Trying Not To Try by Edward Slingerland

Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity

Slingerland, Edward

Introduction

Wu-wei literally translates as “no trying” or “no doing,” but it’s not at all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective.
People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, or even bringing the entire world into harmonious order. For a person in wu-wei, proper and effective conduct follows as automatically as the body gives in to the seductive rhythm of a song.
This state of harmony is both complex and holistic, involving as it does the integration of the body, the emotions, and the mind. If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like “effortless action” or “spontaneous action.”

Being in wu-wei is relaxing and enjoyable, but in a deeply rewarding way that distinguishes it from cruder or more mundane pleasures. In many respects, it resembles the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s well-known concept of “flow,” or the idea of being in the zone, but with important—and revealing—differences

People who are in wu-wei have de, typically translated as “virtue,” “power,” or “charismatic power.” De is radiance that others can detect, and it serves as an outward signal that one is in wu-wei. de has a powerful, seemingly magical effect on those around them, allowing them to spread political order in an instantaneous fashion. They don’t have to issue threats or offer rewards, because people simply want to obey them. If you have de, people like you, trust you, and are relaxed around you. Even wild animals leave you alone. The payoff provided by de is one of the reasons that wu-wei is so desirable, and why early Chinese thinkers spent so much time figuring out how to get it. They all built their religious systems around the virtues of naturalness and spontaneity and felt that overall success in life was linked to the charisma that one radiates when completely at ease, or the effectiveness that one displays when fully absorbed.

