The Useless Tree

Baiyunguan: White Cloud Temple

I went to Baiyunguan - White Cloud Temple - today, a place where Daoism is practiced as a religion. It's an important location, a key site for the Quanzhen sect of Daoism.  I have to admit, I do not know much about religious Daoism - I am more of a philosophy guy - but it's obvious that it is a deep and complex faith tradition.

This is a living place of worship.  There are Daoist adepts, dressed in a kind of uniform of white and black, who oversee a series of temple halls dedicated to various and sundry saints, people who, throughout the ages, since about 100 CE, created a canon of spiritual practice and passed the tradition along to their predecessors.  There is a Daoist heaven and hell, and people will come to the temple and pray for good luck or good health or just generally seek solace in their lives.  On specific holy days there are special ceremonies.  Today was not one of those days, so there were not that many people in attendance.  The people who were there burned joss sticks in front of the deities, bowed, asked for blessings, in a manner similar to Buddhist temples I have visited.

The entire complex is well kept. There are a good number of priests and adepts to keep things in order.  But I also got the sense that the community contributed significantly: there were large, rather fancy vases in some of the halls, containing imitation flowers that were well crafted.  I suspect successful businessmen come to seek good fortune; there were a couple of black Audi's idling out front.  One of the deities, in fact, is precisely charged with responding to prayers for wealth.

There was a sign that stated the temple and the sect were patriotic and law-abiding.  Indeed, this is also the organizational center of the Chinese Daoist Association, the government office in charge of keeping an eye on religious Daoists.  The state is wary of religious revival of all sorts, Daoism included, but whatever surveillance there was did not disrupt the peace and quiet of the grounds.  It was quite a pleasant place.  Here are some photos:

 

The main gate

 

Ai Weiwei, Zhuangzi, and Life at the Margins

Happy New Year!

I saw the Ai Weiwei documentary, Never Sorry, again last night, and led a bit of a discussion about it afterwards.  If you haven't seen it, you should.  Alison Klayman does a great job presenting Ai's political engagement, and the way his art has been transformed into dissidence (or is art always and everywhere dissidence?).  At one point he is asked how he understands himself as an artist, and he replies that he sees his role as something like a chess player, waiting for the adversary to make its next move so he can ponder his next action.  Art as strategy; or maybe strategy as art.

In preparing for our post-screening discussion, I found this NYT Q&A with Ai written by Didi Kirsten Tatlow.  And this exchange jumped out at me:

Q.

For nearly three years now you haven’t been outside China. Do you feel marginalized? Do you feel you are missing international developments?

 A.

I think that today the concept of marginalization is a very interesting one for an artist. As a contemporary artist, we’re always looking for reasons to exist in marginalization, for the possibilities in marginalization. The minute we talk about possibilities, in reality we’re talking about the question of marginalization.....

The Party leadership is trying to marginalize him, keeping him from physically traveling and thus cutting him off from one aspect of his inter-cultural creativity.  This tactic is failing, however, because, as Ai goes on to state in the interview, the internet provides him with extensive connectivity.  You can follow him on Twitter, where he daily protests the extra-judicial repression of his international travel, and remembers the children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.  He is one of the most globally connected people in the world, as the documentary illustrates.

But he is right to make the point about artists seeking out marginalization. That is what art is all about: discovering an expression that shifts the viewer's perspective, shifting the frame, de-centering an image or idea that had become settled.  It is about bringing the center to the margins and the margins to the center.  This is what Xu Bing accomplished with Phoenix, taking construction refuse and forging it into a representation of imperial glory; grandeur from garbage.

And this is what much of Ai's work strives for.  In Sunflower Seeds, he takes what appears to be a wholly insignificant object, sunflower seeds, and uses that to call our attention to larger social and cultural ideas.  The gallery web site states:

Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain.

What seems to be natural is actually carefully produced; the vast uniformity is really a riot of individual presences; the mundane is profound.  And so on.  All brought forth by placing the marginal at the center.

