COMING OUT AND GOING BACK IN:
TAOIST THEMES OF EVOLUTION AND
INVOLUTION
Delia Morgan
I. Introduction.
Religions and philosophies have as central concerns the nature of ultimate reality, the facts of phenomenal existence and the realm of human culture and concerns; and ideas concerning the relations between these three realms form a central core of any tradition. Discourses along these lines are both descriptive, an explanation or model for the way things are, and prescriptive, a recipe for the way things should be. Cosmogony, an account of the coming-to-be of the phenomenal world from ultimate reality, is descriptive; while ethics, which relates human concerns to the sphere of ultimate reality, is prescriptive. But these two questions -- 'How does the world arise?' and 'How should we, as humans, act?' are usually interrelated. It has been noted that religious symbols and ideas often serve as bi-directional models: a model of the sacred, unseen order is simultaneously a model for the structure of human society.
In classical China two divergent streams of thought, the Confucian and the Taoist, justified their often opposing views regarding desirable human behavior by appealing to very different cosmogonies. As pointed out by Norman Girardot, the Confucians looked back to a world originally founded on order, that is, the primordial chaos which had existed prior to the ordering of things by the sages, was not considered part of the creation proper, but rather as an unruly force opposed to the maintenance of order, a threat to be kept at bay by virtue of correct behavior, the observation of rules and proper rituals. The Taoists, on the other hand, looked back to the primordial chaos as the creative agent of cosmogony, and looked upon the Confucian sages as despoilers of this idyllic beginning-time. For the Taoist, the world is steeped in a natural ordering process, the Tao, and any attempts to impose limited, human ideas of order upon nature are bound to create artificiality and confusion.
The Taoist ideals of naturalness and the 'primitive' result in often startlingly original ideas of the way humans 'ought' to be: mindless, blockish, and dull, forgoing righteousness and benevolence and eschewing morality. But even this is paradoxical since in Taoist thought, right and wrong are themselves arbitrary human inventions, better disposed of; so how can one begin to hold any 'oughts'? Yet the Taoists do offer prescriptions, for how to act, how to speak, how to think, how to be. Different individuals require, or can make use of, different levels of spiritual teaching; ordinary men need to learn to live skillfully in the world, while the sage desires to attain a more intimate connection to the Tao, the ultimate reality that is both transcendent, beyond ordinary perception, and immanent, present within all things in the phenomenal world. As we shall see, those persons seeking union with the Tao seem also to progress through levels of knowledge or awakening; and while there are some similarities with other meditative traditions such as Yoga, there are uniquely Taoist features, related to fundamental perceptions of the nature of ultimate reality.
Whether the ideas of ultimate reality grew out of a difference in perception rooted in spiritual practice or whether the spiritual practice reflected those metaphysical ideas would be a chicken-and-egg sort of question. One overarching theme, however, is that of esoteric disciplines leading to a spiritual return -- a return to the primordial and undifferentiated experience of the unified Tao. Mircea Eliade has elsewhere pointed out the ubiquity in religious traditions of the theme of 'the Eternal Return,' in which life in the present, here and now, re-assumes a sacred and cosmically significant aspect by returning through ritual or spiritual techniques to primordial time, 'in illo tempore', and he relates this to both the ecstasis of the shaman and the enstasis of the yogic mystic. In shamanic ecstasy the seeker takes spiritual flights out of his body, traveling through sacred realms; in yogic 'enstasis' the cosmos is located inside, enfolded within the microcosmos of the individual yogi. These may be viewed as two different shades on a continuum of spiritual experience; in Taoist texts the entire spectrum would seem to be represented -- the Holy Man becomes empty, joins in the Oneness of the Tao, flies through unseen realms like a dragon, and folds the sun and moon under his arm.