Chapter 2 – Drunk on Heaven: The Social and Spiritual Dimensions of Wu-wei

As Zhuangzi puts it, his drunken cart-rider “was not aware that he was riding, and is equally unaware that he has fallen out. Life and death, alarm and terror cannot enter his breast, which is why he can bump into things without fear.” This, Zhuangzi explains, is because “his spirit is intact.”
For the early Chinese, being in wu-wei is not just about how one feels internally, or to what extent one’s conscious brain is in charge. It is, at the end of the day, about being properly situated in the cosmos. And this too has important implications for contemporary life.
Ultimately, though, thinkers like Zhuangzi don’t really care about how you cut up oxen or carve bell stands. What they care about is how you relate to others. This is why Butcher Ding says, at the end of the story, that what he cares about is the Way (the Dao), not skill per se. After seeing his performance, Lord Wenhui doesn’t announce that he’d really like to give up the feudal lordship business and become a butcher, but rather that he’s learned from the performance the secret to living his life. This is because the story is really about social effectiveness: the ability to move through the human world with the same ease as Butcher Ding’s blade through the ox.
This kind of social efficacy, in turn, depends crucially upon the mysterious power of de, the charismatic tractor beam that emanates from a person in wu-wei, drawing other people to him or her and inspiring trust. In the Analects we read that “one who rules through the power of de is like the Pole Star: it simply remains in its place and receives the homage of the myriad lesser stars.” In early Chinese astronomy the Pole Star was thought to be the fixed center of the nighttime sky, with all of the other heavenly bodies moving around it in concentric circles. The truly virtuous Confucian ruler can simply take his place in the palace and the gravitational force of his de will draw everyone into his or her proper place around him.
In the Laozi we read of the hidden Daoist adept, with an empty mind and a child’s heart, who is able to walk among fierce wild animals or through walls of fire without being harmed. The Laozian ruler is also able to bring the human world into order through his de, although unlike the Confucian ruler—high up and bright in the heavens like the Pole Star—the Laozian sage is invisible, dwelling in the dark valleys and pulling everyone in the world into order as gravity pulls water downhill. The Zhuangzian sage similarly possesses a powerful de, which has a therapeutic, relaxing effect on others and allows him to move unharmed through the physical and social worlds.
The concept of Heaven (tian) is an ancient one, appearing in bronze vessel inscriptions from the second millennium B.C.E. It refers to the high god worshipped by the early Zhou kings, conceptualized as a powerful person dwelling somewhere up in the sky—tian refers both to this being and to the physical sky. This is why “Heaven” is the standard English translation, and probably the least inaccurate one we can find. It’s important to realize, however, that we’re not talking about a place, as in the Christian conception of heaven, but rather a godlike being who can send down orders, control the weather, determine success in battle, and reward and protect its followers. From Zhou times on, Heaven is also seen as the source of value or goodness: what Heaven wants is, by definition, good. The same inherent goodness characterizes the “Way” (Dao, ), which literally refers to a path or road—a physical way. By extension, it can also mean the way to do something and, in this context, the right way. For the early Chinese, it had cosmic significance: the Way is the proper means of being a perfected human being, or faithfully doing the will of Heaven. The Way is Heaven’s Way, the grounding of all goodness or value in the world.
Wu-wei, on the other hand, means becoming part of something larger: the cosmic order represented by the Way. Sages from Confucius at age seventy to the Daoists describe wu-wei as a state of “fitting” with the universe. What wu-wei represents, on the other hand, is the state of being a perfected part of a greater whole that is also embraced by others. It is this holistic, social, and religious quality of wu-wei that makes it unique.
The best way to get a handle on this point is to consider what is probably the best-known contemporary account of spontaneity as an ideal, the concept of “flow” developed by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. If we consider the major features of flow as he outlines them, many similarities pop out: deep but effortless concentration, responsiveness to the environment, a high degree of effectiveness, profound enjoyment, the loss of a sense of self, and an altered sense of time.
Since skills improve over time, this means that flow requires exposure to constantly “spiraling complexity” that “forces people to stretch themselves, to always take on another challenge to improve on their abilities.” It is this emphasis on challenge and complexity that best allows us to see the distinction between flow—at least as defined by Csikszentmihalyi—and wu-wei.
Flow also contains other stories that I originally found much more compelling than that of E. One good example is the story of Serafina Vinon, a seventy-six-year-old inhabitant of a small mountain village in the Italian Alps. Serafina is described as living a lifestyle that remains more or less unchanged from that of her ancestors for the past few hundred years: she rises at five in the morning to milk her cows, she cooks, she cleans, she takes the herd up to higher pastures or tends to her orchards, she cards wool. When asked to describe what gives her the greatest pleasure in life, she reports that it is precisely these everyday activities that put her into a state where she is absorbed, unselfconscious, and at ease. “To be outdoors, to talk with people, to be with my animals … I talk to everybody—plants, birds, flowers, and animals,” she explains. “Everything in nature keeps you company; you see nature progress every day. You feel clean and happy.… Even when you have to work a lot it is very beautiful.” These bigger wholes into which Serafina feels absorbed—Nature with a capital “N,” or her cultural tradition—are also seen by her as important sources of value or goodness. Indeed, it is the fact that she deeply cares about her beautiful surroundings and her way of life, and derives meaning from them, that allows her to become absorbed in the first place.
The complexity and challenge of writing a book can induce wu-wei only if they are encountered in the service of something bigger, such as an idea that I really care about and want to share with others.
It is this focus on caring—on getting beyond the self—that, in turn, allows us to connect wu-wei states characterized by high complexity and challenge to their infinitely more common relatives: very routine, thoroughly familiar, low-complexity activities that allow us to be fully absorbed in something that we love and value and that we see as being larger than our individual selves.
My most common wu-wei experiences, like Serafina’s, have always tended to involve activities that put me in contact with the natural world. Hiking the same trail I’ve hiked a hundred times through Point Reyes National Seashore on the California coast reliably puts me in wu-wei, as does weeding my vegetable garden, pruning and tending to my fruit trees, or simply sitting on an ocean beach watching the waves crash. Except for the psychological profile of the state they produce, these activities do not look anything at all like E.’ s frenetic life. Indeed, if one looks past Csikszentmihalyi’s own emphasis on complexity and challenge, the survey data that he and his colleagues have gathered suggest that most flow experiences actually occur in social situations of relatively low complexity, like conversing with friends, sharing a meal with family, or playing with small children.
Because these researchers are, for the most part, Western individualists. In our culture, activities like running ultramarathons or exploring new art museums tend to be solitary and aimed at self-improvement. We focus more on the intersection of our individual skills with the demands of the task at hand and overlook the fact that the resulting challenge engages us only against a broader background of things we care about. Flow researchers also latched on to complexity and challenge because they were keen to distinguish flow states from other states that share some of the same features—loss of a sense of self, an altered experience of time, relaxation—but that we wouldn’t want to dignify with the label of “flow.”
It is the connection with a larger, valued whole that allows wu-wei or true flow experiences to leave us feeling “clean and happy,” as Serafina puts it, rather than dirty and worn out. One can think of this larger whole as a framework of values—that is, a structure within which we situate ourselves or our actions and that allows us to classify some things as good and others as bad and to behave accordingly.
Many in the West have attempted to ground such values in objective facts or rational calculation, but they are, by their very nature, beyond the purview of science. Science can tell us what is, not what should be: it traffics in facts, not values. This means that we go beyond the facts anytime we make value judgments. We feel that slavery is wrong because there is something special about human beings that makes us different from cattle, although from a biological perspective there is nothing that qualitatively distinguishes Homo sapiens from Bos taurus, the domestic cow. Our value judgments are ultimately grounded in these kinds of unjustifiable, but nonetheless deeply held, convictions. Moreover, human beings are built in such a way that we cannot do without such convictions.
Understanding the essential role that these frameworks play in human life is, in turn, the key to understanding wu-wei. I would suggest that the distinguishing feature of wu-wei is the absorption of the self into something greater. That is, whether we emerge from a state of effortlessness and unselfconsciousness feeling energized or enervated probably depends, at least in part, on our values: How does the activity in which we just engaged reflect our large
There are loads of rituals to be performed at specified intervals, concrete guidelines about what to eat and wear and touch, and lots of group activities. This makes interacting with the sacred, typically in the company of like-minded individuals, a very reliable and effective means of getting into a state of wu-wei. Indeed, this is probably how wu-wei has been experienced by most people for most of human history.
Interestingly, if you were to keep track of the activities that induce wu-wei in me or anyone else, you’d be able to piece together a rough outline of what sorts of things a person values or doesn’t. You’d also be able to tell whom they value, and whom they don’t, and this is perhaps of even greater importance. Crucially, wu-wei can occur in group activities only when we genuinely value the social relationships involved. We can effortlessly engage with others only when we care about, and feel relaxed with, the people we are with.
Wu-wei involves giving yourself up to something that, because it is bigger than you, can be shared by others.

