Taoism
The Principles of Taoism is an excellent and very readable basic
account of Taoism in Thorsons' 'Principles of ...' series. It covers not
only the basics of the belief system in both its philosophical and
religious forms but gives a solid and rounded account of its history and
its influence on Chinese medicine and martial arts. Personally, I
find Taoism a highly amenable philosophy and approach to religion even
if I cannot wholly engage with it myself. It is possibly the most humane
of ancient philosophical paths but it is highly culture-specific in its
general forms even if its basic philosophy can be studied with profit
outside East Asia and the Chinese diaspora.
It is not, however,
without flaws. The most obvious one derives from what tends to happen
when 'essentialist' a priori reasoning gets hold of reality and then
tries to bend it to its will - this is the so-called Outer Alchemy,
derived from an over-elaboration of Taoist principles that resulted in
longevity pills being made out of life-shortening heavy metals. There
is far more that is credible in Taoism's holistic approaches to nature
and medicine but, if Taoism handles the placebo effect with infinitely
greater subtlety and probable success than the West, Western scientific
medicine certainly scores higher in dealing with serious organic
disease.
The training in martial arts also seems to have
uncovered secrets about how to align mind and body in seamless action
several hundred years before a combination of creative practice,
neuroscience and the various cognitive sciences started to teach us
these tricks in the West - and yet it is probable that the
johnny-come-lately West will eventually, through the application of
science, short-circuit some of the labour-intensive methods of the East
in its march towards 'enlightenment'. It may be depressing for some
adepts but modern technology may well do for the 'spiritual' what it has
done for the material.
Finally, the sexual yoga of Tao, another
major advance on Western resistance towards any sort of engagement with
the body, is still trapped in a highly essentialist view of the
mind-body and its relation to the universe. The idea that the retention
of bodily fluids is better for you than their expenditure is a curious
cultural construct that just does not stand up to scientific scrutiny. On
the contrary, when we think of all the many necessary extrusions of the
body - not just semen but faecal matter and urine, sweat, tears, milk
(for a woman), 'snot' and earwax, even saliva (let alone the relative
intangibles of breath, sounds, pheromones, gesture and so on) - the
general rule derived from science is that it is healthy and good to let
them loose and not 'bottle them up', if in a balanced and non-obesessive
way. Taoist sexual yoga may be a lot less restrictive than Western
Christian hatred of the body and all its works but we should not delude
ourselves that it is any less a construct of the mind rather than a true
balance of body with nature.
As with many religions that become
centred on order and good conduct, there is something slightly autistic
about the more elaborate behaviours encouraged by later Taoists. It is
as if, whenever men are presented with something that is essentially
simple, they have to give greater meaning to their own engagement by
making what they have inherited unnecessarily complex. People must
dabble! The early philosophical thought of followers of the Way
(Tao), notably Chuang-Tzu, appears to have been a sophisticated
intellectual development of shamanism. The shamanic, beyond good and
evil, in technique and understanding, often represents the wisest way of
handling man and nature in a pre-scientific age, one with limited
ability to understand fully cause-and-effect.
Shamanism may not
always be scientifically true but it is often psychologically true and
it offers insights into the relationship of mind, body and world that
stand the test of time. Philosophical Taoism and early religious taoism
seem to keep the virtues of shamanic tradition and then refine out much
of the irrationality to offer a genuinely insightful spiritual model
which also stands that same test. Unfortunately, as with so many
religions, special interests and new social demands soon turn the
principles of the Tao of the early era into something else as history
and politics unfold - whether as a compromise with Confucian order, as a
degraded magical mentality that is resistant to reasoning or a tool of
competing factions, each seeking to offer a unique selling point
designed to appeal to adherents, gain patronage or fight off the threat
from rivals.
This is what makes Taoism so culturally specific and
also an easy victim of the 'scientific materialism' of the
Marxist-Leninists who arrived in force in 1949, pre-prepared for their
purge by the cynicism of a Western-influenced class of reformers and
warlords in the decades before. Taoism had become superstition. But
it would be a shame if the central and original spirit of the Tao or
the core ideas of Inner Alchemy were lost to the world or, worse, Taoism
became transported to the West in a form based wholly on martial arts
movies and Chinese medicine. There is nothing at all wrong with the
latter - there is real virtue in the martial codes and acupuncture in
particular is one of a number of alternative healing methodologies that
need embracing as provenly effective for many people. Similarly,
the psychology of mental and physical training through subtlety rather
than gross pain and 'burn' and the idea of treating the person as a
whole (mind, body and world) are lessons learned too late by the West.