Also in Taoism, this spiritual progression may be seen as an involution -- a reversal of the process of evolution by which the phenomenal world unfolded, a 'going back' to before the beginning. If the cosmogony is conceived of as an evolution (in the broad sense of the term, not the Darwinian) or a going-out of things from a primordial unity, then spiritual practice is in effect aimed at halting and even reversing this process within the individual. The reversal of evolution to involution is in keeping with the ideas about the Tao itself -- that reversal is in its very nature; things go in one direction for a while, but then they must come back. These reversals play out upon the field of the-transformation-of-things, which is also the unchanging Tao itself. It is not a temporal process we are speaking of here; although the texts do often speak of the True Man of Old and the idyllic Ancient Times, these tales relate to times that the world 'has the Tao' or doesn't, and such times are a matter of fate. But regardless of the times, the spiritual seeker may achieve within himself the equivalent of the return to primordial paradise, by tracing back to the root of things, seeing their oneness and melding himself with that. Once he has returned to this beginning, reversing the evolutionary process within, then world of the ten thousand things and all their changes is itself seen as infused with and contained within the unchanging and transcendent Tao.
II. Taoist Ways
Consider the following, from the outer chapters of Chuang-tzu:
"In the Great Beginning, there was nonbeing; there was no being, no name. Out of it arose One; there was One, but it had no form. Things got hold of it and came to life, and it was called Virtue. Before things had forms, they had their allotments; these were of many kinds, but not cut off from one another, and they were called fates. Out of the flow and flux, things were born, and as they grew they developed distinctive shapes; these were called forms. The forms and bodies held within them spirits, each with its own characteristics and limitations, and this was called the inborn nature. If the nature is trained, you may return to Virtue, and Virtue at its highest peak is identical with the Beginning. Being identical, you will be empty; being empty, you will be great. You may join in the cheeping and chirping and, when you have joined in the cheeping and chirping, you may join with Heaven and earth. Your joining is wild and confused, as though you were stupid, as though you were demented. This is called Dark Virtue. Rude and unwitting, you take part in the Great Submission." (CT 131-132)
Join in the cheeping and chirping, wild and confused, as though demented! One would be hard-pressed to find a comparable recommendation in other spiritual texts or teachings. Contained within this passage are some characteristic Taoist sentiments: the empty and amorphous nature of ultimate reality; the chaotic processes of flux and flow which shape the world; the desirability of emptiness as the way of union with the Tao; and the confused, seemingly demented mode of being of the Taoist sage, one who has attained spiritual union. The 'cheeping and chirping' remind one of the second chapter of Chuang-tzu, which speaks of the noises of the empty hollows, caused by the piping of the breath of Heaven, blowing on the ten thousand things and causing each one to be itself. We also see here both an evolutionary cosmogony, which begins with non-being and culminates in the inborn nature of the many things, and a prescription for a spiritual return. The turning point is in the training: if the inborn nature, evolved from original source, is trained through esoteric disciplines, one may return to Te, the virtue or power of the Tao; then one will be empty, identical with the beginning, which had its roots in nonbeing. (In other places in the text, one cannot speak of the Tao as either being or non-being, since it is beyond all such distinctions; but the passage here succeeds at least in giving the idea that there may be something beyond what we usually think of as being or existence.)
