate future karma because future karma continues you in the wheel of becoming samsara, the round and keeps you being reincarnated. Now then in that case, when the time comes that you start to get out of the chain of karma, all the creditors that you have start presenting themselves for payment. In other words, a person who begins to say to study yoga is felt that he will suddenly get sick or that his children will die or that he loses money or all sorts of catastrophes will occur because the karmic debt is being cleared up. And there's no hurry to be cleared up if you're just living along like anybody, but if you embark on the spiritual life a certain hurry occurs. And therefore since this is known, it's rather discouraging to start these things. The Christian way of saying the same thing is that if you plan to be, to change your life shall we say to turn over a new leaf, you mustn't let the devil know because he will oppose you with all his might if he suddenly discovers that you're going to escape from his power. So for example, if you have a bad habit, say you drink too much and you make a new year's resolution that during this coming year you'll stop drinking. That's a very, very dangerous thing to do because the devil will immediately know about it. And what will happen will be this, he will confront you with the prospect of 365 drinkless days. And that will be awful, you know, just overwhelming. And you won't be able to make much more than three days on the wagon. So in that case you compromise with the devil and say, just today I'm not going to drink you see, but tomorrow maybe, you know, we'll go back. Then when tomorrow comes you say, oh just another day let's try out, that's all. And the next day you say, oh one more day won't make much difference. So you only do it for the moment and you don't let the devil know that you have a secret intention of going on day after day after day after day. But of course there's something still better than that. And that is not to let the devil know anything. And that means of course not to let yourself know. One of the many meanings of that saying, let not your left hand know what your right hand do with is just this. And that was why in Zen discipline, a great deal of it centers around acting without premeditation. As those of you know who read Herrigal's book Zen in the art of archery, it was necessary to release the bowstring without first saying now. There's a wonderful story who may also have read by a German writer von Kleist about a boxing match with a bear. The man can never defeat this bear because the bear always knows his plans in advance. And is ready to deal with any situation. The only way to get through to the bear would be to hit the bear without having first intended to do so. That would catch him. And so this is one of the great, great problems in the spiritual life or whatever you want to call it, is to be able to have intention and act simultaneous. By this means you escape karma and you escape the devil. So you might say that the Taoist is exemplary in this respect. That this is getting free from karma without making any previous announcement. Of simply supposing we have a train and we want to unload the train of its freight cars, you can go to the back end and you can unload them one by one and shunt them into the siding. But the simplest of all ways of unloading is to uncouple between the engine and the first car and that gets rid of the whole bunch at once. And it is in that sort of way you see that the Taoist gets rid of karma without challenging it. And so it has the reputation you see of being the easy way. There are all kinds of yogas and ways for people who want to be difficult. And one of the great gambits of a man like Gurdjev was to make it all seem as difficult as possible because that challenged the vanity of his students. If some teacher, some guru says really this isn't difficult at all, it's perfectly easy. Some people will say, oh, he's not really the real thing. We want something tough and difficult. When we see somebody starts out giving you a discipline that's very, very weird and rigid, people think, now there is the thing. That man means business, see? And so they flatter themselves by going to such a guy that they are serious students, whereas the other people are only dabblers and so on. All right, if you have to do it that way, that's the way you have to do it. But the Taoist is the kind of person who shows you the shortcut and shows you how to do it by intelligence rather than effort because that's what it is. Taoism is in that sense what everybody is looking for, the easy way in the shortcut. Being cleverness instead of muscle. So the question naturally arises, isn't it cheating? When in any game somebody really starts using his intelligence, he will very likely be accused of cheating. And to draw the line between skill and cheating is a very difficult thing to do. Maybe the inferior intelligence will always accuse a superior intelligence of cheating. That's its way of saving face. You beat me by means that weren't fair. We were originally having a contest to find out who had the strongest muscles and you know we were pushing against it like this, this, this, this. And this was proof who had the strongest muscles, but then you introduced some gimmick into it, some judo trick or something like that, you see. And you're not playing fair. So in the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are roots for the stupid people and roots for the intelligent people and the latter are faster. This was perfectly clearly explained by Quay Nang, the six-patriarch of Zen in China in his sutra where he says the difference between the gradual school and the sudden school is they both arrive at the same point, but the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast-witted people. Can you, in other words, find a way that sees into your own nature, that sees into the Tao immediately. And at the end of this morning's talk, I pointed out to you the immediate way. The way through now, when you know that this moment is the Tao and this moment is by it's considered by itself, without past and without future, eternal, neither coming into being nor going out of being, there is Nirvana. And there is a whole Chinese philosophy of time based on this. It hasn't, to my knowledge, been very much discussed by Taoist writers, it's been more discussed by Buddhist writers, but it's all based on the same thing. Do Gen, the great 13th century Japanese Zen Buddhist, studied in China, and he wrote a book called Shobogenzo, a Roshi recently said to me in Japan, that's a terrible book because it tells you everything. It gives the whole secret away, but in the course of this book he says, you don't, there is no such thing as a progression in time. The spring