But it would be tragic if Taoism in its next iteration, followed the
fate of Tantra into neo-Tantra or Tibetan Buddhism into its Californian
equivalent. The West has a habit of taking the superficial aspects of an
alien spiritual world-view and turning them into a network of hungry
small businesses offering quick fixes to deep-seated problems.
The
roots of Taoism in shamanic tradition and in the philosophical
development of the implications of shamanism are core to its value
beyond local conditions. Although still essentialist, classical Taoism
comes closest, barring Chan/Zen and its philosophical derivatives, to the phenomenological and existentialist perspectives of
modern Western continental philosophy. It has that sense that that
which ultimately cannot be known is important precisely because it is
not knowable (with no need for some God to intervene even if religious
Taoism eventually added Gods by the bucket load). It understands the
'isness' of Being well beyond imposed notions of good and evil. It
understands that we are creatures in an ever-changing flow of
conditions. It understands that life is about constant calibration of
opposites (yin/yang).
It also understands the core libidinous
basis of our psychic energy and the way that it has to be 'worked' to
get our mind into transcendent mode. If actual transcendence is an
illusion (as I believe), the Taoists cannot be blamed for this since it
is an illusion shared by every religion while the non-religious persist
in pretending that this phenomenon of felt transcendance does not exist
when it clearly does. Even the flawed sexual yoga of Taoism
remains potent because, alongside the modern rediscovery of shamanic
techniques, engagement with such methods, for some people at some times,
can be powerful tools for re-calibrating the mind into alignment both
with one's own body and the world as it is, not as it is presented by
society. The very anti-sentimental detachment of Taoist sexual yoga,
operating against all notions of romantic superficiality, is, like its
tantric equivalent, a powerful occasional tool for personal development
which has no analogue in the repressive religions of the book.
The
East still stands head and shoulders above the West in having integral
spiritual philosophies of corporeal, intellectual and social cohesion
while the religions of the book are still dominated by the idea that
mind, body and society are to be treated separately. In most cases, this
means that the actuality of the mind-body-world dynamic is resisted,
the body constrained and both mind and body placed in the service of the
world, or rather of its avatar God. Taken as a set of
metaphors, a system for explaining the mind-body-world, the Tao stands
head-and-shoulders above all its rivals. But it is still only a metaphor
even if that metaphor has significant use (as the Arab and Western
alchemical tradition and Jung re-discovered) as a tool for self
development and self creation.
Although China needed Confucianism
as counter-balance, the Taoist mentality in its classic form is
individualistic in the very best sense, a fundamental commitment to the
worth of the person, making Chinese culture in many ways a more
instinctively liberal one than that of the West where a person is so
automatically socialised ideologically that liberalism comes to mean
little more than an attempt to assert rights to be an individual against
the system. The con-trick in the West is that 'rights' can have any
philosophical substance at all once you remove their contingent grant by
God, Emperor or People - Kant does his best but all we end up with in
the end is a depersonalised God in Reason, a pseudo-God whose relationship to Being is
questionable to say the least. Taoism does not bother with such
paraphrenalia. It gets back to basics. We are self-evidently persons
existing in the Tao. No person is any different from any other person
except in their contingency in relation to matter and society. No
language of rights is required because there is no struggle to be had.
We deal with the Tao as a personal matter. Our struggle is with it alone
and not with others, in a manner closer to the much later Western
existentialist tradition, and we 'become' through our own efforts.
This
is a much more profound sense of freedom than the faux-freedom of
rebellion against social pressures in the West. There is probably no
person more unfree in themselves than the Western liberal who does not
think about their own condition. One Taoist philosopher simply retired
and told his Lord that the effort of public administration was not worth
one hair on his back. This is true freedom. The Taoist in the story
does not mention his rights once - he just does what he does!
This book is not only an invaluable basic text on the history and principles of Taoism but it also gives a good insight into the core metaphor of the Inner Alchemy. This is a big subject. A general introduction like this cannot cover it in great detail but Wildish is excellent at taking us through the mental model of the Taoist body and the construction - partially analogous to the Moon Child of the modern Western esotericist - of a spiritual form from this process. In the Tao case, the creation is of the inner self of the person, rather than the separate creation of the Crowleians, one that will bear the adept into the Tao Heaven as an immortal at the point of death. It is a religious stance that is not for me but it may be for you. It may be detached from its cultural context as a metaphor that could be translated into almost any situation - the test of the core of a good religion much like Christ's Salvation. If this appeals to you and you know nothing of Taoism, this book will give you a good basic grounding for further research.