00:07

Watts

Oh, I’m not going to stand in front of the rostrum, so—that’s the whole thing. I want to be over in the middle. I’ll sit down over here.

03:01

Watts

Perhaps you know that the painting of landscape is for the Chinese a form of religious art. Landscape art developed in the West, quite incidentally, to the art of painting the human figure. Landscape began to be introduced into paintings of the Renaissance as a background for human subjects. And then, by slow degrees, people got fascinated with the background and actually moved into landscape painting under Chinese influence. But with the Chinese the landscape is dominant, and when human figures appear in landscape they appear very small indeed, and quite definitely, in other words, part of their surroundings.

Also, there is a curious perspective in Chinese landscape. You know, perspective is a convention. When we see things and reproduce them according to our ideas of perspective, that’s not necessarily the way things are. The fact that things get smaller from the standpoint of one point of view emphasizes that as things are further away from the observer, they are less important. In Chinese painting, however, distances tend to be put higher in the picture, things near lower. And there are several vanishing points in the painting, because the thing is observed simultaneously from various points of view.

And I say these things by way of symbols to introduce the idea that there is not, in Chinese thought, a fundamental dichotomy between man and nature. Although, of course, when I say Chinese, I’m being vague. To be specific, I’m going to talk about one form of Chinese philosophy known as Taoism. T-A-O-I-S-M. But, you see, for us it is a very strange fact that the prevailing philosophy of science of the nineteenth century was what we might call a naturalistic monism. Such people as Freud, Huxley, and Hegel firmly believed that all the mental phenomena of human life could be explained in terms of neurology and biology. The philosophy of science of that epoch was one which sought to have a unitary view of the world, no longer split in two by the dualisms of mind and matter, spirit and nature.

But the peculiar thing is that this philosophy of science of the nineteenth century emerged in a technology which we commonly call the conquest of nature. It has, rather than healing the rift between man and nature, exaggerated it to an enormous degree. And so we now talk not only of the conquest of nature, but the conquest of space, the conquest of Mount Everest, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And to a Taoist this sounds an extremely curious phrase. Do you conquer space? Is not space to be thanked for giving you room to move around in? Do you conquer a mountain? Aren’t you grateful for it being there so as to lift you so high in the air?

The attitude of fundamental hostility and antagonism to nature, which we approach with all kinds of prickles, both material and intellectual, so as to resemble a bunch of porcupines. When we talk, for example, of “brute facts” or “hard facts,” we seem to imagine that reality consists of hard facts which you’ve got to face. And so there’s this sort of attitude towards everything. And you know the sort of scientific personality in a lecture who is always emphasizing absolutely precise, accurate definition of this, that, and the other thing, and great rigor of procedure. And you can see in that very voice the knife edge, the rapier, that he’s got to face this world with.

When, as a matter of fact, our fingertips and eyeballs and eardrums are soft facts, not hard facts. And they are constructed for knowing the world through the loving caress rather than the firm grip. Indeed, we have teeth and fingernails too. There is a place for the sharp instrument, but a greater place underlying it for the soft instrument. For through our soft instruments—our eyes and eardrums—we know our environment by becoming it. Because, after all, we know that what we see is something inside our nervous system. What is, so to say, out there, we only know in terms of our own brains.

And so while we know in theory, in physical theory, that man and nature, the perceiver and the perceived, are a sort of inseparable transaction, we still don’t seem to realize it in practice. We Westerners still feel, as individuals, locked up inside our skins, and take very largely an attitude of aggression towards the natural environment. And therefore I think we have a great deal to learn from a philosophy for which man and nature must be seen as fundamentally inseparable.

Now, the basic concept of Taoist philosophy is the word Tao, T-A-O. And this word is sometimes translated in English “the Way,” though this is not quite accurate. The Chinese character that is pronounced this way is made up of two parts. This part having a general sense of intelligence. You’ve got an eye here, a face or self, a head, and fire. The radical of the character means motion in the sense of going on and stopping, something like rhythm.