Here is where Zhuangzi comes to mind, especially chapter 5.  In this section, the writer presents us, repeatedly, with the image of marginalized people - criminals who have had a foot chopped off and people with other physical deformities - individuals who would not conventionally be viewed as exemplary in social or moral terms.  But Zhuangzi uses these marginalized figures as avatars of a new understanding.  They become sources of wisdom and knowledge and virtue.   Here's and example (Legge's translation):

Duke Ai of Lu asked Zhongni, saying, 'There was an ugly man in Wei, called Ai-tai Tuo. His father-in-law, who lived with him, thought so much of him that he could not be away from him. His wife, when she saw him (ugly as he was), represented to her parents, saying, "I had more than ten times rather be his concubine than the wife of any other man." He was never heard to take the lead in discussion, but always seemed to be of the same opinion with others. He had not the position of a ruler, so as to be able to save men from death. He had no revenues, so as to be able to satisfy men's craving for food. He was ugly enough, moreover, to scare the whole world. He agreed with men instead of trying to lead them to adopt his views; his knowledge did not go beyond his immediate neighbourhood. And yet his father-in-law and his wife were of one mind about him in his presence (as I have said) - he must have been different from other men. I called him, and saw him. Certainly he was ugly enough to scare the whole world. He had not lived with me, however, for many months, when I was drawn to the man; and before he had been with me a full year, I had confidence in him. The state being without a chief minister, I (was minded) to commit the government to him. He responded to my proposal sorrowfully, and looked undecided as if he would fain have declined it. I was ashamed of myself (as inferior to him), but finally gave the government into his hands. In a little time, however, he left me and went away. I was sorry and felt that I had sustained a loss, and as if there were no other to share the pleasures of the kingdom with me. What sort of man was he?'

魯哀公問於仲尼曰：「衛有惡人焉，曰哀駘它。丈夫與之處者，思而不能去也。婦人見之，請於父母曰『與為人妻，寧為夫子妾』者，十數而未止也。未嘗有聞其唱 者也，常和而已矣。無君人之位以濟乎人之死，無聚祿以望人之腹。又以惡駭天下，和而不唱，知不出乎四域，且而雌雄合乎前。是必有異乎人者也。寡人召而觀 之，果以惡駭天下。與寡人處，不至以月數，而寡人有意乎其為人也；不至乎期年，而寡人信之。國無宰，寡人傳國焉。悶然而後應，氾而若辭。寡人醜乎，卒授之 國。無幾何也，去寡人而行，寡人卹焉若有亡也，若無與樂是國也。是何人者也？」

The Duke is so taken with this hideous man that he tries to make him chief minister. The marginal had come to the center and transformed understanding - pretty much what contemporary art, Ai Weiwei's included, strives to do.

This is a key element to Daoist thinking in general, and Zhuangzi is particularly good at turning our attention toward the unconventional, the downtrodden, the rejected.  Think of this excerpt of passage 8 of the Daodejing (Hinton translation):

Lofty nobility is like water.  Water's nobility is to enrich the ten thousand things and yet never strive: it just settles through places people everywhere loathe.  Therefore, it's nearly Way.

上善若水。水善利萬物而不爭，處衆人之所惡，故幾於道

When you are down in the abyss, the "...places people everywhere loathe....," you're close to Way.

So, yes, there is a Daoist aspect to Ai's work.  But it has to be mentioned: he is not as marginal as he might want to be.  Beyond his international fame, he is the child of a famous poet, Ai Ching.  And his father's political status in the post-Mao period, as a good socialist who had been persecuted unjustly during the Cultural Revolution and thus respected by some powerful leaders after 1979, no doubt gave Weiwei some protection when he went all transgressive in his art. His family's experience has been a complex dynamic of privilege and persecution, neither unambiguously marginal nor comfortably central.  One wonders if people more ensconced at the margins would ever have the chances he has had.

Ai is fully aware of his social-political status, and he uses what privilege he might have to press against the repressive limitations of state power.  His work strives to open the way for others at the margins to express themselves and live their lives freely. And, in a way, that's what Zhuangzi is doing in his writing....

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry OFFICIAL TRAILER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Nelson Mandela: Daoist Sage

I'm reading obituaries of the great man, Nelson Mandela, who accomplished a transition to democracy in a divided and fraught South Africa. And I am reflecting on what I know of his life and how that experience has flowed through my own life: the anger at the horrendous system of apartheid; the frustration with conservative American apologists for apartheid; the hope at a 1987 Hugh Masekela concert when he sang "Mandela (Bring Him Back Home)"; the exhilaration at the1994 inauguration. Rarely in political history do we find as clear a sense of positive achievement as we do in the career of Mandela.

As a political leader, and a pragmatist, he was a complex man. His strategic vision of a multi-racial, democratic, constitutionally ordered South Africa required, at times, shifting tactics. He made mistakes, as we all do. But his world historical effect in realizing democratic transition is, ultimately, extraordinary.

