God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (44 page)

The
Daodejing
is said to have been written as Laozi was withdrawing to the mountains, and it obviously commends the natural life of the recluse he is becoming over the artificial life of the clerk he had been. It is inhuman, Laozi says, to live under the thumb of the dictates of ruler or father or husband; to be human is to be free. Unlike the seventeenth-century Englishman Thomas Hobbes, who famously argued that human life in the state of nature would be “nasty, brutish, and short,” Laozi is convinced that human life in a society where everyone acts naturally and spontaneously would be pleasant, humane, and long. But Laozi is no anarchist. His vision favors “soft power” rather than no power. It imagines small-scale, noncompetitive communities that are harmonious because their governments, in keeping with
wu wei
, do as little as possible and leave the rest to nature. The great U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis was channeling Laozi when he said of America’s highest court that “the most important thing we do is not doing.”
³⁰

Zhuangzi and the Zhuangzi

The next Daoist classic, second in influence only to the
Daodejing
, is the
Zhuangzi
(
Chuang-Tzu
), which takes its name from Zhuangzi (369–286
B.C.E.
), a follower of Laozi and contemporary of the Confucian thinker Mencius. Although we know more about Zhuangzi than we do about Laozi, we don’t know much. A biographical account from the first or second century
B.C.E.
portrays him as a writer of anti-Confucian allegories who laughs in the face of an offer to become a prime minister’s chief of staff. “I’d rather enjoy myself playing around in a fetid ditch,” Zhuangzi says, “than be held in bondage by the ruler of a kingdom.”
³¹

Widely recognized as a masterpiece of world literature, the
Zhuangzi
, which likely came together between the fourth and second centuries
B.C.E.
, consists of seven “inner chapters” probably written by Zhuangzi himself plus fifteen “outer chapters” and eleven “miscellaneous chapters” probably written by his followers. This classic had a major impact not only on Daoism but also on Chan Buddhism, which in Japan would come to be known as Zen. Like Zen, the
Zhuangzi
uses language to call language into question. It also shares with Zen the conviction that what matters most can be found wherever we look. A famous Zen exchange goes, “What is the Buddha?” “Dried shit.” The
Zhuangzi
informs us that the Dao can be found even in excrement.

As this observation implies, the
Zhuangzi
is a mischievous text. Its reputed author has been described as “a mystic, a satirist, a nihilist, a hedonist, a romantic,” and “a profound and brilliant jester who demolishes our confounded seriousness.”
³²
The words attributed to him run in all these directions, often at the same time. Long before American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself,” Zhuangzi was arguing (no doubt with a sly grin) that arguing is a dead end. While his contemporaries in the Confucian, Mohist, and Legalist schools were using logic and rhetoric to advance arguments, Zhuangzi told stories. In the face of a society that championed usefulness, the
Zhuangzi
championed uselessness, singing the praises of a tree so bent and unkempt that it can’t be used for anything other than shade for an afternoon nap. Zhuangzi didn’t want the Dao to be useful for politics, or even philosophy. He wanted it to be good for nothing. The same goes for each of us. Instead of making ourselves useful, he advised, make yourself useless. Then everyone will leave you alone.

The
Zhuangzi
includes chapter titles such as “Webbed Toes” and a long cast of off-beat characters—“Master Timid Magpie,” “Nag the Hump,” “Sir Sacrifice,” “Uncle Obscure Nobody,” “Princely Nag,” “Mad Stammerer”—that seem to have sprung full-blown from a Flannery O’Connor short story.
³³
If the
Daodejing
is a work of philosophy, this is a work of literature, and of comedy. It uses fables and fantasy in the service of satire and ranks as both the funniest and the most irreverent of the great religions’ scriptures. One way to cope with death and degeneration, the
Zhuangzi
suggests, is to step lively through laughter and play. If there had been knives and forks at the time of Confucius, his starchy followers would have used both to consume their noodles. Not Zhuangzi. He slurps.