The Taoist sees all things as rooted in the Tao, or Way, which is itself beyond ordinary perception: "The Way has its reality and its signs but is without action or form...It is its own source, its own root. Before Heaven and earth existed it was there...It gave spirituality to the spirits and to God; it gave birth to Heaven and to earth....it exists beneath the limit of the six direction, and yet you cannot call it deep." (CT 81)
Another characteristic of Taoist thought is its love of freedom and the natural, and its aversion to the artificial and the regulated: "Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views -- then the world will be governed." (CT 94) Since all things are contained in and supported by the Tao, attempts at human regulation or interference generally create trouble. To the Taoist, much of this confusion starts with language, and the creating of distinctions between things; one must transcend the limits of reason and experience the unity of things in the Tao: "'This' and 'that' give birth to each other." (CT 39) But "The Way makes them all into one." (CT 41) Therefore: "The sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in Heaven the Equalizer." (CT 41) "The sage embraces things. Ordinary men discriminate among them and parade their discriminations before others. So I say, those who discriminate fail to see." (CT 44)
This 'embracing of things' is a very different kind of understanding than that of the rational mind; one ceases trying to fit things into neat boxes with sharply drawn lines, and rests in a state of contented unknowing, which reveals a deeper truth than that of reason. "If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way." (CT 44) "Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest. " (CT 44)
When this sort of emptiness is attained, one becomes a channel for the power of the Tao; applied to daily living one becomes a skilled person; applied to a way of life, one may become a sage. The story of cook Ting cutting up an ox relates an skill of everyday life to the Tao, or Way: "What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now -- now I go at it by spirit and don't look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants." (CT 50-51)
While it may be said that Taoist texts ultimately aim at only one kind of knowledge, that of experiential union with the Tao, there are different levels of knowledge acknowledged, and different contexts in which knowledge is useful. In Chuang-tzu there are numerous anecdotes of skill -- carving, swimming, catching bugs -- but all of these are in some way related to attaining some unity with Tao, even if only in one limited aspect of life, one particular talent. When we consider union with Tao as an end in itself, we must look at those passages dealing with the illumination of the sages.
III. Fasting and Forgetting:
the Way of Sages
Descriptions of the fully-realized individual are among the most colorful passages in Chuang-tzu; terms such as the Sage, the Holy Man, the Perfect Man, the True Man of Old are used seemingly interchangeably to refer to persons complete in their union with the Tao, and hence powerful in Te, which is Virtue or vital power. (Some passages, however, seem to suggest varying levels of spiritual accomplishment, differently named, or a progressive process of Tao-realization.) In some passages the sage's virtue is employed in bringing natural order to the people; in others the enlightened one, often called a Holy Man, is clearly a recluse.
"A Holy Man...rides a flying dragon, and wanders beyond the four seas. By concentrating his spirit, he can protect creatures from sickness and plague and make the harvest plentiful" "This man, with this virtue of his, is about to embrace the ten thousand things and roll them into one. Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world? There is nothing that can harm this man." (CT 33) "The Perfect Man is godlike. Though the great swamps blaze, they cannot burn him...A man like this rides the clouds and mist, straddles the sun and moon, and wanders beyond the four seas. Even life and death have no effect on him, much less the rules of profit and loss!" (CT 46) "The sage leans on the sun and moon, tucks the universe under his arm, merges himself with things, leaves the confusion and muddle as it is, and looks on slaves as exalted." (CT 47)
'Concentrating his spirit' refers to esoteric techniques, and the virtue or vital power gained thereby is seen as having effective power in the world of things. He embraces the ten thousand things, the phenomenal world, and rolls them into one, the Tao. He is beyond harm, beyond gain and loss, beyond even life and death. Along with the forgetting of distinctions, there is an embracing of all things in all their endless changes. The discipline needed to attain this state is sometimes referred to as 'fasting of the mind,' which refers to an emptying of the mind, ridding it of thought and distinctions; often it is called, simply 'forgetting.'
