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Taoism Part Two - The Way
Reverend Brian J. Kiely,
Unitarian Church of Edmonton, November 4, 2001
Last week we looked at some of the history of Taoism and dipped
into its central text, the slim volume called the Tao Te Ching. This
morning I want to consider the main vehicle through which Taoist
philosophy is taught in this country, the martial art form of T'ai
C'hi.
But a quick review first: Taoism developed in China between the
7th and the 3rd centuries BCE. In a highly rigid and mannered society,
the founder Lao-tze advocated freedom of spirit and body. He believed
that harmony with the universe could be best achieved by letting
go of the need to control. Although he did not coin the phrase, Taoism
was a philosophy where one would 'go with the flow.'
Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born soft and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail. (TTC 76)
In its 2500 years, Taoism has passed through many phases. It has
been a philosophy, a religion, a form of magic and the basis for
both martial arts and divination. In this country, most who make
contact with the Tao, The Way, do so through T'ai C'hi. It is how
I learned of this path.
As a seminary student at the University of Chicago in the 1980's,
I allowed myself to get squeezed by the pressure. Part was self-imposed
and part of it was nature of both graduate schools and army boot
camps.
Afraid of failure, I pushed myself hard, and when I wasn't pushing,
I fretted about whether I had pushed enough. Lots of caffeine got
me moving in the morning and wired by 10 a.m. At night a couple or
three Tylenol sent me into a restless sleep. My thinking was foggy,
my sense of humour only a distant memory and my neck muscles so taught
that turning side to side actually hurt.
By Christmas break, several friends had told me I was hurting myself.
I decided to get help. I had once seen a demonstration of T'ai C'hi.
The demonstrators had told us that it conditioned the body, toned
the muscles and helped decrease stress. I saw a flyer advertising
it on campus and gave it a try.
T'ai C'hi is a form that is part physical and part spiritual exercise.
It is the physical embodiment of Taosim. It consists of learning
and repeating a complex series of movements in a very slow and deliberate
fashion. The traditional way to learn is to mimic your instructor.
In some schools, no words are ever spoken, but the instructor will
move around from time to time and correct posture and movement by
physically moulding you with his or her touch. The goal is to learn
each movement by feel, committing it to a memory of sensation completely
separate from intellect. It is practiced until it becomes entirely
natural and automatic.
Bruce, my instructor, was an unprepossessing man. Perhaps that was
part of his way, for after all, to be noticed you must draw attention
to yourself. Bruce did not do that. But once I began to attend to
him in class, I saw something different. I have never known anyone
with his inner centredness. He was calm. He was still on the inside.
The feeling that emanated from him was good and compassionate.
Bruce was in harmony with his surroundings. Even when he laughed
I sensed the balance and stillness underneath. Perhaps it is self-
awareness, perhaps it is contentment, perhaps it is an understanding
of where his desire should end. I can't say exactly. All I know,
is that when I read the qualities of the Master in the Tao Te Ching,
I am reminded of Bruce's innate grace.
It was through Bruce that I saw the Taoist philosophy brought to
life. It was a marvellous gift. You see, all you find in books are
descriptions of philosophies. To truly comprehend a philosophy, you
must see it embodied. Words aren't enough.
"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name." (TTC
1)
T'ai C'hi teaches balance and harmony in movement. It teaches breath
control. It teaches the opposing and complimentary forces of yin
and yang. To maintain balance and harmony, every thrusting yang move
must be matched by an equal and opposite yin move.
But the beauty if T'ai C'hi is that it does not teach this on an
intellectual level. You watch. You begin to move. You copy what you
see. You make corrections. The body becomes comfortable and relaxed
and flowing. It is the body which first learns the Tao, not the mind.
We live in a culture which can devalue the lessons learned from
the body and the intuition. We sometimes give too much power to the
intellect. We let our minds run things they have no business running.
We get tense and even sick, because we try to impose our order over
that which is healthy and in harmony with nature. It is that Confucian
sense that we can impose order on nature that gave rise to Taoism
in the first place. That's what I did back in first year Div school
and it made me ill.
I found the Tao and T'ai C'hi because I was so desperately out of
touch with inner harmony. I was so engrossed with the things I ought
to be cramming into my mind, that I lost sight of two facts: 1. Life
is for living. 2. Ministry is about helping people live. In time
I realized that the spiritual discipline of T'ai C'hi did more for
my education as a minister than half of the 'brain' courses I took.
It also helped my golf swing...but that's another sermon.