Chapter 3 – Try Hard Not to Try: Carving and Polishing the Self

Another way to put this is that, despite their endorsement of spontaneity as an ultimate end goal, Confucius and Xunzi emphasized cold cognition, on both an individual and a cultural level. For individuals, they stressed the importance of exerting willpower, consciously reflecting on one’s behavior, and repressing hot cognition when appropriate—which, in the early stages of training, is almost always. The cultural forms that they celebrated can be seen as a crystallization of acts of cold cognition performed in the past, a reservoir of wisdom produced by careful, conscious reasoning. By mastering and internalizing the cultural ways inherited from the ancient kings, otherwise misshapen human beings could transform themselves into something beautiful. Although their reliance on cold cognition might sound similar to Western rationalist philosophy, it is the Confucian emphasis on personal transformation that marks the crucial difference, as we will see.
No single person could hope to reproduce this inherited wisdom on his own. As Confucius puts it, “I once engaged in thought for an entire day without eating and an entire night without sleeping, but it did no good. It would have been better for me to have spent that time in learning.” Thinking on one’s own might be compared to randomly banging on a piano: a million monkeys given a million years might produce something, but it’s better to start with Mozart.
Xunzi: I once stood on my tiptoes to look into the distance, but this is not as good as the broad view obtained from climbing a hill. Climbing a hill and waving your arms does not make your arms any longer, but they can be seen from farther away; shouting downwind does not make your voice any louder, but it can be heard more clearly; someone who borrows a carriage and horses does not improve the power of his feet, but he can travel a thousand miles; someone who borrows a boat and paddle does not thereby become able to swim, but he can cross great rivers. The gentleman by birth is not different from other people—he is simply good at borrowing external things. These “external things” are the various cultural practices passed down by the Zhou kings—the fruits of cold cognition inherited from the past. Xunzi wanted to emphasize that the kind of naturalness that Confucius valued doesn’t just fall off the trees but is a hard-won achievement. Put another way, he wanted to emphasize that hot cognition needs to be restrained and then extensively reshaped by cold processes before it can be trusted. The evolved structure of our embodied minds suggests that Xunzi was on to something here.
Besides helping us stick to our diets, it’s also clear that consciousness is vital when it comes to managing our social lives. Our unconscious minds are very good at quickly detecting agency, identifying threats in our environment, and reading emotions in faces. Only conscious processes, however, seem capable of complex modeling of other minds. Consciousness creates a virtual representation of the internal thoughts of others so that we can figure out how to interact with them: he is disappointed I didn’t say hello, she is wondering why I’m so late. The virtual world of consciousness is also where we get to practice things without actually having to do them.
You’ve been admiring that woman for a while, she seems to like you, you see her every morning, what are you going to say when you sidle up to her in the line at the coffee shop tomorrow? Practice it in your head now. Offline, imaginary practice is equally important when it comes to physical skills. Anyone learning to ride a bike or hit a golf ball mentally practices what she’s learned, rehearsing the moves over and over, and this helps to make the artificial, novel movements involved more fluent and effective.
Consciousness is also the seat of language, an essential tool for social animals like us. While language has its limits—trying to explain what a wine tastes like, or how an emotion feels, is notoriously difficult—it is extremely effective in converting personal experience into a medium that can be shared with others. You can, at least haltingly, explain to me why you prefer this Chardonnay to that one, or why you’re so angry with me. Powerful hallucinogens can, by temporarily paralyzing the areas of our brain responsible for orienting us in space and in language, give us a sense of what life without the language-based ego would be like. Full of color and magic, perhaps.
Language is also clearly crucial for a special kind of abstract thinking that requires what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls “scaffolding”—chains of reasoning so complex that we need external placeholders to keep us from forgetting where we are. This scaffolding includes such useful cultural inventions as, say, calculus, statistics, or controlled double-blind experiments, which allow us to uncover patterns in the world that are completely invisible to our hot cognition. The creation of modern science is essentially a story of how, over a long period of time, humans have cobbled together novel methods of thinking and communicating that allow us to reach conclusions that completely contradict our intuitions—born of hot cognition—but give us a more accurate picture of how the world works. The earth moves around the sun. Colds are caused by tiny, tiny organisms, not cool breezes or uncovered feet (although try telling this to my Italian mother-in-law).
The sum total of these scaffolding devices can be referred to as “culture”: a body of information passed down from generation to generation in a process that, in some important respects, resembles genetic evolution. One of the key features of this process is that it can generate solutions that are, in principle, beyond the reach of any individual or single generation.
For instance, minor but helpful variations in tool design can be “selected for” in the sense that some designs survive and some don’t, even though no actual person ever consciously decides to prefer one version over another.
Similarly, cultural evolution can zero in on important long-term problems that are, by their very nature, invisible within a single human lifetime—say, the effect of vitamin deficiencies in local foods—and “design” solutions for them.
As in Fiji, the “collective mind” of any cultural group, accumulated over time, is typically smarter than any individual human mind. This is why cultural learning is so important, and also why such techniques as crowdsourcing are so effective.
Xunzi compares the Confucian Way inherited by his generation to markers used to indicate a ford over an otherwise deep and swift river. People with experience have, through careful trial and error, figured out the best place to cross the river and have left markers to help us find it. We could ignore them and just wing it, but that would be counterproductive and even dangerous.
The idea that “the body”—the panoply of desires and instincts and unconscious habits rooted in hot cognition—is a barrier to perfection is found in all of the world’s major religions, as is the conviction that the only way to subdue the body is to use “the mind.” We certainly see this theme at work in Confucian thought. Xunzi, for instance, is fond of the metaphor of the mind as ruler. (The Chinese word we translate as “mind” actually refers to a concrete organ in the body, the heart, and so we also sometimes render it as the “heart-mind.”) For the early Chinese, the heart-mind was the seat of certain emotions, but its most important function was as the seat of cold cognition and conscious willpower. While the other organs can function only in a hot manner, the heart-mind is capable of stopping, reflecting, weighing pros and cons, and then making a conscious, considered decision. Because of these unique powers, it was viewed as the natural ruler of the self.