The fasting of the mind is described: "Make your will one! Don't listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don't listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind." (CT 57-58) "You have heard of the knowledge that knows, but you have never heard of the knowledge that does not know. Look into that closed room, the empty chamber where brightness is born! Fortune and blessing gather where there is stillness...put mind and knowledge on the outside. Then even gods and spirits will come to dwell...This is the changing of the ten thousand things..." (CT 58)
There is also the story of Yen Hui, the disciple who tells Confucius "I'm improving!" In successive days of 'sitting down and forgetting' he attains the following phases: "'I've forgotten benevolence and righteousness!" "I've forgotten rites and music!" and finally: "I can sit down and forget everything!" (CT 90) "I smash up my limbs and body, drive out perception and intellect, cast off form, do away with understanding, and make myself identical with the Great Thoroughfare. This is what I mean by sitting down and forgetting everything." (CT 90)
Here the Great Thoroughfare is the Tao itself; one gains union with it by forgetting everything and becoming empty. Passages referring to 'smashing up' the limbs and body would seem to refer to a Taoist kind of yoga; there are also references to deep breathing and guarding the pure breath, indicating that breath techniques were common to both the yogic and Taoist traditions. "The Perfect ...guards the pure breath...guards what belongs to Heaven and keeps it whole. His spirit has no flaw, so how can things enter in and get at him?" (CT 198) Breath is correlated with spirit, and to maintain its wholeness is to become impermeable to the vicissitudes of material existence. Even the metaphor of enlightenment would seem to hold; while descriptions of the Tao in dark terms abound in Taoist texts, there are also metaphors of light, or of 'shaded light,' and those who attain union with the Tao are described as having gained a brilliant brightness.
There appear to be levels of true knowledge, successive phases of 'forgetting.' One description of the attainment of a Taoist unity is in the teaching of Pu-liang by the Woman Crookback: "It's easier to explain the Way of a sage to someone who has the talent of a sage...So I began explaining...After [three days] he was able to put the world outside himself...[after seven days more] he was able to put things outside himself...after [nine days more] he was able to put life outside himself...he was able to achieve the brightness of dawn, and...he could see his own aloneness...he could do away with past and present...he was able to enter where there is no life and no death. " (CT 82-83)
This seems to be a progressive emptying: one loses the world (perhaps meaning socially-constructed reality), then things (linguistic distinctions, boundaries between this and that), then life (the body, the sense of one's own self as a living being), and is then enlightened. In this state there are no longer distinctions between past and present, life and death, or self and others (because he could see his own aloneness, implying that there are no 'others').
There seems to be a recurring motif of progression in the stages of spiritual attainment. In the first chapter of Chuang-tzu it is declared: "The Perfect Man has no self; the Holy Man has no merit; the Sage has no fame." (CT 32) These are usually taken to be three terms for the same thing; but we could easily see here a sort of progression, albeit listed in reverse. Fame is an arbitrary and ephemeral fluke of fate, dependent entirely on the often uninformed opinions of others; what gains one fame and recognition may or may not depend on one's own merit or action, and it may change overnight. Hence it is the most shallow of the attributes here being 'forgotten,' and probably indicates a first stage of spiritual understanding. Merit runs deeper; ideas of right and wrong, good and bad actions, are usually present even in those who have no desire for fame; the spiritual person wants to do the right thing. But the Taoists insist that such distinctions are also illusory and we must move beyond them; this is a further stage of realization. Finally, one is left with oneself alone, stripped of attributes; when even this self or identity is emptied, so that there is no distinction between self and other things, the seeker has attained union with the Tao, which is the final stage of realization. So here we could take the spiritual progression to be: Sage/without fame; Holy Man/without merit; Perfect Man/without self. The final stage, of course, would include the first two; the Perfect Man would be without fame, merit or self.
We also see a similar progression of loss of fame, merit and self in the story of woodworker Ch'ing, who carves bell-stands, and who also attains his realization by esoteric discipline; he has gotten to a place where the Tao moves through him, so people think that his bell-stands were carved by spirits: "I always fast in order to still my mind. When I have fasted for three days, I no longer have any thought of congratulations or rewards, of titles or stipends. When I have fasted for five days, I no longer have any thought of praise or blame, of skill or clumsiness. And when I have fasted for seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a form and body...My skill is concentrated and all outside distractions fade away." (CT 205-206) Here he forgets first fame (rewards, titles); then merit (praise, blame, skill); then even himself (his form and body).