And so “Tao” is the fundamental word that is given to life. And the sense of it is that it is some kind of intelligent (or shall we say organic) process. The key is process, for the Taoist sees the world in a rather different way than we see it, because he sees it entirely as act. He does not see a dichotomy of action and agent; a dichotomy represented by our two parts of speech, the noun and the verb. He is thinking in a language, as it were, in which there are only verbs.

Of course, the Chinese language does not have a clear differentiation of parts of speech as we have it. The ideograph can equally well be translated into English in most cases by a noun or by a verb. But you can see, if you construct a language for your own use which eliminates all nouns and puts verbs in their place, that you can always have a verb where you might normally use a noun. And this, in fact, becomes a more satisfactory way of describing what is going on, just as, for science, physics no longer is interested in what is the stuff which we call matter, but is interested in a formal structural description of a process of behavior, and has abandoned the idea of seeking for the, as it were, billiard ball stuff of the world.

Because where we might say, in ordinary English, “The cat sat on the mat,” it is perfectly clear to say, “The catting sat on the matting.” Indeed, we already have the word “matting” in our language, and it’s a verb word. And so there is a catting. And we might then be moved to ask, “Who cats? Who mats?” “It is raining.” Who is “it” that is raining? And we begin to realize that we ask this question—“Who does it? Who is the agent behind the act?”—not because there is a logical necessity for there to be an agent, but a purely grammatical necessity for there to be one. Because our language conventions require that verbs have subjects, that acts have doers.

But the fundamental approach of Taoism is that the world is a process which nobody is doing, it is just doing. And therefore, it does not proceed from our basic assumption of a world picture which requires the machine and the mechanic, the clay and the potter, the inert matter which requires an outsider to confer upon it a form. And this makes for some very fundamental differences indeed between the Chinese conception of nature and the Western conception. Because, you see, we tend to look upon nature as a construct, and it seems perfectly natural for a Western child to ask its mother, “How was I made?” It seems almost as natural as for it to suck its mother’s milk. But, as a matter of fact, this is a highly artificial question. Who told you you were made at all, anyway?

Because, you see, the idea of making requires the distinction between the agent and the act. It requires the Aristotelian distinction of the stuff or substance, on the one hand (like the clay), and the firm given to it on the other (like the pot). And since the substance doesn’t seem to explain its own form, a form must have been conferred upon it from outside.

And so, if we have a commonsense picture of the world as a construct, as something put together, we are going to ask: “How it was put together?” We want an explanation of the world, somewhat similar to the sort of explanation we get when we want to know how a house was built or how a machine was constructed. And we can find this explanation in terms of the description of a series of steps which the architect or the mechanic took to construct it. And this we will regard as the explanation.

And so we have been looking for an explanation of how the world is put together because we’ve started from the idea that there is someone who knows. It’s true that, in the course of history of science, the idea of God as having the laws of nature or the plan of the world in his mind in the beginning, this has been abandoned. But the concept of the laws of nature without the lawgiver has carried on for a very long time. But this is still the same old idea: that there is a pattern which things follow. That the world is in the situation of the young man who said, “Damn, for it certainly seems that I am a creature that moves in determinate grooves. I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram!”

Whereas, on the other hand, the Chinese conception of nature may be studied from the very word which is used in Chinese, and which we translate “nature.” It’s pronounced, I’m afraid, something like ziran, and it means “self-so.” This is “self-so.” What happens of itself. Almost our word “automatic,” but without the mechanical connotation of automatic. In other words, there is no agent performing the act, the act just happens. And there will therefore be no possibility of explaining the act by attributing it to an agent. Perhaps we would translate this expression “spontaneity.”