Much has been written about Mandela, and much more will now come in retrospection, but here is something I noticed today: an echo of the Daodejing in his leadership style. Consider these lines from the NYT obituary:

In his autobiography, Mr. Mandela recalled eavesdropping on the endless consensus-seeking deliberations of the tribal council and noticing that the chief worked “like a shepherd.”

“He stays behind the flock,” he continued, “letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”

That would often be his own style as leader and president.

 And now these lines from Daodejing 66 (Hinton translation):

So, wanting to rule over the people a sage speaks from below them, and wanting to lead the people he follows along behind them,

then he can reign above without weighing the people down and stay ahead without leading the people to ruin.

 是以聖人欲上民，必以言下之；欲先民，必以身後之。是以聖人處上而民不重，處前而民不害

He didn't do this literally all the time.  Perhaps his most notable achievement - negotiating while in prison for his release and the beginnings of a democratic transition - was done, initially, without consulting his closest ANC allies.  He got out in front of them to lay the ground work for a process that required compromises they were likely to reject out of hand.  But as that process unfolded, after he was out of prison and working on the creation of a new constitution, he had to let the situation develop, see where certain people and political forces were headed, so that he could, in the end, guide them from behind and bring them to democracy without "leading the people to ruin." 

Another aspect of his political life has a Daoist resonance: at the end of his five-year term as President, he yielded power.  In doing so, he avoided repeating a common mistake of many others who have held on too long to power. He understood that only by letting go, by not doing (wuwei), would it be possible for democracy to develop.  South Africa is not a perfect place politically.  But I suspect it is much better off now as a result of Mandela's exemplary leadership, including relinquishment of power.

It could be argued that Mandela is far from a Daoist because he was so canny a strategist.  He did not just let things happen; rather, he worked hard to move events toward his preferred outcome.  In that way, he had a bit of Sunzi in him, as in this calculation:

Mr. Mandela seated his visitors [other ANC leaders] at a table and patiently explained his view that the enemy was morally and politically defeated, with nothing left but the army, the country ungovernable. His strategy, he said, was to give the white rulers every chance to retreat in an orderly way. He was preparing to meet Mr. de Klerk, who had just taken over from Mr. Botha.

As Sunzi (Griffith, 7.30-7.32) says:

Do not thwart an enemy returning homewards.

To a surrounded enemy you must leave a way of escape.

Do not press an enem at bay.

 歸師勿遏，圍師必闕，窮寇勿迫

This is a remarkable insight, given Mandela's historical context. It would have been easy to rush unrestrained toward the complete destruction of the white power structure that had repressed him and so many others. But he was looking beyond immediate victory toward the creation of something larger and more lasting.  He might be criticized for allowing the oppressers to retain signficant portions of their power, especially their economc power, but he understood that in doing so political power could be secured for the majority in a relatively peaceful manner.

And maybe he intuitively understood this line from Sunzi (I don't know if he directly studied the text):

Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strengths and strikes weaknesses.

And as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy.

And as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant conditions.

夫兵形象水，水之形，避高而趨下：兵之形，避實而擊虛；水因地而制流，兵因敵而制勝。故兵無常勢，水無常形；

(Griffith, 6.27-6.29)

Mandela adapted himself and his strategy to the circumstances that surrounded him and thus found a way through to the outcome he wanted most: constitutional democracy.   And that sense of water-like adaptabilty to circumstance and sensitivity to context is something that Sunzi shares with Daoism.

I don't want to make too much of the Daoist themes here. Mandela was obviously more than that.  So, we'll give him the last word:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Return to the Trolley Problem: The Daoists Are Right!

A review in yesterday's NYT Sunday Book Review brings the infamous "trolley problem" to wider public attention. Having blogged on this issue before, primarily from a Daoist perspective (see here and here), I will not describe the full analytic apparatus of the trolley problem, but will simply point out the the NYT review makes some points that bolster the Daoist view.

Most importantly, the review briefly cites empirical studies that attempt to discover how people actually behave when confronted with the trolley problem, as opposed to rationalist assertions of how people should behave:

The results of such studies have been fascinating, showing, for example, that women are less likely than men to sacrifice the Fat Man, or even to flip the lever in Spur. Other investigations reveal that people are more likely to approve the killing of the Fat Man if they have just seen a comedy clip as opposed to “a tedious documentary about a Spanish village.” The contingent nature of our ethical responses in general emerges from other research. We are more generous toward a stranger if we have just found a dime; a judge’s decision to grant parole depends on how long it has been since he or she had lunch. Are these the “deep-rooted moral instincts” on which we are willing to found decisions that may affect tens or hundreds of thousands of fellow humans?