Taking up many of the key themes of the
Daodejing
, the
Zhuangzi
underscores the fact of change and the futility of resisting it. It glories in simplicity, spontaneity, flexibility, and freedom. It observes that rules and concepts get in the way of both individual happiness and social harmony. (“Get rid of goodness,” reads the
Zhuangzi
, “and you will naturally be good.”
³⁴
) Zhuangzi is less interested than Laozi, however, in dispensing political advice. Whereas Laozi had at least one foot in the Confucian problem of social chaos, Zhuangzi frames the human predicament almost entirely in individual terms. The problem is lifelessness, which is brought on by the social customs so prized by Confucians. The solution is a life well lived, which is to say health, longevity, and perhaps even bodily immortality. But none of this is possible without freedom from life-sapping social conventions.

The
Zhuangzi
also differs from the
Daodejing
in its preference for the story over the aphorism. One of its most poignant parables concerns a rare seabird discovered far away from the ocean in the city of Lu. A government official fetes it like an honored guest from some faraway land. A great feast is prepared, music is played, and wine is offered. But the bird is overwhelmed by the fuss and dies after three days.
³⁵

In
Leaving Church
(2006), memoirist Barbara Brown Taylor writes about giving up a job as an Episcopal priest—a job that was killing her. Along the way, she challenges readers to ask what in their lives is killing them and what is giving them life. Daoism poses the same challenge. In one of the
Zhuangzi’s
oft-told tales, a ruler sends his officials to convince Zhuangzi to accept a prestigious government appointment. But Zhuangzi, who is fishing, doesn’t even give them a glance. As he continues his casting, he speaks of the dry bones of an ancient tortoise kept by the ruler in a temple and trotted out on special ritual occasions. “What would you say that the tortoise would have preferred: to die and leave its shell to be venerated or to live and keep on dragging its tail over the mud?” Zhuangzi asks. “It would have preferred to live and drag its tail over the mud,” the officials answer. “Go your ways,” Zhuangzi says, “I will keep on dragging my tail over the mud.”
³⁶

The
Zhuangzi
speaks of a variety of techniques that can take us from the problem of lifelessness to the solution of flourishing. Each aims to redirect us from social death to natural life. For example, Zhuangzi advocates “sitting and forgetting,” a method for emptying the mind of so-called learning. In a passage that upends both the Confucian hierarchy of teacher over student and Confucian confidence in education, Confucius is speaking with his favorite student Yan Hui. Yan Hui proudly reports that he has forgotten all sorts of core Confucian virtues. “I sit and forget everything,” Yan Hui says. “I leave behind my body, perception and knowledge. Detached from both material form and mind, I become one with that which penetrates all things.”
³⁷
This story ends when Confucius, rather than rebuking Yan Hui, asks to become his student. So while education, so highly prized by Confucians, may help us get ahead in the Chinese bureaucracy, it does not foster life or make us human. Only the spontaneity and surprise of the Dao can do that.

In passages that have captured the attention of Western philosophers of language, the
Zhuangzi
also takes aim at the Confucians’ tendency (and our own) to chop up the world into quick-and-easy dualisms. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing / there is a field. I’ll meet you there,” writes the Sufi mystic Rumi.
³⁸
Except for the meeting part, that is vintage Zhuangzi. For him, dichotomies of right and wrong, life and death, large and small work only inside our limited conventions of thought and language. From the wider perspective of the Dao, so-called opposites logically depend on one another and are forever melting into one another. To grasp after any one side of these dualisms is to bring on lifelessness. Why fixate on success when, as Bob Dylan once put it, “there’s no success like failure” and “failure’s no success at all”?
³⁹

It is sometimes said that Daoists believe that human beings are born good. And it is true that Daoists see virtues such as naturalness and simplicity in abundance in infants, who have the additional merit of an equal balance of yin and yang. But from the Daoist perspective human nature is neither inherently good, as Mencius argued, nor inherently evil, as many of his opponents insisted. It is, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would later argue, “beyond good and evil.”