Moreover, work in social psychology has made it clear that cognitive control is a limited resource. When a teacher taps on a dozing student’s desk and says, “Pay attention!” it turns out that this is not just a metaphor: attention is costly, and if it is “spent” on one task there is less available to spend on another. This phenomenon is known as “ego depletion.” Exerting conscious cognitive control in one domain—say, choosing a healthy radish over chocolate, or suppressing an emotional reaction—makes you subsequently less able to exert it in another domain, like persisting in trying to solve a difficult puzzle. The moral? Effort is effort, mental or physical. Although all brain functions require energy, cognitive control, which requires overriding automatic, deeply rooted actions, is particularly greedy in this regard.
In the same way, the conscious mind can acquire new, desirable goals and then download them onto the unconscious self, where they can then be turned into habits and implemented without the need for constant monitoring. Effortful, conscious action can be transformed into wu-wei.
In fact, clever experimental manipulations have trained subjects in motor tasks while paralyzing their conscious minds by overloading their working memory with a counting task. Brain imaging shows that, under such conditions, the basal ganglia and relevant motor regions can essentially learn the skill on their own, leaving the subject with no conscious awareness of the new ability.
Studies have shown that, as one’s skill level increases in a given activity, brain activity gradually drops, and fewer brain regions are involved. As the skill becomes “internalized,” the conscious mind can gradually relax and let the basal ganglia and sensorimotor systems take care of things on their own.
Knowing how we in fact master a new skill, like driving a car, gives us an important insight into the wu-wei strategy pursued by Confucius and Xunzi. The Confucian Way—the rituals and knowledge passed down from the Zhou dynasty—needs to be fully absorbed by people if they are to live together in a harmonious society. The mind has the power to comprehend the Way, but this is not enough. One needs to get beyond merely understanding the Way and live it, in a fully embodied manner. Cold cognition must be made hot. The Confucians tried to accomplish this by intensively training people’s embodied minds until consciously learned processes could be performed in an wu-wei fashion, like operating a clutch or tying your shoes.
The next time you go out in public, think about how much of what you do and say is scripted: the way you address people on the street and in stores, how you greet a friend versus how you greet a colleague, how you deal with complete strangers as opposed to acquaintances. The social conventions that pervade even our relatively freewheeling modern life might seem insignificant, but try spending a day without them. Go into a store and, instead of making eye contact with the storekeeper and saying hello, just declare what you want to purchase and slap your money down on the counter. You’ll make yourself an outcast very quickly and also have an immediate negative impact on the social flow around you. There is considerable evidence that small gestures, tone of voice, and facial expression can change the mood of your social surroundings, with effects that then radiate out in larger circles.
The Confucians were to adopt a competing marketing motto, it would be Think Ancient. They believed that the accumulated wisdom in classics
This is why Confucius compares a person who doesn’t know the Odes to someone “standing with his face to a wall.” Moreover, even figuring out the meaning of the Odes is a tricky proposition—you can’t grasp the meaning of any ancient text by sitting alone in your room. To be properly understood, the Confucian classics need to be studied in a structured social context, under the guidance of a wise instructor and in the company of eager fellow students.
This emphasis on tradition, authority, and collectivism goes very much against Enlightenment thinking. René Descartes, in his Meditations (1641), famously declared that you can’t accept as reliable knowledge what you’ve been taught in school. The only way to obtain true knowledge, he argued, is to acquire it yourself, building up logically from first principles. This is a seductive idea, and very deep-seated in our culture, but it’s almost certainly wrong. To a degree that qualitatively differentiates us from other animals, we are born incomplete, primed to learn specific types of things from our culture but absolutely dependent upon culture to provide them. We celebrate creativity and novelty but tend not to notice the extent to which any artist or business innovator has been shaped by the ideas and efforts of others, both living and dead.
Phenomenon of unconscious “priming” effects: altering the behavior of a person by making a word or concept salient in a way that is not even noticed. Subjects who unscrambled a word jumble with words that evoked old people (“ Florida,” “gray,” “wrinkle”) walked more slowly when they left the laboratory, and those primed by concepts of politeness waited longer before interrupting. Subjects who unscrambled sentences about helpfulness were more likely to pick up objects dropped by an experimenter. Subjects primed by the social role “professor” performed significantly better on a general knowledge task than nonprimed subjects, while subjects primed with the “soccer hooligan” role performed more poorly. Priming effects extend also to physical actions, which gives us a sense of how and why rituals are so effective. Subjects holding a pen in their teeth in a way that made them simulate a smile rated cartoons as more enjoyable than those who didn’t—in other words, faking a smile makes you happier, at least temporarily.
The implications of all of this for Confucian training are obvious. Reading about restrained, elegant exemplars may make you more restrained and elegant. Adopting a humble posture, a respectful demeanor, and a proper sitting position may very well make you more humble, respectful, and proper.
The Confucian Way is not all about restraint and restriction, however. As any sculptor knows, rough cutting needs to be followed by smoothing and polishing. In terms of Confucian self-cultivation, this finishing work was performed using the tool of communal singing and dancing. Harmonious group movement served as the final step of the carving and reshaping process, producing in the end a perfectly rounded Confucian gentleman.
One early Warring States Confucian text notes that what is special about music is “its ability to enter inside and pluck at the heartstrings.” This idea of music as especially capable of “entering” people and transforming their emotions quickly and directly is a theme in many early Chinese texts, as is the idea that the connection goes both ways: listening to someone’s music gives you an instant and accurate read of their character. Indeed, the traditional account of why the classic Book of Odes contains so many folk songs about mundane topics like farming, weaving, or bucolic love is that the Zhou kings commissioned special ministers to travel around the realm, recording the music and songs being produced by the common people in order to get a sense of their genuine state of mind. Your local governor in province X may tell you that everything is going just great, but if the people working in the fields are singing the blues you might want to look into the situation more carefully. (The modern equivalent of this is the daily summary of Chinese microblogging sites provided to the ruling elite.)
Another important thing to note about the social use of music is that it is almost always communal and accompanied by dance or synchronized movement. This shared, physical activity seems effective not only in conveying specific emotions but also in bringing people together into bonded communities.
The rapture inspired by sublimely beautiful music represents, in the Confucian view, the end of a long journey of self-cultivation, where one arrives at an entirely new place that nonetheless feels completely familiar.

