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The Daoists

The Daodejing, ascribed to Laozi, and the Zhuangzi, named after Zhuang Zhou of the fourth century BCE and only partly by him, are the two root texts of what Sima Tan called the school of the Way and its Virtue.

The Daodejing opens on what cannot be said: “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name” (1, tr. Legge). The second dao is a verb, “to tread” for Legge and “to speak” for others. “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know” (56).

So learning and the Way pull in opposite directions. “He who devotes himself to learning (seeks) from day to day to increase (his knowledge); he who devotes himself to the Tao (seeks) from day to day to diminish (his doing)”, until “he arrives at doing nothing (on purpose)” (48; the bracketed words are Legge’s). “When we renounce learning we have no troubles” (20). The two words the later tradition joined in Daoxue, learning and the Way, stand here against each other; the work is done by subtraction.

The Zhuangzi turns the same reserve on argument. Two disputants cannot settle who is right between them, and no third party can: “If you beat me, and not I you, are you necessarily right and I wrong? … Who shall I employ as arbiter between us?” (ch. 2, tr. Giles). Against the Mohists’ winner in every dispute, it finds no neutral judge. Words are a means, to be dropped once they have served: as the fish trap is forgotten once the fish is caught, words are forgotten once the meaning is grasped (ch. 26). The skill stories, the cook carving an ox and the wheelwright who cannot pass his knack to his son, show knowing as a practised ease that no book carries; they are on Zhuangzi.