And so here’s the problem. Nature is regarded as being a spontaneous occurrence which is not to be explained in a mechanical way. A Taoist would not use causality as a serious explanation of how things happen, because he would realize that causality is a rather artificial way of talking about things. And I think this is every easily demonstrated by saying: if I lift up this ashtray by the edge of it that is nearest to me, is that a cause of which the effect is the simultaneous lifting up of the other edge too? I think we would find that a rather clumsy way of talking, because you can see that this edge is so joined to that edge that to lift this one up is also to lift this one up.

But now, if the join between these two things is a little more complicated and not quite so evident to us, we may begin to talk about cause and effect. In other words: yes, you can always say that effects are explained by their causes if you separate the two in the first place and play this little trick on yourself. But if you didn’t separate them in the first place, if you didn’t regard them as two distinct events, then there would be no point in talking about cause and effect. You would say, “Well, that’s just one event and it happens to have such and such characteristics.”

So there’s the feeling that you do not explain what is going on now by describing the past. Because, in any case, a description of the past can go on for ever and ever. There are ever so many myriads of events, all of which could be explained and described if you had the time, and even then you wouldn’t have begun to exhaust their possibilities. You’ve got, in other words, a picture rather like this: here’s a ship moving on the ocean and creating a wake which gradually tails off. Here is spontaneity, the self-motion of the ship. And the wake is what we remember of it; where it was. Now, we can set up a graph and carefully plot the positions of this wake. And then we can take a trend and make a prediction of where the ship may go next. And say, “Ye gods! Look at that! Where it went tells where it’s going to go. Perhaps the wake is moving the ship.” The past is moving the present. The tail is wagging the dog. Because it makes a very good prediction on the whole. I mean, there’s little inaccuracies like predicting the weather. As Norbert Wiener said: “If you want really accurate meteorological predictions, you’ve got to fill the whole atmosphere with weather balloons.”

But, you see, ziran means the movement comes from here, now. This is what’s happening of itself now, and you must look here for the explanation. Here’s the record of what it’s done. But this tail isn’t wagging the dog. The wake isn’t moving the ship. And, in a way, you see, this means you now are, as a ziran being—as a spontaneous being—what do you want to do? And we say, “Oh, oh, oh, no! Be careful about this. Spontaneity is very dangerous. Very dangerous. Very dangerous.” We must be awfully careful that we are trams, not buses. We’ve got to have the rails laid down for us, and we’ve got to pretend not that we agreed to these rails and are going to follow them, but that they were laid down by authority—whether it was divine or whether it was somehow the law of nature. We’re going to look up the book first before we do anything and find out what we should do.

Now, this brings in another very fundamental point about the Chinese philosophy of nature. You will invariably find Lao Tzu saying to a ruler—Lao Tzu, who is the alleged founder of the Taoist philosophy, probably lived about 400 BC. He said in writing a book which was for the guidance of rulers called the Tao Te Ching. The Ching, the book of Tao, and Te, its virtue. But virtue not in the moral sense, but in the sense of the old use of the healing virtues of a plant.

He said to the ruler: “Look, the best ruler rules by not ruling. Keep the people unaware, first of all, of your presence.” In other words, if the President of the United States followed Lao Tzu’s advice, when he came to town, he wouldn’t arrive on a great big jet plane with a mayor and everybody out to meet him and police things. He’d sneak in the back way. And the office of president wouldn’t be something everybody shouted and made a fuss about, it’d be something like the director of sanitation or something like that. Very anonymous, quiet fellow going about his business. And the basic idea, you see, would be, on the whole, to leave people alone. Now, it’s true that if you leave them alone, they will get into a certain amount of trouble. But the philosophy here is that that won’t be nearly so much trouble as they will get into if you start trying to govern them. That—in other words, you’ve heard of Parkinson’s law. Parkinson is a good Taoist. He pointed out that the more administration you have, the more you’ve got to have.