The key here is: "... the contingent nature of our ethical responses in general..."  It seems that people just do not behave in the manner that rationalists presume.  We cannot wholly abstract ourselves from our immediate social and cultural contexts to arrive at some ideal Archimedean point that allows for near-perfect objectivity.  In a sense, then, the whole exercise is something of a canard, a set-up that stacks the deck in favor of consequentialst thinking.

It could be argued that bringing behavioral data into the discussion is unfair, mixing, as it does, empirical and normative reasoning.  But, in fact, that is just the point for critics of the kind of overly rationalist thinking that consequentialists love. Such critics, Daoists included, reject the analytic separation of the empirical and the normative, and argue we must ground our normative thinking in an understanding of how we actually behave. 

That is where the Daoists - and the Confucians - do better than consequentialists. Both perspectives recognize the inescapably context-dependent nature of human knowledge and action.  In the case of Daoists, that context is very, very specific, limited to the interaction of an individual de 德 - ("character," "integrity," "potency," "potential") as it unfolds in the vastness of dao 道.  We cannot judge the dynamic experience  of one de-dao relationship with the dynamic experience of another de-dao relationship. So, we cannot confidently generalize how one might be more right than another.  As I suggested in an earlier post:

But Daoism does not express a clear principle that can be followed in most cases.  It would offer no imperative to act, but it would also offer no imperative not to act.  If action occurred spontaneously and immediately, a Daoist would not ask for reasons. There might be many causes of such action.

This does not mean that all actions, or non-actions, have the same moral valence for a Daoist.  There is a Daoist ethic that is averse to killing or harming others ( discuss this on pp. 89-90 of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao).  But there would be no false assumption of a kind of moral precision that consequentialists put forth.  The "answer" to the Trolley problem is not simply a numeric comparison of death rates.

And it that the Daoists are right (and I say that with full understanding that the declaration of their rightness is, in itself, paradoxical from a Daoist perspective...)

Birthday Thoughts

     Today is Aidan's birthday.
 
     He would have been twenty-two.

     As I think about his life, and what he gave to me, a passage from Zhuangzi comes to mind.  Without him, I would not have the understanding of this passage that I now have.  It is his gift to me and, so, I post it here as a birthday present for all.

Sufficient because "sufficient."  Insufficient because "insufficient."  Traveling the Way makes it Dao.  Naming things makes them real.  Why real?  Real because "real." Why nonreal? Nonreal because "nonreal."  So the real is originally there  in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things.  There's nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not sufficient.

Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing [beauty], the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange - in Dao they all move as one and the same.  In difference is the whole; in wholeness is the broken.  Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again.

Only one who has seen through things understands moving freely as one and the same.  In this way, rather than relying on your own distinctions, you dwell in the ordinary.  To be ordinary is to be self-reliant; to be self-reliant is to move freely; to move freely is to arrive.  That's almost it, because to arrive is to be complete.  But to be complete without understanding how - that is called Dao.

Daoist Gun Control Redux

I posted this in January, but the inhuamnity of American gun culture requires us to return, again and again, to the sad topic of firearm violence:

 

 The Daodejing takes a dim view of weapons.  Passage 31 begins (Legge translation):

Now arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. Therefore they who have the Dao do not like to employ them.

夫佳兵者，不祥之器，物或惡之，故有道者不處。

This is not simply an anti-war message, though the Daodejing can be seen as generally anti-war.  The aversion to arms runs deeper. Weapons distort our humanity.  They take us away from allowing Dao to unfold as it will; they are instruments of coercive intervention that often do more harm than good.  In a well-ordered society, as in passage 80, they are unnecessary (Eno translation):

Though there be armor and weaponry, they shall not be deployed.

雖有甲兵，無所陳之.

Weapons bring out the worst in people.  They make us think that we can easily dominate others, take what we want without fear of reprisal.  They instill a false sense of power: yes, a gun would allow me to kill a person right here and now, and the fear of that sort of violent death may well cause that person to do what I want right here and now.  But this is a false power because, over time, that coercive force will reach its limit, or it may even inspire counteractions that are more powerful.  A gun may facilitate a victory today, but it cannot bring victories forever.

The wretched "debate" on gun control in the US misses most of this.  Gun zealots hold an impoverished view of society, one that presumes the complete absence of civility.  All they can think of is violent attack against their persons that they believe they can somehow prevent with a firearm.  They resist data that suggest gun ownvership brings an increased likelihood of accidental harm and suicide.  Due to the power of the gun lobby, advocates of stricter regulation are reduced to the narrowest proposals for limiting the availability of fire arms.  Thus, American society is flooded with guns, and grows coarser because of it.