As in the
Daodejing
, the exemplary human being in the
Zhuangzi
is the sage, described here as a “genuine person.” The
Zhuangzi
also includes a tantalizing glimpse into a figure that will become central in later Daoism: the immortal who is indifferent to politics, uninterested in fame, unmoved by profit or loss, and unafraid of death.

Popular Daoism and Superhero Immortals

Around the time of the emergence of Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, devotional Hinduism, and Mahayana Buddhism, which is to say at the dawn of the first millennium, Daoism began to take on many of the characteristics of other organized religions. Spurred by Buddhists, who upon their arrival in China in the first century
C.E.
organized themselves around monasteries and temples, Daoism took institutional shape. Daoists wrote thousands of scriptures and gathered them into a massive canon. They turned their heroes into gods. They developed a full range of festivals, rituals, and self-cultivation practices. They integrated into their tradition Buddhist notions of karma and rebirth, Confucian commitments to filial piety, and elements from ancient Chinese religion such as shamanism, divination, sacred mountains, pilgrimage, and sacrifice. They institutionalized their tradition, founding new sects and building and maintaining temples and monasteries. They invited a vast pantheon of gods to inhabit these institutions and ordained priests to oversee them. Some Daoist priests followed Laozi’s example by living apart from society. Others were married with children, performing life-cycle rituals in the midst of the hubbub of social and sexual life.

Drawing on ancient beliefs in ghosts and demons and practices such as ancestor veneration and shamanism, Daoism added to its goal of nourishing life an ambitious corollary: physical immortality. Whereas Laozi and Zhuangzi had cultivated an air of indifference toward life and death alike, Daoists now sought after not only vitality and longevity but also the immortality of the body. As Buddhism gained in popularity, Daoists started to treat Laozi like a religious founder, a revealer, and even a deity who demonstrated that it was possible for ordinary human beings to live forever. While Buddhists sought to become bodhisattvas or Buddhas, Daoists now sought to become immortals (aka “transcendents”
⁴⁰
), who according to legend distinguished themselves from the rest of us through all sorts of astonishing powers.

In keeping with the Daoist romance of reclusion, these exemplars were said to live on high mountains, in secluded grottoes, or on faraway islands. According to Dutch Sinologist Kristopher Schipper, the Chinese word for immortal (
hsien
, or
xian
) is made out of the characters for “human being” and “mountain,” so immortals were human beings who traded in stale society for the vital rhythms of the natural world.
⁴¹
As wanderers, they abstained from the five grains of settled agricultural life, on the theory that these grains nourished the “three worms” that sucked life out of the human body. Immortals subsisted instead on a special diet of roots, nuts, herbs, and other foods that could be gathered in the mountains, including resin and needles from pine trees whose evergreen properties were thought to be particularly conducive to immortality. In exceptional cases, immortals existed on no food at all. These exemplars were particularly adept at augmenting and retaining their qi. In a sort of “sexual vampirism,” males and females alike would take in qi from their partners and keep their own by steering clear of qi-depleting orgasms.
⁴²
Thanks to their vast storehouses of qi and their ability to balance their bodies’ yin and yang energies, immortals were said to defy not only mortality but also physical degeneration. They enjoyed youthful bodies with jet black hair, perfect teeth, and unblemished complexions. Their breathing was deep. They were impervious not only to heat and cold but also to the ravages of old age.

Stories about Daoist immortals read like superhero comics or tales of the extraordinary
siddhis
(supernatural powers) of Tibetan lamas. Immortals could run great distances at top speeds, disappear, shrink themselves, and shape-shift. They could change one object into another, heal wounds, fix broken bones, neutralize snake venom, exorcise demons, predict the future, and resurrect the dead. Though they exemplified the key Daoist virtue of naturalness, they were able to defy nature too. Water did not make them wet. Ice did not make them cold. Fire could not burn them. They lived in a Harry Potter sort of world, wielding swords of invisibility and able to apparate at will. And like Superman, they could fly. Their bodies were not only youthful, they were as light as birds.