Chapter 6 – Forget About It: Going with the Flow

The problem with Huizi is that he can’t see beyond the possibilities defined by his culture. Gourds are used for X or Y; these gourds do not work for either purpose; ergo, they are useless. Psychologists refer to this as “categorical inflexibility,” a tendency for socially learned representations of objects to constrain our ability to think about them in novel or creative ways. This mental inflexibility is a symptom of a problem that Zhuangzi saw as the primary barrier to wu-wei: the human tendency to be dominated by the “mind”—a term that, for Zhuangzi, refers to what we’d think of as the cold-cognition system. “Letting the mind be your master,” as he puts it, causes people to get trapped in rigid social categories, artificial values, and narrowly instrumental reasoning, preventing them from seeing the world clearly and getting into its flow.
Zhuangzi would like us to embrace with the spiritual bankruptcy and suffering that he saw all around him: When people are asleep, their spirits wander off; when they are awake, their bodies are like an open door, so that everything they touch becomes an entanglement. Day after day they use their minds to stir up trouble; they become boastful, sneaky, secretive. They are consumed with anxiety over trivial matters but remain arrogantly oblivious to the things truly worth fearing. Their words fly from their mouths like crossbow bolts, so sure are they that they know right from wrong. They cling to their positions as though they had sworn an oath, so sure are they of victory. Their gradual decline is like autumn fading into winter—this is how they dwindle day by day. They drown in what they do—you cannot make them turn back. They begin to suffocate, as though sealed up in a box—this is how they decline into senility. And as their minds approach death, nothing can cause them to turn back toward the light.
The fact that this passage is actually targeted at the desperate inhabitants of Warring States China suggests that the challenges of finding happiness in civilized life have not changed much over the millennia.
The way off the hamster wheel, according to Zhuangzi, is to stop trying harder, learning more, and laboriously cultivating the self. We need to learn to let go. Once we can do this, we will be truly open to the world and to other people, and wu-wei will come to us naturally.
Socially learned values lead us astray; knowledge is dangerous; forced morality is not moral; go with your belly, not your mind or your eye.
The key, in his view, was to not condemn others or to pride yourself on being right but rather to get beyond right and wrong altogether: “If you’re committed to something being ‘right,’ you’re equally committed to something else being ‘wrong’; condemning something as ‘wrong’ means valuing something else as ‘right.’ This is why the sage does not go down this road but simply illuminates things by means of Heaven. He still follows a ‘this,’ but in such a way that his ‘this’ is also a ‘that,’ his ‘that’ is also a ‘this.’ ”
Zhuangzi’s exemplars are, however, distinctive in a couple ways. To begin with, they are a diverse bunch. While Confucius and Mencius hobnobbed with lords and kings, Zhuangzi was hanging out in workshops and the kitchens—from which, as Mencius sniffed, the gentleman “keeps his distance”—and he was impressed by what he saw. This world revealed to him artisans and butchers, ferrymen and draftsmen, whose effortless ease and responsiveness to the world could serve as a model for his disaffected fellow intellectuals. His debates with Huizi were aimed at getting his friend out of his head and into this world, where he could follow his body and not his mind. In keeping with Zhuangzi’s refusal to be confined by standard social values, his sages include hunchbacks, lepers, witches, and criminals with amputated feet—the “weeds” of humanity ignored by Mencius with his carefully tended moral garden, but more representative, in Zhuangzi’s view, of true naturalness.
Zhuangzi’s sages are also distinctive by virtue of the fact that they are not attached to strict values. They live their lives and have their goals but maintain an openness that allows them to change direction when circumstances demand, or to let go of something that has turned from a gift to a burden and move on to something else.
One way to understand the distinction in this passage between the three levels of “listening” or perceiving the world is to see them as engaging different areas of the brain. Listening with the ears is a bit like Butcher Ding merely looking with his eyes at the huge ox in front of him: he’s just taking in sensory information but has no idea what to do with it. Listening with the mind involves regions like the lateral PFC, which consciously analyzes this information and relates it to prior knowledge. Listening with the qi seems to refer to shutting down the cognitive control regions of the brain—what we think of as the conscious mind—and letting the adaptive unconscious take over. In the context of the early Chinese worldview, this unconscious is going to lead us in the right direction because it possesses a sacred quality. Like the “spiritual desires” in the Butcher Ding story, this qi is a force connected directly to Heaven. Indeed, for Zhuangzi the spirit and the qi seem to be more or less synonymous: both provide one with a pipeline to Heavenly guidance.
Hui, inspiring a kind of instant enlightenment. “Before I was able to grasp this teaching, I was full of thoughts of myself,” he declares. “But now that I get it, it’s as if my self has never actually existed. Can this be called emptiness?” “You’ve got it!” the Master answers. “Let me tell you: now you can go and play in his gilded cage without being moved by fame. If he listens to you, then sing; if not, remain silent. Forget everything you’ve been taught and abandon all personal schemes. Reside in oneness and lodge yourself in what cannot be stopped. Then you’ll be close to success.”
The loss of self that Yan Hui reports involves abandoning all self-serving strategic thinking and preconceptions. By emptying himself of himself, as it were, he creates a receptive space, an openness to hearing what the ruler actually has to say and what the situation actually demands. He shuts down his conscious, calculating mind and lets his vital energy or qi take over. He thereby becomes absorbed into something larger than himself: the movement of the Way, that which “cannot be stopped,” a sacred force that will carry him along to the proper outcome. Plodding, rigid, conscious planning is replaced with fast, flexible, and unconscious responsiveness to the world.
This is easier for children than adults. Take “divergent” creativity, which refers to the ability to imagine multiple solutions to a problem, or novel uses for an object. A common way to measure it experimentally is the Unusual Uses Test (UUT), where subjects are given a common object and asked to come up with as many different possible uses as they can imagine within a given time frame. Young children are more flexible and creative in such tests, not only because they’ve had less time to be indoctrinated in what these objects “are for,” but also because their cognitive control regions are less developed. Kids immediately grasp that Huizi’s huge gourds would make an awesome raft. Interestingly, successful performance by adults in tasks that require creative recategorization is accompanied by measurable downregulation of the cognitive control regions, and adults with PFC damage tend to do better on such tasks than healthy controls.
Alcohol, a very effective means of temporarily paralyzing our cognitive control abilities, has also been shown to enhance various types of creativity. One recent study asked subjects to perform a Remote Associates Test (RAT). In the RAT, subjects are given three apparently unrelated words (say, peach, arm, and tar), and asked to come up with a fourth word that will connect them (in this case, pit). Although the RAT is often used to probe “convergent” thinking—which seems distinct from “divergent” thinking and requires more cognitive control—it’s become clear that when initial guesses are incorrect, or subjects just can’t “see” the solution immediately, divergent thinking becomes crucial. In the study in question, the researchers found that subjects brought to a moderate level of inebriation—a blood alcohol level of .075, just shy of where you’d lose your driver’s license—did better on the RAT than sober controls. Moreover, the inebriated subjects were more likely to attribute their success to sudden “insight” rather than more plodding analytic strategies. Getting a bit drunk seems to weaken cognitive control and enhance insight-based creativity.