Guns also undermine democracy.  Think about it: democracy requires freedom of expression.  Open, rational debate, with the possibility of peacefully persuading others of your position is the ideal.  Firearms distort that process.  The coercive potential they represent can silence people, weakening the give and take that democracy require.  Interestingly, although not a treatise on democracy, the Daodejing seems to understand this in passage 36 (Hinton):

Fish should be kept in their watery depths: a nation's honed instruments of power should be kept well-hidden from the people.

魚不可脫於淵，國之利器不可以示人。

This statement will not doubt enrage gun owners who resist reasonable regulation.  They will see in it a conspiracy on the part of state power-holders to dominate the population. But that ignores the prior point that state power-holders themselves should not rely upon weapons.  The point of passage 36 is that "soft and weak overcome hard and strong" (柔弱勝剛強).  Fishes find natural comfort in the depths; and people will find their best natural expressions when weapons are not ostentatiously displayed.

Americans can learn something from the Daodejing here: weapons weaken our humanity.

chart source

Daoism as the Core of Chinese Culture

"Confucianism" is often taken as a metonym for "Chinese culture."  It's easy to see why: the educated elite in imperial China, who themselves had to master the Confucian classics, had a material interest in asserting the cultural preeminence of those works.  The bureaucratic civil service exam, a political invention of the Han dynasty not found in the pre-Qin texts, melded Confucian philosophy and state power together in a powerfully hegemonic union.  

But "Chinese culture" has always been more than "Confucianism."  It includes other philosophical and religious perspectives: Legalism, Daoism, Buddhism, the "school of names" Mohism, and others. "Culture" is a vague and expansive terms, which includes many other aspects of human life: architecture, cuisine, dress, aesthetics, etc.  Reducing the vastness of cultural belief and production and performance in historical China to a single, and far from all-encompassing, rubric - "Confucianism" -  is obviously flawed. But it's done all the time, perhaps because "Chinese culture" is so large and complex.  You have to start somewhere to get a sense of it and Confucianism might well seem to be the best point of entry.

The danger, however, is, when starting with Confucianism, we might come to assume that this is somehow the core of Chinese culture, the pivot around which all the other elements rotate.  If we fall into that assumption we could be distorting our view, buying into a perspective that imperial power holders preferred but one that limits our capacity to appreciate the full significance of other cultural elements.  Indeed, it is not surprising at all that CCP apparachiks chose "Confucius Institutes" as the name for thieir Chinese as a foreign language programs.

So, let's do a little thought experiment as an antedote to the usual cultural preeminence that is granted to Confucianism: how might we understand Daoism as the core of Chinese culture?  Here are some ideas (and a quick caveat: I do not mean to imply here that "Chinese culture" can be expressed in these terms alone - this is not a "Chinese characteristics" exercise. Just pushing against the Confucian mainstream...):

    - Daoism instills a certain detachment; that is, a person following Dao, in a Daoist manner, will let go of instrumental and emotional attachments to things and people and expectations. We cannot control our fates, so when circumstances move in a direction we were not expecting or do not desire, acceptance is the natural response.  To some, this might smack of "fatalism," which can have measurable socio-cultural effects.  To others, this could be seen as a healthy understanding of the limits of human efficacy in the world (this is my personal preference).  However we interpret it, we can note that Daoist acceptance has long been present and important in Chinese worldviews.  Maybe that is why Lu Xun was purported to have said: "Daoism is the root of Chinese culture." (I cannot find a specific textual reference for this statement. Suggestions welcome!).  Lu saw this as a problem (if we see "The True Story of "Ah Q" as holding a critique of Daoism...), but we needn't agree with that interpretation while accepting the more basic point of Daoism's cultural centrality.

