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Tao: The Watercourse Way Paperback – Illustrated, January 1, 1975
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According to Deepak Chopra, "Watts was a spiritual polymatch, the first and possibly greatest." Watts treats the Chinese philosophy of Tao in much the same way as he did Zen Buddhism in his classic The Way of Zen. Critics agree that this last work stands as a perfect monument to the life and literature of Alan Watts.
"Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, . . . Watts begins with scholarship and intellect and proceeds with art and eloquence to the frontiers of the spirit."—Los Angeles Times
- Print length134 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPantheon
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1975
- Dimensions6.11 x 0.43 x 9.17 inches
- ISBN-100394733118
- ISBN-13978-0394733111
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—Kirkus Reviews
"Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, Alan Watts had the rare gift of 'writing beautifully the unwritable' ... Watts begins with scholarship and intellect and proceeds with art and eloquence to the frontiers of the spirit ... This is a profound and worthy work, left by a teacher to echo and re-echo."
—Los Angeles Times
"A remarkable book because of Alan Watts's talent for communicating Eastern ways of thought ... not only the last of his works, but the best ... This book is a 'must.'"
—Shambhala Review
"Watts's last book is in the category of his finest work, a lucid discussion of Taoism and the Chinese language ... profound, reflective, and enlightening. Moreover, the text supplies a sense of his ebullient spirit behind the revelation of Tao."
—Boston Globe
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
At the very roots of Chinese thinking and feeling there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the ideas of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world. To the traditional way of Chinese thinking, this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that + and –, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be the disappearance of the system.
People who have been brought up in the aura of Christian and Hebrew aspirations find this frustrating, because it seems to deny any possibility of progress, an ideal which flows from their linear (as distinct from cyclic) view of time and history. Indeed, the whole enterprise of Western technology is “to make the world a better place”—to have pleasure without pain, wealth without poverty, and health without sickness. But, as is now becoming obvious, our violent efforts to achieve this ideal with such weapons as DDT, penicillin, nuclear energy, automotive transportation, computers, industrial farming, damming, and compelling everyone, by law, to be superficially “good and healthy” are creating more problems than they solve. We have been interfering with a complex system of relationships which we do not understand, and the more we study its details, the more it eludes us by revealing still more details to study. As we try to comprehend and control the world it runs away from us. Instead of chafing at this situation, a Taoist would ask what it means. What is that which always retreats when pursued? Answer: yourself. Idealists (in the moral sense of the word) regard the universe as different and separate from themselves—that is, as a system of external objects which needs to be subjugated. Taoists view the universe as the same as, or inseparable from, themselves—so that Lao-tzu could say, “Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.” This implies that the art of life is more like navigation than warfare, for what is important is to understand the winds, the tides, the currents, the seasons, and the principles of growth and decay, so that one’s actions may use them and not fight them. In this sense, the Taoist attitude is not opposed to technology per se. Indeed, the Chuang-tzu writings are full of references to crafts and skills perfected by this very principle of “going with the grain.” The point is therefore that technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. Our overspecialization in conscious attention and linear thinking has led to neglect, or ignore-ance, of the basic principles and rhythms of this process, of which the foremost is polarity.
In Chinese the two poles of cosmic energy are yang (positive) and yin (negative), and their conventional signs are respectively — and – – . The ideograms indicate the sunny and shady sides of a hill, fou, and they are associated with the masculine and the feminine, the firm and the yielding, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the rising and the falling, heaven and earth, and they are even recognized in such everyday matters as cooking as the spicy and the bland. Thus the art of life is not seen as holding to yang and banishing yin, but as keeping the two in balance, because there cannot be one without the other. When regarding them as the masculine and the feminine, the reference is not so much to male and female individuals as to characteristics which are dominant in, but not confined to, each of the two sexes. Obviously, the male has the convex penis and the female the concave vaginal and though people have regarded the former as a possession and the latter as a deprivation (Freud’s “penis envy”), any fool should be able to recognize that one cannot have the outstanding without the instanding, and that a rampant membrum virile is no good without somewhere to put it, and vice versa, But the male individual must not neglect his female component, not the female her male. This Lao-tzu says:
Knowing the make but keeping the female, one becomes a universal stream. Becoming a universal stream, one is not separated from eternal virtue.
The yang and the yin are principles, not men and women, so that there can be no true relationship between the affectedly tough male and the affectedly flimsy female.
The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability. As Lau-tzu puts it:
When everyone knows beauty as beautiful, there is already ugliness;
When everyone knows good as goodness, there is already evil.
“To be” and “not to be” arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited; . . .