Similar effects have been found in “incubation” experiments, where subjects are given a primary task but then are allowed some time off, as it were, distracted by another task. As long as the primary task goal is kept salient—that is, as long as it remains somewhere in the back of the mind—brief distractions appear to enhance both problem-solving ability and skilled performance on physical tasks. Again, this seems to be because hot systems are good at making cognitive leaps. If the conscious mind can be temporarily diverted, the unconscious mind is free to get on with its work.
Confucius, again serving as Zhuangzi’s mouthpiece, replies that someone who swims well has “forgotten the water”—that is, they no longer fear it, and so it no longer takes up space in their consciousness. As a result, they can easily learn to master a small boat because their freedom from fear and distraction allows them to just relax into their unconscious skill: “They look upon the vast deep as if it were safe, dry land and view the capsizing of a boat with the same equanimity that you would view your cart tipping over. Imagine viewing the upheavals and setbacks of everyday life with the same lack of concern—nothing could get in and bother you, and there would be nowhere you could go and not be at ease.”
Koans consist of riddles, nonsense statements, or interpersonal encounters that either have no logical meaning or try to unsettle our ideas of what Buddhism is about. They are to be meditated upon in order to break the hold of rationality on the self—to “fast away the mind.” A common structure to the encounters is that a student, trying to be a good Buddhist, asks some straightforward question about doctrine. The Zen master then answers with a non sequitur, trying to shake up the student’s conceptual framework. The student then gets confused, hesitates, maybe begins to ask another question, and then the master strikes (verbally or physically) in order to provoke something like a spiritual nervous breakdown. The goal is to mount a multi-pronged assault on ordinary reason—verbal, physical, social—in order to free the embodied mind from the limitations of cold cognition and shock the student into a state of wu-wei.
The key to enlightened wu-wei is not learning more about doctrine but seeing and responding appropriately to what is in front of you. The Chinese Zen master who compiled the collection in which this koan appears comments, “It is only because it is so clear that it is so hard to see. People go looking for fire using a lighted lamp; if they only realized that the lamp itself was fire, they’d be able to cook their rice much sooner.”
Butcher Ding’s blade has no thickness, so it can play in the spaces in between the tendons and bones. In the same way, a person who genuinely has no self can move smoothly through the social world.
Zhuangzi shares with our other thinkers a conviction that wu-wei leads to de, although the power of Zhuangzian de lies not so much in attracting others as in relaxing them. At one point Zhuangzi notes that if you are out boating on a lake and someone in another rowboat collides with you, you get angry, yell at them, and curse. If the same thing happens with an empty rowboat—say, one blown into your path by the wind—you simply shrug it off and go on your way. The goal of the Zhuangzian sage is to empty his boat, so he can collide with others without arousing any animosity.
Complete relaxation and freedom from external concerns perfect your de and make you formidable, conveying a confidence and ease that makes others think twice before messing with you.
The way to handle monkeys—human or otherwise—is just to let them have their way, if there is no harm in it, rather than insisting on one’s original plan. This is “going along with things.” We see many of these socially adept exemplars in the text, including a skillful tax collector, who is empty of schemes and responsive to the emotions and needs of those he encounters. This endows him with a powerful de that allows him to “collect taxes from morning to night without meeting the slightest resistance.”
Supposedly to capture monkeys, a gourd containing food would be staked to the center of a clearing. The opening was designed to be large enough to allow a monkey to reach his hand in but too small for him to withdraw a fistful of food. The story has it that, having allowed the monkey a chance to reach in and grab the food, the tribesmen would then rush out of the bushes to capture him. All the monkey needed to do to escape was let go of the food and run, but—unable to recalibrate his evaluations in light of changing circumstances—he would remain there, panicked and desperate to flee, but with his tightly gripped fistful of food keeping him bound to the gourd. It’s the same rigidity that causes an eighty-hour-a-week big-firm lawyer to cling stubbornly to a high-paying, prestigious job even as physical exhaustion, mental breakdown, and an incipient ulcer arrive to take her away.
As Zhuangzi complains at one point: Now, as for what most people do and what they find happiness in, I don’t know whether, in the end, that is worth calling “happiness” at all. I look at what most people find happiness in—what the masses all flock together to pursue, racing after it as though they can’t stop themselves—and I don’t really know whether those who say they are happy are really happy or not. In the end, does happiness really exist, or not?
This Zhuangzian wu-wei is a state of perfect equanimity, flexibility, and responsiveness. Unlike the rigid conscious mind, it can “determine right and wrong” because it doesn’t pre-determine it. Being in wu-wei is sometimes compared to being like a pivot or a hinge—the still point at the center from which one can respond to every change, every eventuality. “When ‘this’ and ‘that’ are no longer set up in opposition, this is called the pivot of the Way,” we are told. “Once the pivot is centered in its socket, it is able to respond inexhaustibly.” Another helpful metaphor is that of letting your mind be like a mirror: The Perfected Person uses his mind like a mirror: he does not lead or welcome; he responds but does not store. This is why he is able to win over things and not be harmed. A literal mirror passively reflects what is in front of it, and when that thing changes the mirror changes as well. It does not “store” past images, nor does it anticipate images to come. It simply waits, empty and receptive. This is what the post-fast consciousness looks like, open to the world, responding directly from the unconscious mind, and overflowing with subtle, but powerful, de.
At the end of the day, the Zhuangzi is a text about individual wu-wei, about how you, as a person, can learn to move through the world in a free and easy way. On the surface, you might look like everyone else—going to your job as a butcher, or headed door to door to collect taxes—but on the inside you are quite different because you are now guided by your embodied, hot cognition, not your conscious mind. At one point this ideal is described as being “human on the outside, Heavenly on the inside.” It resembles in certain respects the New Testament ideal expressed in John 17, “being in the world but not of it.” Like the early Christians, Zhuangzi offers us no concrete political vision.
The process seems similar to the “social contagion” effect documented by psychologists, sociologists, and medical health professionals, whereby behaviors or traits—obesity, smoking, excess drinking, depression—appear to spread through social networks, affecting people as far as three degrees of separation away. That is, Joe’s depression can produce a noticeable uptick in depression among people he’s never even met—people who merely interact with friends of his friends. Zhuangzi’s ideal end-state seems to be a world where all people calmly pursue their own naturalness, interacting freely with others but always defaulting to a solitary path, like fish “forgetting about each other’s presence as they enjoy themselves in the rivers and lakes.”