    - Everybody reads the Daoist classics. And by everybody I mean the educated elite in China throughout history.  An old saw (again, no specific textual references. Help!) had it that a person was (had to be?) a Confucian during his or her working life, but a Daoist in retirement (or a Confucian during the working day and a Daoist in the evening).  This suggests that while Confucianism had a certain material advantage, being the curriculum one had to master to gain access to government position and material wealth, Daoism is what everyone really aspired to.  Daoist-like thinking even makes an appearance in the earliest Confucian texts.  Analects 15.5 reads:

The Master said: 'If anyone has managed to rule by doing nothing, surely it was Shun.  And how did he do so much by doing nothing? He just sat reverently facing south, that's all!" (Hinton)

子曰：「無為而治者，其舜也與？夫何為哉，恭己正南面而已矣。」

Yes, that would be a direct statement of wu-wei - 無為 - right in the middle of this Confucian classic. And that suggests that either: 1) Confucianism is rooted in ideas that later emerged (and likely contemporaneously circulated orally or otherwise) as distinctly "Daoist" (see an interesting discussion here; may be paywalled ); or 2) that some Daoists got hold of an early version of The Analects and mischievously inserted a few passages that gets their ideas across. Perhaps the most famous example is the "madman of Chu" in Analects 18.5, though 18.6 and 18.7 also fit this bill.

The point here is that Daoism has always been around and many, many people have engaged with Daoist ideas all through Chinese history.  Indeed, we might see Confucianism as an attempt to counter a more powerfully entrenched socio-cultural orientation.  Confucius and Mencius and others had to work quite hard to get their ideas across, and in their own times they failed to do so (or at least they failed in terms of gaining the kind of widespread political-cultural effects they seemed to desire).  Maybe Confucianism is simply a prescriptive reaction against an empirically more influential Daoist culture.

    - Daoism has a broader cultural influence than Confucianism because it is conventionally practiced as a religion in a much more prevalent manner than Confucianism.  This is true in its own right, as Daoist religion is extensively practiced in all Chinese cultural locations, but also in its combination with Buddhism, which yields Chan (or Zen) Buddhism.  We can argue about whether Confucianism is a "religion" or not (I tend toward the "not" position) but there is no question about the religious expressions of Daoism.  And this is important, as it gives to Daoism a practical existence that Confucianism might lack.  When somebody dies, more people look for a Daoist "priest" not a Confucian scholar. 

Those are just some rough thoughts.  But perhaps they are enough to begin to fulfill my purpose here: to destabilize an over-simplistic identification of "Confucianism" and "Chinese Culture."  Daoism is just as important; indeed, it might be more central to Chinese culture than Confucianism.  And it might have been smarter for the PRC government to name its Chinese language organizations "Laozi Institutes" or "Zhuangzi Institutes"...

Daoism and the Diffusion of Trauma

The title of this piece in yesterday's NYT Sunday Review caught my eye: "The Trauma of Being Alive."  After wondering if it was a riff on the first of the four noble truths of Buddhism (it wasn't), I myself slipping into Daoist mode.  Why conceive of "being alive" as traumatic?

I certainly understand that emotions and psychology matter, and that people can suffer deep and real psychic pain in their lives.  But this piece seems to reach too far when it states:

Trauma is not just the result of major disasters. It does not happen to only some people. An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster. One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us. Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it.

This over-generalizes trauma. It makes virtually any moment of life, any moment when we realize our impermanence, traumatic. But why avoid the reality of impermanence in the first place?

We learn to deny our mortality.  We learn it in our daily lives, driven as we are by expectations and desires for today and tomorrow.  A notion of permanence is constructed in our minds, and reinforced by myriad transactions, as we envision our selves moving forward in time.  And that is all perfectly natural and normal. But it is also inherently fragile and flawed.  If we invest too much in maintaining a sense of "self," and if we come to believe that some sort of stable "self" will remain largely unchanged as we move through time, then we are setting ourselves up for more trauma than might otherwise emerge.  This, at least, is what the Daodejing and Zhuangzi tell us.  First, the Daodejing passage 22 (Hinton):

In yielding is completion. In bent is straight. In hollow is full. In exhaustion is renewal. In little is contentment. In much is confusion.

This is how a sage embraces primal unity as the measure of all beneath heaven.

Give up self-reflection and you're soon enlightened.

Give up self-definition and you're soon apparent.

Give up self-promotion and you're soon proverbial.

Give up self-esteem and you're soon perennial.

Simply give up contention and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contends with you.

It was hardly empty talk when the ancient declared "in yielding is completion."  Once you perfect completion you've returned home to it all.

We could quibble with the translation. The first line is: 曲 則 全, which Ames and Hall have as: "crimped then whole;" and Hendricks has as: "Bent over, you'll be preserved whole."   "曲," has a connotation of "bent" or "crooked."  But I like the way Hinton handles it: in a sense, if you bend to circumstance, you will keep yourself whole.  That is in keeping with the rest of the passage, which interrogates the notion of "self;" 自.  Of course, "自" in the time of the DDJ did not have the same meanings as a modern definition of "self," but it does suggest a process for how we understand our place and presentation in the world.  And passage 22 is clearly telling us to not hold on to expectations for what the "self" might be.  If we give up thinking about what the "self" is, we will find a kind of liberation.  If we yield in to the natural impermanence of "self" we return "home to it all" - 誠全而歸之 - or, true wholeness will return.