Because, you see, here is the difficulty. When you are faced with spontaneity—well, as a matter of fact, you’re never faced with it, you are it—you think, “I can’t trust it because I don’t know what it’s going to do next.” And therefore, it’s got to be controlled. And this stems, of course, from our historical feeling that we are involved in original sin. That we, our wills—and since we are the head of nature, we ourselves, by our fall, have corrupted nature—therefore, we are fundamentally untrustworthy. But the basic assumption of Taoist philosophy which lies behind this attitude of wu wei—roughly, “hands-off;” it means literally “non-interference”—the attitude of this is that nature, and your own nature, has to be trusted. Because if you can’t trust your own nature, can you trust your not trusting it? And obviously you can’t.

You see, if you say—you know the famous logical paradox, “I am lying.” If that statement is true, it’s false, and so true, and so false. We’re in a real mix-up! And so, if you say, “I am a sinner,” well, this is a statement made by a sinner, and it’s not very reliable. And so there’s a feeling, they would say to us, “You people, if you don’t trust your own nature, you must be fundamentally balled up.” So you’ve got to do that in order to do anything. But it’s a risk—because it isn’t always trustworthy. We’ve got to face it: it’s not. And it’s a good thing that it isn’t. Because if we as a species were completely successful, if our trust were always responded to, we would eat up the planet, zhupp, like locusts. And that would be that, in short order. And so there’s always the margin of error introduced, so that our guesses and our hunches will some of the time be wrong.

So our great concern today, as scientists and so on, is: we want to control nature. People are saying we can no longer trust the evolution of man to the spontaneous processes which originally produced the cerebral cortex. Now we’ve got to take over. Wow! And what does that mean? It means, of course, our technology. But next it means psychiatry. Because what happens if the powers of technology are in the hands of people who are insane or stupid or malicious? Well, they’ve got to be psychoanalyzed or something, or given the right drugs. And so technology, then, is extended through psychiatry and other behavioral sciences into man himself. So we are now going to control the controller. This always has to happen. Its eventual fulfillment is the Nineteen Eighty-Four state with the thought police: “You mustn’t think dangerous thoughts.”

And when you reach that point, you see, of control, you have snarled the whole system completely. Because you’re in the situation of somebody who says, “Now I’m going to write a word on the board. Oh, but wait a minute, this hand is spontaneous. Okay, let’s get hold of it with this one. Now—opp, opp, opp! What about the other hand?” You know? And that’s the situation we’re in, increasingly, all the time. Checks checking the checks which checks the checks. Fools proofed by proofs which prove fools and so on, all the way around, because of the fundamental mistake of thinking, you see, that we are agents different from our acts, and therefore we can somehow grab hold of our acts and stand aside from ourselves indefinitely and observe ourselves—in other words, that we can stand back from our involvement in the matrix of nature. And as, in other words, you stand back, you stand away. As you separate yourself from your roots, you dry up.

And so Chinese people, of course, because they are self-conscious human beings, feel this ego sensation that we have just as much as Western people do. They feel the distinction between themselves and the external world. They wouldn’t have needed these philosophies if they hadn’t felt that way. And so the way in which these, you might say, the Taoist and Chinese Buddhist techniques of releasing people from this bind is to put them into it harder.

In other words, there was a Zen Buddhist sage called Bodhidharma. He was actually an Indian according to legend. And he came to China and was asked by one of his—well, his only disciple that he ever had. The disciple said, “I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” And Bodhidharma said, “Bring your mind out here. I’ll pacify it.” And the disciple said, “When I look for my mind I can’t find it.” Bodhidharma said, “There, it’s pacified.”

In other words, look for your mind. If you think you are the separate agent—the separate being who is not nature, but stands apart from it and observes it—find me that. And so the person starts looking. And all that happens to him—he’s like somebody sitting quietly in a padded cell doing this. See? Until he realizes what a fool he is. Until he realizes, as we should say in physical terms: the human brain is part of its own environment, and this whole attempt to control everything by standing outside it is a vicious circle. And so the attitude of wu wei, or letting go, is not what you might call a completely one-sided attitude. The whole point is that spontaneity, by producing the human brain—or by doing the human brain—makes it possible for us to control nature to some extent. So what we’ve got is a sort of hierarchical position, where you have a great area here which is ziran, and then within it a smaller area which is control. And this area is subordinate to this.