does not become the summer. There is first spring and then there is summer. So in the same way, you now do not become you later. This is T.S. Eliot's idea in four quartets where he says that the person who was settled down in the train to read the newspaper is not the same person who stepped onto the train from the platform. And therefore also you who sit here are not the same people who came in at the door. These states are separate, each in its own place. There was the coming in at the door person, but there is actually only the here and now sitting person. And the person sitting here and now is not the person who will die. Because we are all a constant flux. And the continuity of the person from past through present to future is as illusory in its own way as the upward movement of the red lines on a revolving barber pole. You know it goes round and round and round and the whole thing seems to be going up or going down, whichever the case may be, but actually nothing is going up or down. So when you throw a pebble into the pond and you make a concentric rings of waves, there is an illusion that the water is flowing upwards and no water is flowing upwards at all. Water is only going up and down. What appears to move outwards is the wave, not the water. This kind of philosophical argument says that our seeming to go along in a course of time, it doesn't really happen. The Buddhists say suffering exists but no one who suffers. Deeds exist but no doers are found. A path there is but no one who follows it and Nirvana is but no one who attains it. So in this way they look upon the continuity of life as the same sort of illusion that is produced when you take a cigarette and in the dark world it and the illusion of a circle is created, whereas there is only the one point of fire. The argument then is so long as you are in the present, there aren't any problems. The problems exist only when you allow presence to amalgamate. There is a way of putting this in Chinese, which is rather interesting, they have a very interesting sign, this pronounced nian, in Japanese nian, and the top part of the character means now and the bottom part means the mind heart, the shin. And so this is as it were an instant of thought. In Sanskrit they use this character as the equivalent for the Sanskrit word shana. And if you double this character but it twice, or three times and I'll write the Chinese for ditto, nian nian, means thought after thought after thought. Now the Zen master Joshu was once asked, what is the mind of a child? And he said a ball in a mountain stream, what do you mean by a ball in a mountain stream? He said thought after thought after thought with no block. A really virtuous person doesn't show his virtue. He is like, well as a poem in Chinese which says, entering the forest he doesn't disturb a blade of grass, entering the water he doesn't make a ripple. He looks very ordinary, and so his virtue can't be detected. He doesn't stink of virtue. So dhe then is the virtue of the great artist, say or craftsman, who creates marvelous works of art but always as if he was making no effort. And so we say of great art that it's artless, that it seems to come naturally, that he does it as if he were falling off a log. Now of course we know that it isn't that simple. So what everybody wants to know then is how to acquire that great naturalness in everything, so that we in our human lives manifest the dau manifested through man is dhe. How do you do it? So the transitional word which shows the way to realize dhe in one's life, this is pronounced this one is woo, and this one is way, woo way. Way means to act, to strain, to strive or to interfere. And so the dauest manner of life is woo way, don't force it. You may need to use a rudder but don't ever go against the stream. If you are swimming and you are caught in a very strong current, you will be lost if you try to swim against it. You must swim with it and edge to the side. That's woo way. This has been very well understood, even by the samurai in Japan, who when they became very great real masters of swordsmanship, always found out and belonged to the no sword school because the real master of the sword never uses one. There is a story that there were in Japan in ancient times two master swordsmiths and there was a great debate as to which of them was the better. So some soldiers took a sword made by each master and decided to test them out. They first took a sword made by the man who in general opinion was perhaps a little inferior. And they went to a stream and they dipped the sword in the stream with the edge of the blade facing upstream. They dropped a piece of paper on the stream. And it floated towards the sword and as it floated the sword simply divided it into the two pieces of paper joined together on the other side and went on down the stream. They then took the blade of the man reputed perhaps to be the greatest master and thought well it'd be pretty difficult to improve on that. But we'll try it anyway. So they gave the same test. But as the piece of paper approached the sword it moved over to one side, skirted it all together and went on. So the true master will never have to be in a fight. And for that reason Aikido as a athletic technique is learning how to be unattachable is to always avoid the fight. And so however hard people strike at you they will always be hitting the air. That's death you see, that's magical power. But it all comes about through not using effort, not straining at anything, never strained. Like you never force a key in a lock, you'll just bend the key. You jiggle and jiggle and jiggle until it turns smoothly or put oil on it or something. Never force it. Same way when you use your eyes, don't stare at anything in order to see it clearly. Because you'll just tie your eyes and make the image fuzzy. If you want to see the time on a distant clock, you close your eyes. You imagine black and relax your eyes. Then look at the clock lazily. And you will see that the detail is clearer. And so now there's another story with which I will exemplify this. A later than Lao Tzu there was another Taoist sage called Lietsa. And he had the reputation of being able to ride on the wind. Of course, that's metaphorical. And so when Suzuki was asked what it's like to have the experience of Satori or Enlightenment, he once said it is like ordinary everyday experience, except it's about two inches off the ground. Where you don't feel burdened by your own body, where you don't feel you were something that you have to lug around and hold a club over and generally boss. So the sense of lightness, that's the meaning of Lietsa being able to walk on the air. But he told the story of how he managed to do it. He said he went to a great guru and this guru paid no attention to him. So