A reverse form of this three-step process can be seen in the passage where history is related as the downfall of society from idyllic times, due to the ruling ways of the emperors: "The Yellow Emperor ruled the world by making the hearts of the people one...Yao ruled the world by making the hearts of the people affectionate...Shun ruled the world by making the hearts of the people rivalrous." (CT 164) Here there is a degeneration from oneness (people joined as one in the Tao, without sense of separate self), to separation with affection (kindness or goodness), and finally to rivalry (seeking after fame and rewards). So it would seem that, as the people fell away from their true nature, they acquired, in order: a sense of individual self, a concern with goodness or merit, and lastly a rivalrous seeking after fame and fortune. If we consider the Taoist seeker to be engaged in the process of reversing this downfall, then these are the things he would need to give up.
This reveals a theme of reversal: a progressive decay caused by an accumulation of attachments, and a progressive realization attained by forgetting them. The progressive 'forgetting' of the Taoist seeker suggests that it is harder to lose the attachment to some things than others; easy to discard fame when one sees its arbitrary and ephemeral nature, harder to let go of ideas of right and wrong, and much harder to let go of personal identity. One is encumbered by an attachment to these assumptions about the nature of reality, and this can keep one from maintaining a focus on the process at hand; in the case of meditation, the process is a return to one's true and original nature, without distinctions. The process of forgetting is a in part a process of awakening to the falsity of distinctions, or at least to the impossibility of knowing that our distinctions are true. In the final stage of liberation, one must doubt even the distinction of one's own personal identity: "How do we know that this 'I' we talk about has any 'I' to it? You dream you're a bird...you dream you're a fish...But now when you tell me about it, I don't know whether you are awake or whether you are dreaming...Be content to go along and forget about change and then you can enter the mysterious oneness of Heaven." (CT 88-89) One can dream oneself as a fish, as a bird; this echoes the very opening section of Chuang-tzu, where the fish K'un becomes the vast bird P'eng. As the mythical creature journeys toward the Lake of Heaven, the winds and waters roil with his wingbeats; there is blue above and blue below, and no way to tell up from down, one thing from another. A vast, shape-shifting being in a vast and shifting realm, the P'eng bird cannot tell where he begins or ends; he is one with the boundless. (CT 29)
IV. The Great Return
The theme of return to original nature, return to Tao, looms large in Taoist texts. Since Taoists see human history largely as a deterioration away from nature toward artificiality, the only real solution is to forget what the Confucian sages have taught and become simple again; for a nation, this could mean forgetting rites and rules, doing away with rewards and punishment, living simply and contentedly. For an individual, taken to the extreme, it would be to attain the utter simplicity of undifferentiated oneness. At this extreme, one would seem to transcend not only the artificial distinctions of human convention, but even to transcend the natural process of transformation, the benevolent chaos (hun-tun) which sustains the ten thousand things. In the Tao, in eternal constancy, one goes along with the changes of things, but is unaffected by them; one wanders along, unknowing, unscheming, unconcerned, delighting in all things equally.