So that a Taoist attitude, say, could encourage scientific investigation, provided it’s the instrument of spontaneity and stays in that subordinate position. So that the scientist would be the person skilled in knowing when to stop—like a cook is: a cook knows when to stop cooking a soufflé. And a scientist also has to know when to stop controlling things. And indeed, there is some possibility that our scientists will be the first of our culture to find this out, because they know themselves you cannot control research personnel and make them punch time clocks. The men in the white coats in the labs have got to be allowed to be whimsical and wayward, and to play with things. Randomness is necessary for creation. Randomness is spontaneity, is ziran, is the Chinese idea of nature. But this is not randomness in the sense of chaos. It’s randomness in the sense of an order which we cannot, however, describe in our clumsy, logical, and linguistical categories.

There is a fascinating Chinese word for the order of nature. It is pronounced lǐ. And this word, lǐ, means originally “the markings in jade,” “the fiber in muscle,” or “the grain in wood.” In other words: an order, something we perceive as incredibly fascinating—just as, you see, when you take a cross-section, say, of a plant stem and look at it through a microscope: what a thing! But it eludes description. Because language and thought takes things in one at a time, in a linear series, whereas the order of nature is everything going on everywhere at once altogether, and figure that out in words you never will.

But the funny thing is that we, ourselves, are constantly living expressions of this kind of order. Because think of all the things you are doing without having to think about them one at a time. The activity of the nervous system, the heart, the glands—everything. If we had to think about it, what a mess we’d be in! We are doing this—ziran—of itself.

The time seems to be five minutes to one, and I think this is supposed to stop at one. I would like to give a little opportunity for a few questions, if there are any. Yes, sir?

36:06

Watts

Of course the psychiatrist is, in a way, the first person to find out that a great deal of various forms of neuroses are precisely brought about by people trying too hard to control themselves. And there’s this compulsive feeling that one must always be standing over oneself with a club. And therefore, say, in classical psychoanalysis, one of the first things that has to be done is to create a situation of free association where the person can simply let things happen and express them. And also, you know, when you go to a psychiatrist, there’s usually a battle of some kind, in that, if you’re resisting his therapy, you’re always in some subtle way to beat him, to get in control of the situation. And he is very clever and not letting you do that. As Jay Haley pointed out in his wonderful article on the art of psychoanalysis: you have to pay him money. You may lie on a couch. And if you say, “Well, I don’t think that your interpretation of that dream is very good, but I think it’s just something I had for dinner,” he says, “Of course. You’re perfectly entitled to that opinion.” But you realize at the same time that may be not what you really think. You have this opinion in order to resist analysis. Wow! What a technique! You know? Beautiful! Because, you see, the patient can’t win the battle. He’s always one down and the analyst is one up. And so eventually he comes to the point—the patient will—where he will stop trying to be one up on life. And he’ll be discharged; he’ll be cured. I mean, this is a terrific oversimplification condensed into a short space of time. But this is Taoism.

Yes?

38:51

Watts

This is, I’m afraid, a mistake that has been put abroad in an otherwise admirable book, Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China. Joseph Needham doesn’t know a great deal about Buddhism. He knows an awful lot about Taoism. And his interpretation of Taoist wu wei as not going against nature is perfectly correct, and therefore, in other words, a dam would be perfectly justifiable. But Chinese Buddhism—whatever one may say about Indian Buddhism—especially the type of Buddhism which is called Chan in Chinese or Zen in Japanese, has been a type of Buddhism which inherited Taoism, and which even has had certain technological consequences. In other words, Japanese architecture, landscape gardening, the art of judo, all these things are products of Zen. So certainly, in my knowledge of Zen, I know that wu wei is interpreted in exactly the same sense as the Taoist. It might be true of certain other forms of Buddhism, Indian Buddhism particularly, that there would be a disagreement.

I think it’s exactly one, so….