The attitude of passage 22 suggests a diffusion of trauma.  If we are open to the impermanence of the self, to the constant flux and change of circumstance, then we can get out from under the sense of "loss" when circumstances change.  This is not to suggest that the experience of trauma can be always and everywhere extinguished.  I imagine the experience of violent combat, which gives rise to PTSD, is truly destabilizing.  Indeed, I think the NYT article, in making virtually everything traumatic,  undermines our appreciation of truly extraordinary trauma.  

But even if a Daoist stance cannot remove all trauma from human experience (and Daoism would have no such expectation), it can help most of us deal with the unexpected and potentially painful experiences of every day life.  If we let go of a predetermined definition of "self," then apparent transformations of that "self" need not be traumatic. 

Zhuangzi is also helpful here.  The story of the four friends in chapter six describes, in stirring detail, the physical demise of one of them.  When asked directly if he dislikes or resents what is happening, his response is clear (Hinton):

This life we're given comes in its own season, and then follows its passing away.  If you're at ease in your season, if you can dwell in its vanishing, joy and sorrow never touch you. This is what the ancients called "getting free." If you can't get free, you're tangled in things.  And things have never overcome heaven.  So what is there to resent?

This is the ultimate trauma: facing death.  And Zhuangzi is telling us that death need not be traumatic. If we understand its inevitability, and if we focus on the moment we are in, there is nothing to resent.  Or, as is stated elsewhere in the book: "there can be no loss."  

The key here, I think, is acceptance.  The NYT piece mentions Kubler-Ross's famous stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  We might think of this as a process of reaction: something bad happens and we first deny and then move through these other stages.  Daoism, in this sense, is more pro-active, suggesting that we should be fully aware of the inevitability of unexpected change and, thus, cultivate acceptance before "trauma" occurs.  The friends in Zhuangzi's story are not in denial or angry because they have already accepted their inevitable demise before the "trauma" appears.  Thus, it is not nearly so traumatic.

So, the title of the NYT piece, "The Trauma of Being Alive," is over-wrought.  Life need not be continuously traumatic, if we give up self-definition and get free of expectations.

"An Era of Lost Faith"?

A piece in Caixin about a questionable qigong "master," brings up a larger point, one that provides some insight into China's current cultural climate. In considering why successful business people and government cadres seek out spiritual guidance from questionable sources, the writer turns to public intellectual Lei Yi:

Lei Yi, a historian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says that this is due to a sense of insecurity troubling China's political and business elite. They hope to receive some sort of blessing and turn to these "experts" for career advice and luck.

...

Lei said that superstition is common in all walks of life, but this "man of God" phenomenon among senior officials and businessmen is worth special attention. While the worship by entertainers can be written off as a hobby with little public influence, in the case of officials it reflects a paradox because they are the ones openly preaching and advocating materialism and atheism. These words diverge radically from their thinking, Lei said.

Ultimately, Lei said, this phenomenon showed that "this is an era of lost faith."

This is not at all a novel observation, but it is a useful reminder.  The roots of contemporary China's "crisis of faith" go back to the failures of Maoism.  For two decades, (roughly 1958-1978) Chinese people had to suppress their anger and frustration with, first, the mass state-sponsored starvation of the Great Leap Famine, and, then, the lethal political insanities of the Cultural Revolution.  Deng Xiaoping was smart enough to recognize that Maoism had to be jettisoned, at least in the economic and social realms, if people were once again going to believe in something larger than themselves. 

But the strategy of economic reform has turned out only to be half right. It has certainly revived the country materially and kept the CCP afloat politically, but it has not provided a basis of popular faith in broader civic or spiritual principles.  Indeed, this same point is the first premise of Jiang Qing's (and others) assertion that Confucianism needs to be remade into something like a state religion, a project that I suspect Lei Yi would reject. (Here is an article - pdf - that provides some historical background on attempts to make Confucianism into a "religion.") 

The intellectual and social anxieties mentioned by Lei are more than simply a "lost faith."  Business and political and social actors in China seek some sort of transcendent affirmation, but many of them are also search for a transcendent affirmation that is somehow uniquely "Chinese".  The "crisis of faith" is bound up with the crisis of contemporary Chinese identity.  Or so it seems to me...