This return to source is itself seen as a natural part of the process of the Tao, which contains within it a cyclic or returning aspect, the quality of reversal. Things come forth out of it, things return to it, and in between is an unending process of transformation. Lao Tzu describes it poetically: "Things grow and grow/ But each goes back to its root./ Going back to the root is stillness./ This means returning to what is." (LT 16) "The world has a source: the world's mother./ Once you have the mother, you know the children./ Once you know the children, return to the mother." (LT 52) "Become one with the dust/ This is called original unity." (LT 56)
The growing and the returning are two phases of one process, which encompasses both evolution, an outward multiplying of things, and involution, a unifying return to the source. Chuang-tzu describes these phases of the process also: "The seeds of things have mysterious workings...Green Peace plants produce leopards and leopards produce horses and horses produce men. Men in time return again to the mysterious workings. So all creatures come out of the mysterious workings and go back into them again." (CT 195-196)
There is a paradox here of the Tao as a constancy which sustains the continual transformation of things; like the wind which supports the great beating wings of the giant bird-fish (CT 28) , the Tao is empty yet contains all the jumbling things and all of their changes. Western ideas of transcendence versus immanence would not seem to apply here; the Tao appears to be both transcendent and immanent. (Michael Saso relates that modern Taoist mystics of Taiwan see the original Tao as transcendent source, and Te as its active, immanent aspect. (Saso, p. 144-145)
In some of the texts it is possible to recognize phases in the evolutionary (outgoing) cosmogonic process, just as there were stages in the involutionary (inward-turning) spiritual progression of the mystic. The passage at the beginning of the second section traced the process: starting with nonbeing there arose oneness without form, then virtue/life (vital power), this had within it a flux and flow of fates which began to form things, then these forms or bodies held distinctive spirits within, each with its own inborn nature. At that point, there was the possibility of training one's nature to return to emptiness and the beginning; at that point, one has not departed so far from nature after all, so the returning might not be too difficult. "In uncarved simplicity the people attain their true nature. Then along comes the sage...and the world for the first time is divided." (CT 105) "The Way has never known boundaries; speech has no constancy. But because of [the recognition of a] 'this', there came to be boundaries." (CT 43)
With the coming of language, culture, and social conventions a new phase, essentially artificial, has begun. Up to now the cosmogony has been a purely natural process; most likely it is not even a temporal process, but a continuously ongoing one. There were men present, but they lived simply and naturally. But with the coming of language and the coveting of knowledge by the sages, distinctions arose; history began, creating disturbance and confusion in a long process of deterioration from the original idyllic pre-history. This deterioration may be viewed as part of the cosmogonic process; indeed for the Confucians the rise of culture is the only significant cosmogony. But for the Taoists, it imposes extra burdens on those who would reverse the evolutionary flow and return to the emptiness of the beginning. Now there are injurious thought patterns and behaviors to be overcome before one can rest in one's inborn nature and return to the Tao. In some passages even the Tao itself appears to have been injured by the creation of artificial distinctions.
"The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go? To the point where some of them believed that things have never existed -- so far, to the end, where nothing can be added. Those at the next stage thought that things exist but recognized no boundaries among them. Those at the next stage thought there were boundaries but recognized no right and wrong. Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured love became complete." (CT41) "That the unwrought substance was blighted in order to fashion implements -- this was the crime of the artisan. That the Way and its Virtue were destroyed in order to create benevolence and righteousness -- this was the fault of the sage." (CT 106)
Here again we see a progression through cosmogony and history: from nonbeing, to formless being or things without boundaries, to the creation of boundaries but without value judgments, to the creation of right and wrong which damaged the wholeness of the Tao. This would seem to trace out a progression which is the reverse of that by which the mystic attains reunion with the Tao: he must give up 'love' (or the preference for one thing over another), he must give up ideas of right and wrong, he must give up making distinctions or boundaries between things, and finally he must give up himself, and rest in emptiness. With this emptiness one attains a total liberation; having become one with the Tao, one may become any and all things, or none at all.