Chapter 7 – The Paradox of Wu-wei: Spontaneity and Trust

Most of us have experienced the uncomfortable feeling of having another person “look straight into our heart and liver.” If we’re trying to be something that we’re not, it usually shows. Wu-wei reveals your inner character—your de or lack of de—not only because it’s automatic, and thus not subject to the conscious spin-doctor, but because the very fact that you’re not exerting cognitive control indicates you have no need
You’re like the honest subjects in the coin-flip study: it doesn’t even occur to you to cheat, so you don’t need to stop yourself from cheating. Self-confidence sends the signal not only that you’re happy—you are engaged in activities that are genuinely pleasing to you—but that you are what you claim to be. Relaxation and absorption in something that is valued—true wu-wei—is thus a sign of genuine commitment to the activity and its larger framework.
The connection between wu-wei and de thus makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. De is the attractive vibe—a combination of body language, microemotions, tone of voice, general appearance—kicked off by people who are honest, sincere, self-confident, and relaxed. It’s attractive because it’s a relatively hard-to-fake signal of a trustworthy cooperator, and the logic of civilized life makes us very keen to distinguish reliable cooperators from unreliable defectors. And the best time to look for these signals of reliability is when everyone’s guard is down: when we’re dancing, singing, drinking, and playing.
A key feature of wu-wei is the sense of being absorbed into a larger, valued whole, whether that involves the joys of being with a particular group of friends gathered around a particular kitchen table, or with a certain congregation, or surrounded by the beauty of a particular landscape. The lack of wu-wei—and consequent lack of de—therefore serves as a reliable indicator that I don’t care, I do not feel myself effortlessly absorbed into our conversation or our religious ceremony.
What we want, then, is a particular type of desirable, hot behavior where there is absolutely no gap between action and motivation. We want to assure ourselves that there is no extraneous cold cognition sneaking around backstage with potentially nefarious plans of its own. What we’re interested in is not mere physical skills but what philosophers call “virtues”: stable dispositions to perform socially desirable actions in a manner that’s sincerely motivated by shared values.
We have a powerful, ineradicable intuition that a “compassionate” action performed without the right motivation is merely a semblance, a counterfeit of virtue. The flip side is that evidence of sincerity and spontaneity in the moral realm inspires and moves us.
It is this difference between skills and virtues that, at the end of the day, is driving the paradox of wu-wei.
Chinese thinkers used stories like that of Butcher Ding or Woodcarver Qing to illustrate aspects of wu-wei—as did Aristotle, incidentally—the kind of wu-wei that they are worried about is moral in nature. They want to foster cooperation and virtue, not efficient butchery. So the paradox exists because the kinds of virtues that people care about and value in others center on who you are, not necessarily what you do. They are about stable, inner states, not just outward behavior. They are about values, not merely actions, because it’s commitment to shared values that allows large-scale societies to function.
So it’s not enough to perform generous actions, you need to become a generous person. which is why true wu-wei is both inherently hard to reach and such a great signal of trustworthiness once we’ve managed to get there. We’re attracted to genuinely wu-wei people—they have de—because evolution has shaped us to home in on signals of sincerity that are difficult to consciously simulate and even harder to experience on demand, and to do so in response to basic challenges inherent to human cooperation.