Today, I have slid away from the formal practice of T'ai C'hi, but
not from applying its basic principles to other physical parts of
my life. Those lessons of body are with me all the time. And from
time to time I go back to the source of the wisdom, the Tao Te Ching
I do not look to that book for rules. Instead I use it to I ask
myself if the way I am living is truly in accord with the yearnings
of my innermost self. It opens the gateway to my own soul. Any book
of wisdom, including the Tao Te Ching is just a collection of words
until they touch us internally. Until that time comes, the words
just sit. The Tao Te Ching is an interactive book. You must stop
being a reader and become instead a participant. And you must remain
engaged, even if sometimes that engagement is quiet and passive.
Stephen Mitchell translator of the Tao Te Ching, wrote,
"
People usually think of Lao-tze as a hermit, a dropout from society,
dwelling serenely in some mountain hut, unvisited except perhaps
by the occasional traveller arriving from a '60's joke to ask, 'What
is the meaning of life?'...The misperception may arise from his insistence
on wei wu wei, literally, 'doing, not-doing,' which has been seen
as passivity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A good athelete can enter a state of body-awareness in which the
right stroke, the right movement happens by itself, effortlessly,
without any interference of the conscious will. This is a paradigm
for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The
game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can't tell the
dancer from the dance. Nothing is done because the doer has vanished
wholeheartedly into the deed."
It is a mistake to see Taoist non-action as passivity. In only a
few places in the literature is there an understanding that withdrawing
from society is good. Instead Lao-tze advocates doing only what flows
naturally and easily from inside of you without forcing.
A question occurs: What is going to hold the world together if we
don't? If we do step back, let things go and let things be, what
will become of the world? How will it survive if we let go of our
control. It's a pretty arrogant question, but one I know I ask from
time to time in different ways.
Lao-tze's answer is the Tao. The Tao is the force of the universe.
It is the way of all things, the power and the pattern that was and
is and will be, but it would be completely wrong to call the Tao
god. There is no consciousness to the Tao, it simply is.
The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desire for itself;
thus it is present for all beings. (7)
The Tao is also amoral:
The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners. (5)
In that last excerpt we see not only a further explanation of the
Tao, but a broad hint that we should try to behave as the Tao behaves.
We are to follow the Tao, that is, to act as it acts in the universe.
As the Tao does not take sides, so should the Master not make "moral" choices,
for we never really can know if your choices will lead to good or
evil. Instead we make the decisions of life by acting as naturally
as possible, which is to say by acting as in tune with the Tao as
we possibly can.
Moral and immoral in our western understandings of the words have
no meaning in Taoism. There is but one fault...disharmony. But
that one failing is incredibly broad in scope. If we mistreat our
bodies with overindulgence, we throw ourselves out of harmony.
If our relationships are in disarray, we are in disharmony. If
we steal
or murder or lie, that too is disharmony. But harmony lost can also
be regained, so the sinner is accepted, for the task is to spread
harmony by modelling the peace and calm that comes from following
the Tao.
Notice that the welcoming and acceptance is not a passive act. It
brings us again back to wei wu wei, "doing-not doing".
In the Tao Te Ching the harmony is achieved by becoming one with
the natural rhythms, moving with their movement, flowing with their
flow. Harmony is not static, rather it is a circular path of ebb
and flow.
This is perhaps the first lesson Bruce was able to impart in T'ai
C'hi. There are natural cycles in the universe, there are natural
cycles in our human activities. The arm reaches out, it reaches its
limit, it must return in order to start again. It reaches out, yang.
It comes back, yin. Outward, energy is expended, inward, energy is
conserved. It is in the completeness of this circle that the Master
discovers the harmony. To reach out all the time is not balanced.
To beat a passive retreat all the time is not balanced. The balance,
the harmony comes in the acknowledgement that light and dark, passive
and aggressive good and bad are all parts of the circle of living.
The Tao is the way these parts relate to one another and stay in
balance.
That's the message Bruce taught in those hours of repetitive movement.
He spoke little, for he knew that the first step in understanding
was the movement. T'ai C'hi teaches and opens the creative brain
to the Tao. It goes around the intellectual barriers of suspicion
and distrust we throw up in the face of new ideas. It was only after
I had acquired the inner, non-verbal understanding the Bruce said
the words. For me, it was an "a-ha!" a small moment of
personal enlightenment.
So, in my religious life I am drawn by the Tao, the Way.
In the idea of the Tao I find a more satisfying explanation of the
universe than a god who alternately loves and judges .
In the reciprocal concepts of yin and yang I find personal peace
and serenity. I find permission to back-off and let things take their
course sometimes. I find the ideas of rest and relaxation honoured
in equal measure with effort and action. I learn that facing every
problem head on is neither necessary nor desireable.
Finally in wei wu wei I find a reminder that we should honour and
respect the things we are able to do seemingly without effort, for
it is in those actions that we come closest to following the Way
of the universe itself. There is no need to make life harder than
it has to be.
"Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity."
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