"Chuang Tzu now...he is treading the Yellow Springs (underworld) or leaping up to the vast blue (sky)...In utter freedom he dissolves himself in the four directions and drowns himself in the unfathomable. To him there is no east or west -- he begins in the Dark Obscurity and returns to the Great Thoroughfare." (CT 187) "Things have their creation in what has no form, and their conclusion in what has no change. If a man can get hold of this...He may hide within the borders that know no source, wander where the ten thousand things have their end and beginning, unify his nature, nourish his breath, unite his virtue and thereby communicate with that which creates all things." (CT 198)
In both passages above we see the theme of return: Chuang-tzu begins in the Dark Obscurity and returns to the Great Thoroughfare (the Tao). Things have their creation in what 'has no form' (dark obscurity?) and their conclusion in what has no change (the Tao?). If the process is indeed a returning, these two metaphorical places, the beginning and the end, would both seem to be the Tao. Death itself can be seen as a transformation which involves a return to the Tao: "Having been transformed, things find themselves alive; another transformation and they are dead...it is like the untying of the Heaven-lent bow-bag...a yielding, a mild mutation, and the soul and spirit are on their way, the body following after, on at last to the Great Return. The formless moves to the realm of form; the formed moves back to the realm of formlessness." (CT 240)
Things move from the formless to the formless, pausing to play for a while in the ground of form and change. Death, the transition from form to formless is not such a drastic one after all -- a mere yielding, a mild mutation. But when humans fear and struggle against the natural transformations of the Tao, they cling to the transient world of form; they make trouble and confuse themselves, they increase the dividedness of things and lose all serenity. Better to seek refuge in the emptiness, where all things come out and go back in; become one with nonbeing:
"The way permeates all things. Their dividedness is their completeness, their completeness is their impairment. What is hateful about this state of dividedness is that men take their dividedness and seek to supplement it...Only when that which has form learns to imitate the formless will it find serenity. It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end...There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in...This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself." (CT 256-257)
V. Conclusion
We have explored the theme of 'return to source' in Taoism, noting that the process by which the sage attains union with the Tao seems to be a reversal of the process by which the Tao originally gave (or gives, as an ongoing event) birth to things and to men. We have seen that the phases of the cosmogony seem to be evolutionary, or outward-going from the Tao, and the discipline of the sage is inward-directed, an involution or concentration of the spirit upon itself. Cosmogony begins in nonbeing, progresses through formless being, then through things with boundaries, and finally, has distinctions of right and wrong imposed upon it by men. Cosmogony, which began as a purely natural process becomes a cultural one. In reversing this process within himself, the sage first rids himself of the cultural and linguistic baggage which have weighted down his inborn nature. But the process of spiritual return does not stop there, and the sage goes on to practice esoteric spiritual disciplines such as meditation (the fasting of the mind) and breath control in order to attain a pure emptiness in which the Tao may come to dwell.
Many paradoxes , and a few questions, remain. Death is also considered a 'going-back' into the Tao; what then is the difference, if any, between a fully realized sage and a dead one? To what extent is cosmogony conceived as an ongoing process, and to what extent is it temporal? As Eliade has pointed out, many cultures divide time into historical time (usually conceived of as cyclic rather than linear) and primordial or sacred time, which is timeless (both now and eternal); to bring temporal reality back into contact with sacred eternal time is to infuse the present moment with the world-creating holy power of the primordial. It would seem the Taoist conception of the birth of things from the formless is an ongoing process, without beginning or end; even though they speak of a beginning, this seems to be more a state of awareness of undifferentiated unity, rather than a temporal event. Within the ongoing process of the transformation of things, there are many cycles of coming out and going back in; all things come from Tao and return to it, and it is this cyclical process itself which is endless. History could be seen as one part of this cyclical process; there are times when the world has the Way, and times when the world loses it, through the process of coveting knowledge and making distinctions.
The Taoist sage seeks to transcend the temporality of his historical conditions, and also his own personal identity. But in this transcendence he does not cease to be part of this process; on the contrary, in his emptiness he joins in the cheeping and chirping, wild and confused. But a shift in perspective has taken place. It is as if he had dived into the water, becoming one with it; looking up, he sees the splashing waves from a new angle, a place of silence and stillness, and is no longer buffeted about by them. The sage has become one with the substratum of the endless changes, and can ride them about freely, or dwell in emptiness as he chooses. In the sage the immanence of the Tao has become one with its transcendence.
Given this equation of immanence and transcendence, we must be wary even of the language we have used here: evolution as out-going, involution as coming-back-in. These are spatial metaphors, risky to use when speaking of metaphysical realities beyond space and time. But all language is problematic when seeking to describe the Tao and its processes, so metaphors must abound. Evolution and involution contain the root idea of volution, a thing turning back upon itself in repeating patterns, a cyclicity and reversal that is an inherent aspect of the Tao as it manifests, as the phenomenal world spins around a silent, unseen and empty center.