Chapter 8 – Learning from Wu-wei: Living with Paradox

The paradox of wu-wei arises out of problems surrounding human cooperation and trust, and its paradoxical nature is not accidental but rather a design feature. If it could be easily conjured away through some doctrinal innovation or new self-cultivation technique, it wouldn’t be doing its job. At the same time, it must be possible to skirt the paradox in practice—there has to be some way for a person who is not in wu-wei to somehow get there. Otherwise we’d have no effortlessly virtuous Confucius, no genuinely desireless Laozian
Fortunately for us, the early Chinese explored every conceivable strategy for moving a person from a state of alienated trying into perfected wu-wei. You can carve and polish: subject yourself to rigorous, long-term training designed to eventually instill the right dispositions. You can embrace simplicity: actively reject the pursuit of goals, in the hope that the goals will then be obtained by themselves. You can cultivate your sprouts: try to identify incipient tendencies of desirable behavior within you, and then nurture and expand them until they are strong enough to take over. Or you can just go with the flow: forget about trying, forget about not trying, and just let the values that you want to embrace pick you up and carry you along.
In any case, any religion I’ve ever studied is motivated by the sense that there’s at least something we need to change about ourselves or our relationships. The problem is how to consciously strive to do this without fatally blocking wu-wei. After almost 2,500 years of serious, worldwide effort, no one has come up with a completely foolproof solution to this problem. This is both because the paradox is a genuine one and because the different strategies we’ve explored vary in their appropriateness in at least two ways.
To begin with, different strategies may simply suit different types of people. Those with conservative personalities—who are often, though not always, politically conservative as well—generally take a dim view of human nature and emphasize the importance of tradition, authority, and discipline. Liberals tend to have a sunnier view of human nature and therefore place more stock in individual autonomy, creativity, and flexibility. Looked at this way, the swings between Confucian and Daoist strategies for attaining wu-wei could be seen as an alternation between conservative and liberal responses, with Mencius trying to take a moderate view. The same could be said of the “gradual” versus “sudden” debate in Zen Buddhism.
There is considerable evidence that a basic inclination toward either liberalism or conservatism is a heritable trait; like other personality traits such as extroversion or introversion, it has a partially genetic basis. Just as people come into the world being relatively open or closed to new experiences, extremely conscientious or fairly loosey-goosey, it seems that people are also born with liberal or conservative inclinations. So it may be the case that whether you find yourself drawn to the carving-and-polishing or letting-go strategies has something to do with where you fall along this spectrum.
Seeing the different strategies as having at least a partial basis in innate personality differences also goes a long way toward explaining why no single strategy ever becomes dominant for any period of time: as soon as one strategy gets established as orthodoxy, the opposite strategy is quickly reasserted by those who have different inclinations. This would make sense if human populations consist of a mix of liberal-and conservative-leaning people, each inclined to push back against strategies that go against their own innate grain.
Different phases of life might also call for different strategies. Carving and polishing might be more appropriate earlier in life, or when you are just learning something new. There is good evidence that, when it comes to skill acquisition, conscious attention to technique and explicit feedback is actually very helpful. It’s only when you reach the expert stage that cold cognition begins to disrupt your performance.
The same may be true of morality. A deeply ingrained moral disposition could become too rigid as you age, in which case you might need to shift to the sprout or letting-go approach. It’s often said that in traditional China people were Confucians when employed as officials but Daoists when they got axed by a new regime or court faction and sent off to the countryside. Which strategy helps to maintain you in wu-wei may very well change over time in response to different career or family demands.

“smart people who’ve thought about this usually understand that the habits we put in practice end up shaping the people we are within.”

“minor tweaks in our own behavior—such as our facial expression, posture, tone of voice, and other seemingly minor details of comportment—[ that] can lead to major payoffs in our moral lives.”
“ethical bootstrapping,” the idea that cultivated behaviors have a small positive effect on others, which causes them to act in an incrementally more morally positive way, which in turn feeds back on us.
From the perspective of academic psychology, it has become increasingly clear that seemingly trivial aspects of the social and physical environment can have profound effects on behavior. This means that paying attention to the music your kids listen to, what they wear, and whom they hang out with might do both them and society a lot of good. Not a news flash to conservatives, but maybe a bit of a wake-up call to liberals such as myself.
Also as a ritual that probably helps to create more pleasant people. The bus driver, whether she realizes it or not, feels better having been thanked; she is now more inclined to drive courteously, or to remain at the stop that extra second to allow someone running late to hop on the bus. This behavior ripples out across my rainy city in subtle waves, much like the mysterious power of de described by Confucius, inclining people toward virtue like wind blowing over the grass.
Moreover, work in cognitive psychology suggests that submerging people in a particular cultural tradition also helps them learn to love something they do not already love. Simply exposing someone repeatedly to a new stimulus—a font style, song, painting—causes them, over time, to develop a liking for it. Familiarity breeds love, not contempt. It also makes us more likely to believe in it (for better or worse). Statements that we have heard repeated many times are judged to have a higher “truthiness” quotient than novel statements; the same effect is found with text printed in a familiar or more legible font. This has immediate, practical implications for how you go about arranging your daily life. The early Confucians put an enormous amount of effort into modifying their immediate aesthetic environment—clothes, colors, layout of living spaces, music—so that it would reflect the values of the Confucian Way. Use the same techniques to foster our own particular set of values. If you can set up your home and workplace, to the extent you have control over it, to reflect your tastes and values, the things that make you feel good and at home, you’re going to be better off. You’ll have more wu-wei and more de. Whatever—environmental reminders of your larger framework of values will reinforce your commitment, and in the process foster absorption, relaxation, and confidence.
And there are other areas where we might want to develop a new disposition: becoming a more patient spouse or parent, a more courteous driver, or a more helpful friend. The basic idea is simple. You choose a desirable model, then reshape your hot cognition to fit by immersing yourself in reminders and environmental cues. How this repetition eventually causes the new internal disposition to become sincere and self-activating is a bit of a mystery—intellectually, the paradox remains—but it seems to work in practice.
There are times, though, when cultural training devolves into empty posturing or when intensive effort turns into counterproductive drudgery. That’s when we might need to follow Laozi’s “do nothing” strategy. A growing literature in the psychology of perception has demonstrated that, when it comes to certain difficult visual tasks—exercises where subjects are asked to locate a target shape in the midst of a large array—simply relaxing and letting the answer “pop out” works much better than actively trying.
Similarly, when one is stymied by a problem, simply leaving it alone and doing something else is often the best way to solve it. Doing nothing allows your unconscious to take over, and, as we’ve seen, the unconscious is often better at solving certain types of particularly complex problems.
The conscious mind has limited capacity, and often the best thing to do when you run into difficulty is shut it down for a while and let the body take over. Laozi at one point advises the ruler, “Governing a large state is like cooking a small fish”—in other words, you don’t want to overdo it. When you are faced with a difficult management decision or an intractable technical problem, the best approach may be just to walk away. Sleep in, take a walk, go weed your garden.