he just sat outside the door of his hut and a year went by. And still this man paid no attention to him. So Lietsa went away, discussed it. But then he thought it over a bit and realized this man had a terrific reputation. And that if perhaps he had been a little bit more patient, he would have had some teaching. So he went back. And the great sage looked at him and said, why is ceaseless coming and going? So he sat down again at the entrance of the hut and for a further year attempted to control his mind in such a way as never to think of profit or loss or advantage or disadvantage. And then at the end of that year the teacher looked at him. For another year he practiced. And at the end of that the teacher invited him to come in the hut and sit on the mat. Then for the next year however, he did something quite different and he says this, I let my eyes see whatever they wanted to look at. I let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear. I let my mouth say whatever it wanted to say and I let my mind think whatever it wanted to think. And at the end of that year I didn't know what was subject and what was object. I didn't take any account of time. I was riding on the wind but I didn't really know whether the wind was riding on me or I was riding on the wind. And this was when he got to float you see. He allowed democracy to prevail. He said to his eyes, I'm not going to try and control you. You know better how to see than I do. To his ears, I'm not going to force you to listen to anything. You know how to hear better than I can direct you and so on for everything. He trusted his own brain. He trusted his own organism. This is where way. So in exactly the same way, if you practice meditation, don't try to meditate. Like the choir was told not to try to sing. Don't force it. When you meditate, let your lungs breathe the way they want to breathe. Let your mind think anything it wants to think about. Don't try to repress thoughts. Let your eyes see whatever they're looking at. And let your ears, your ear drums vibrate to any oscillations there may be in the air. Let go. You think that's very risky? It isn't. It really isn't. It's like a ship in a typhoon. They always shut the engines off and drift. Because if the propellers are going and the tail end of the ship is thrown up, serves to be above the water level, the whole ship will vibrate and be shaken to pieces by those revolving propellers. So in a big storm, and life is a big storm all the time, you let go and you become like a cock on the water or a ping pong ball in a mountain stream. That's what's called purposelessness in Darwinism, which is a form of woo-way. And a Darwinist text says, when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the point has been grasped. So it's the same problem we have in India. You know there's a superstition that if you think of a monkey while you're taking medicine, the medicine won't work. You're in the predicament of trying not to think of the monkey while taking medicine. And that happens to us whenever we try to be natural. Everybody can see it's forced, it's faked. And so you think then, how can I be genuinely natural? How can I really flow with the course of nature? How can I let my mind think whatever it wants to think? Because the moment I start doing that, I realize I'm doing it with an ulterior motive. I'm trying to meditate, I'm trying to grow spiritually. And that ruins the whole thing. Well, when you've tried for a long time to get the right attitude and you find that all the attitudes you get are phony ones. Then you come to the realization there's nothing you can do about it. It really doesn't make any difference. And again, the principle that I've emphasized all along, you give up. And in so doing, gain the strength and energy that you were looking for. You see, it's like trying to live in the present. Goodger refused to set his students the exercise he called self-remembering. That is constantly, all day long, be completely aware of what you're doing. Have your mind always on the immediate moment. Oh, and it's tough, tough, tough, tough to do that. You get distracted all the time. Till one fine day you realize to your astonishment, there is no way at all of having your mind anywhere else but in the present moment. Because even when you think about the past or the future, you're doing it now, aren't you? And that results in a very curious transformation of consciousness. You feel that the present moment is flowing along and carrying you with it all the time. Just like the flow of the Tao. The flow of the Tao is what we would call the flow of the present. And you're with it. There's nowhere being anywhere else. Jung Jung, the book called the Unwobbling Pivot, says, the Tao is that from which one cannot deviate. That from which one can deviate is not the Tao. Or to put it into the form of a Zen story, the master, Joshua, said to Nansen, what is the Tao? Nansen replied, your everyday mind is the Tao. Joshua asked, how do you get into accord with it? Nansen replied, when you try to accord, you deviate. So that's the principle. And this, although we're getting the paradox, you see, this sounds like a completely laissez faire spineless attitude to life. But it is precisely Taoism, which underlies in common with Buddhism, in conjunction with Buddhism. It underlies the greatest achievements of Chinese art and culture. It underlies judo. It underlies the Zen arts of Japan, calligraphy, architecture, gardens. It is the form of Chinese philosophy which in subsequent years became most interested in science and in the study of nature. The confusions never were had any interest in science, because they were bookish people. They were all absorbed in texts. They were essentially scholastics and never opened the book of nature. But the Taoists were always observing natural phenomena, how they worked. They were interested above all in manual skills and using the Tao to perfect manual skills. And therefore, these lazy people achieved the most interesting results, because they were like water, which is lazy, and always seeks the line of least resistance. But that is almost the same thing as intelligence. You've been listening to the second talk in the podcast, Wisdom of the Watercourse. It is part of our new series on Taoism, which is called Tao for now, way beyond seeking. And like all of our other recordings, it's available on our website at AlanWats.org. And there you'll also learn a lot about the background and our organizational history and some of the things that we're trying to do today to keep the works of Alan Watts alive and vibrant in this world. This podcast was produced in conjunction with the BeHerNow Network, and our theme music is by Zakir Hussein, courtesy of Moment Records. Thank you for being with us today.