But let's stop for a moment and, instead of analyzing the "crisis of faith," think more about what kinds of beliefs are possible in the world today.

I will throw out an assertion that, perhaps, not everyone will accept (critiques welcome!): it is simply not possible to construct a set of transcendent principles that will "unify" or "represent" populations at the scale of the "Chinese people". 

If we have learned anything about the dynamics of postmodernity, it is that such efforts, these days (and maybe always in history?) will inevitably descend into authoritarian repression of actually existing intellectual and religious diversity.   There simply cannot be "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic" church. There are many and they do not share the same beliefs.  Of course, there can be many  communities of believers but these communities are always limited, never universal, and they never scale up to truly fill "national" categories.  Not all English are believers in the Church of England.   Not all Iranians share a single faith community.  Globalized postmodernity powerfully reproduces diversity in belief.  There's just no escaping that fact of contemporary life.

If that is true, then how can there really be a Chinese "crisis of faith"?  When I wander about China I see many kinds of believers: Buddhists, Daoists, Christians, secular traditionalists, confirmed and secure atheists, and, yes, Confucians.  Zhang Xin is Baha'i. There are all sorts of possibilities.  What is missing is a singular or uniform template of faith.  But such a thing is really not possible in China or anywhere now.

So, maybe the qigong thing is not a sign of "an era of lost faith" but just the opposite: an era of dynamic finding of faith.  Some people will make some strange choices as they search for meaning within postmodernity (I'm more of an Daoist immanentist than a transcendentalist myself...),  We still have snake handlers in the US. But so what?  It is a shame that some people will get hurt or do stupid things as they search for meaning, but that is their choice.  As long as they are not hurting others or causing signficant negative social effects, they should be given some leeway to make mistakes.  

And eventually, the silliness of the claims of those qigong "masters" will out. 

Bottom line: the "crisis of faith" may only be a "crisis" for those who want to impose a particular faith on a broad population of people.  For everyone else, it is an era of freedom to find one's own faith.

It's Hard Out Here For A Daoist

A disheartening, if not completely unexpected, story in China Daily today (h/t Sinocism) on the ways in which the growing materialism of Chinese society is undermining the practice of Daoist religion:

Taoist abbot Yuan Zhihong has a complicated attitude toward money: He knows his temple needs funds to make ends meet, but the commercialization of religious venues is affecting their sacred status....

A Taoist for 31 years, Yuan said religious venues have received more donations in recent years as the economy has grown, yet he lamented that many temples have become profit-driven, which is contrary to the nature of the religion.

This gets at the sometimes contradictory interactions of the competition for wealth and the search for personal meaning in China today.  To thrive economically, a person has to seize whatever opportunities for gain there might be.  And, in doing so, a person may fail to cultivate and maintain more deeply meaningful human relations.  The market (even one still significantly shaped by the state) dissolves the social bases of humanity.  What was it that Marx said?  Oh yes:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

When faced with that brutal materialism, many people seek spiritual or religious succor.  Thus, as China has become more competitively materialist, it has also become more religious, and Daoism is one of those religions that has grown in recent decades.

But, as the China Daily story suggests, religious practice cannot always escape from the venalities of the market:

However, Li Zhijin, deputy director of the Hebei Provincial Taoist Association, who attended the seminar, complained that many Taoists now care about nothing other than money. "They ignore the disciplines and don't observe the rituals," he said.

During a 2011 memorial in Huaiyang county, Henan province, a Taoist temple auctioned off the privilege of lighting the first joss stick for 1.18 million yuan to an entrepreneur. The action led to a public outcry.

Wang Ka, a professor of religious studies with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said commercialization has ruined the reputation of many religious venues.

"Ticket prices for some renowned temples are higher than 200 yuan, which is unaffordable for many people," he said in a lecture at the seminar. "The religion should not be used as a machine to make money."

But as Mr. Wang and Mr. Li and Mr. Yuan well know, the Daodejing anticipates just these sorts of problems:

Understanding sparse and sparser still I travel the great Way, nothing to fear unless I stray.

The great Way is open and smooth, but people adore twisty paths: Government in ruins, fields overgrown, and granaries bare, they indulge in elegant robes and sharp swords, lavish food and drink, all those trappings of luxury. I

t's vainglorious thievery - not the Way, not the Way at all. (passage 53)

People adore twisty paths: a tendency still as strong today, if perhaps not stronger, as it was back in the day when somebody wrote down those words.  Plus ca change...