Before and after are in mutual sequence,
They are thus like the different, but inseparable, sides of a coin, the poles of a magnet, or pulse and interval in any vibration. There is never the ultimate possibility that either one will win over the other, for they are more like lovers wrestling than enemies fighting. But it is difficult in our logic to see that being and nonbeing are mutually generative and mutually supportive, for it is the great and imaginary terror of Western man that nothingness will be the permanent end of the universe. We do not easily grasp the point that the void is creative, and that being comes from nonbeing as sound from silence and light from space.
Product details
- Publisher : Pantheon; First Edition (January 1, 1975)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 134 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0394733118
- ISBN-13 : 978-0394733111
- Item Weight : 7.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.11 x 0.43 x 9.17 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #42,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Tao Te Ching (Books)
- #22 in Taoist Philosophy
- #553 in Christian Self Help
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born American philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Second, Eastern and Western civilization are not as different as he suggests. For example, although some Chinese characters seem more natural than the Latin alphabet, the Chinese written language has become nearly as abstract as the Latin alphabet. Watts' insinuation that Chinese language more accurately conveys reality is a bit of a stretch, as is his idea that Eastern civilization is less neurotic than Western civilization. A quick reading of Chinese history reveals that Chinese encountered the same tendency to 'order the world' as their European and Ottoman counterparts.
Those two points aside, Watts delivers an excellent introduction to Taoism. I should mention the caveat that 'Taoism' is not really a system of thought like Confucianism, but a useful category to put related ideas into. Chuang Tzu did not think of himself as a disciple of Lao Tzu; Han historians falsely (or accurately?) envisioned them as belonging to a single stream of thought like Legalism or Confucianism. On a related note, Watts gives a well-thought description of the Tao on pg. 55:
"But if, as is the case, the Tao is simply inconceivable, what is the use of having the word and of saying anything at all about it? Simply because we know intuitively that there is a dimension of ourselves and of nature which eludes us because it is too close, too general, and too all-embracing to be singled out as a particular object."
This is the essence of the philosophy, and he goes on in the long paragraph to further explain it. Not unlike the scientific concept of electricity, the Tao is not a thing at all, but a certain dimension that we cannot quite explain (the word 'dimension' doesn't do it justice). In that way, the Tao is no more mystical than science. Watts includes a passage from a scientist writing about electricity and correctly calls it 'pure metaphysics'. Empirical experiments only give us snippets of observed reality, which is different from reality itself, for the very observation of a thing changes it. The Tao underlies this reality, and is not observable. But it doesn't matter if we have an incomplete and inaccurate view of the cosmos since we need only 'go with the flow' and understand that the nature of reality is unknowable. This leads to a more tolerant, less anxious existence in the modern world.
Watts does an incredible job explaining difficult concepts to his readers. Watts will give you an intuitive understanding of the concepts of action through inaction and te (virtue/virtuality). I may disagree with how he views Eastern and Western society (or societies, as he would put it), but he has achieved something with this small volume that few others could hope to match. At the end of the book I was left curious and wanting more, knowing that this unfinished book was his last; could you ask for more?
TTWW is not only a competent introduction to Taoism, but also an accessible bridge between Taoist Chinese ideas and the more compartmental western mindset. The book begins on a note that feels a bit misplaced (a discourse on the Chinese language), but then moves smoothly into the subject matter. The ways of thinking presented in the book did a great job at challenging my conceptual intuitions about the universe and the beings within it.
And while there are some strange conclusions here and there (this is mostly by Watts!), on balance the reasoning is solid and the text is a beautiful testament to Taoism.
I've had people ask me if this book was "actionable". That is to say, did it actually influence my judgment and decision making. The answer is a resounding yes. The tenants and principles of Taoism described in The Watercourse Way provide a very concrete framework to view the world through.
Ultimately: choose nature, be patient, capture essence, and don't forget to keep life playful :)
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Es un tamaño pequeño y de bolsillo, lo que buscaba y el libro en sí es absolutamente maravilloso, como siempre Allan Watts explica todo con una claridad excepcional para nuestras mentes occidentales. Una filosofía absolutamente maravillosa que te hace apreciar la cultura china aún más. Un placer, lo recomiendo.
The forewords and afterwords were quite bad, felt forced and pandering, and detracted from the quality of the book. My recommendation is to skip them.
Das Englisch ist sehr lesbar, vor allem mit dem eingebauten Wörterbuch und der Text schmiegt sich an vielen Stellen der daoistischen Seele an und erfüllt sie mit dem glücklichen Gefühl, vielleicht doch was zu verstehen.
Hat Spaß gemacht, danke Alan.