Still, the Tao is not something which anything can ever come out of; it contains all and infuses all. The out-going is more properly a fading out of the state of awareness that is intimately steeped in the Tao; it is a forgetting of true nature, a forgetting of its emptiness as it becomes filled with distinctions in the world of form. To return, the world of forms and distinctions must be forgotten, so that Tao may be remembered and embraced.
One metaphor not touched upon here so far is that of the dream; yet it is intimately connected with these processes of coming-out and going-back-in to the Tao. It is as if the sage, at one with the Tao, has a foot in both the conscious and unconscious states. Others dream, not knowing that they dream. He is enraptured by the dream, embracing the changes with playful delight, without seeking to understand or analyze them; yet he does not grant hard reality to the illusion, does not become seriously attached to it but sees it for what it is -- a flux and flow of endless transformation. Unlike others, he is awake in the source of the dreaming, the empty Tao: "Meng-sun...was advanced beyond ordinary understanding...[he] doesn't know why he lives and doesn't know why he dies. He doesn't know why he should go ahead; he doesn't know why he should fall behind. In the process of change, he has become a thing [among other things], and he is merely waiting for some other change that he doesn't yet know about. Moreover, when he is changing, how does he know that he is really changing? And when he is not changing, how does he know that he hasn't already changed?...You and I ...we are dreaming...Meng-sun alone has waked up." (CT 88)
Here Chuang-tzu is deliberately employing a kind of reversal of the ordinary meaning of words, courting paradox yet again in purposeful ambiguity. The boundary between waking and dreaming is an essentially meaningless distinction, which becomes blurred in the light of clarity possessed by the sage. This clarity is a radically different idea of wakefulness than is generally found in the western traditions; it might be compared to a kind of lucid dreaming. "Such men as they...wander beyond the realm...Even now they have joined with the Creator as men to wander in the single breath of heaven and earth...They borrow the forms of different creatures and house them in the same body. They...cast aside ears and eyes, turning and revolving, ending and beginning again, unaware of where they start or finish. Idly they roam beyond the dust and dirt; they wander free and easy in the service of inaction." (CT 86-87)
Turning and revolving, ending and beginning again, unaware of where they start or finish; they become different creatures; they seem to be changing but don't know whether they are changing. They have forgotten themselves, they have put off distinctions, and to such men it seems as if the world itself has been powerfully transformed: "You have only to rest in inaction and things will transform themselves. Smash your form and body, spit out hearing and eyesight, forget you are a thing among other things, and you may join in great unity with the deep and boundless. Undo the mind, slough off spirit, be blank and soulless, and the ten thousand things one by one will return to the root -- return to the root and not know why. Dark and undifferentiated chaos -- to the end of life none will depart from it. But if you try to know it, you have already departed from it." (CT 122)
Thus the sage has the power not only to return to the Tao himself, but to cause other things - the ten thousand things - to return to the Tao also. But have they really returned? Or had they never left?
"Reversal is Tao's movement.
Yielding is Tao's practice.
All things originate from being.
Being originates from non-being." (LT 40)
"Original Te goes deep and far.
All things reverse
Return
And reach the great headwaters." (LT 65)
REFERENCES:
Note: 'CT' in parentheticals refers to reference #1, the
Chuang Tzu; 'LT' refers to reference #2, Lao Tzu.
1. Watson, Burton; translator. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. Columbia University Press, New York, 1968.
2. Addiss, Stephen and Lombardo, Stanley; translators. Tao Te Ching (of Lao Tzu). Hackett Publishing Co., Indianapolis, 1993.
3. Girardot, Norman J. "Chaotic 'Order' (hun-tun) and Benevolent 'Disorder' (luan) in the Chuang Tzu." Philosophy East and West 28.3 (July 1978):299-322.
4. Mair, Victor H.; editor. Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu. University of Hawaii Press, 1983.
5. Saso, Michael. "The Chuang-tzu nei-p'ien: A Taoist Meditation." In Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, by Mair.