Halfway through a term of Dao De Jing reading we get to wu wei, and a hand goes up. The wording shifts a little year to year. The question doesn’t.
So this is telling us to give up and do nothing?
No. Not close.
Teaching it in Sydney adds a complication I didn’t expect when I started. About half the room reads the classics in English, and they arrive having already met wu wei as “non-action,” or as “effortless action.” The first hands them a man sitting still. The second promises results without work, which sells rather well. Neither survives the text, and by the time someone reaches my classroom they’ve already underlined it.
The verb has to come apart first
Wei in pre-Qin usage is not the neutral “do” of modern Chinese. It leans toward contriving, imposing, handling something until it takes the shape you had in mind before you looked at it. That is the specific move being refused.
Which is why Chapter 3 reads 為無為, wei wu wei, do non-doing. The verb is still sitting there in front. Whatever this is, you perform it, and it costs you effort. The cost has just moved somewhere people don’t expect to spend it.
Chapter 64 is harder: 為者敗之，執者失之. The one who acts on it ruins it, the one who grips it loses it. What fails is the forcing and the gripping. Neither line mentions hands at all.
The ox
At this point I always go across to the Zhuangzi, third chapter, the cook and the ox.
Everyone knows the passage, and most people know it worn down to a single idiom about the blade having room to roam. The original is coarser and much more practical. Cook Ding says a good cook changes his knife once a year, because he cuts. An ordinary cook changes his once a month, because he hacks. His own knife has been in use for nineteen years and several thousand oxen, and the edge looks as though it just came off the stone. The reason he gives is 以無厚入有間: send in what has no thickness, through the space that is already there. The joints leave gaps. A thin edge goes into a gap, and nothing wears.
The ox still comes apart.
The part people quote less is what he does at a tangle. 每至於族, every time he reaches a knot of tendon and bone, he sees the difficulty, slows down, his eyes stop moving, the knife goes very light. That is the sentence I want students to keep. He knows a hard place is hard, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Code, and houses
Writing code is where I feel this most, so I’ll start there. Anyone who has added a feature to a system that has been running for a few years knows the shape of it. The request itself isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is that nobody who built the thing had this direction in mind. Two roads out. Go back and fix the abstraction underneath, which is slow, touches a lot of files, and leaves you wondering what else you moved. Or go around the side, drop in a special case, ship it that afternoon. Most people take the second road, and I have taken it. The bill arrives later, when somebody inherits the code, finds three different ways of doing one thing, and isn’t confident enough to delete any of them. That is cutting across the grain. The edge doesn’t roll on the day you do it.
House audits are the same job in a different room. A building has a skeleton: where the load is carried, which side the light comes in, the three or four lines a person actually walks in a day. In Sydney, moving anything structural in an apartment means going through strata first, and touching a load-bearing wall in a freestanding house usually means council, which is enough paperwork to eat a month before anyone lifts a tool. In the older brick stock the load-bearing walls aren’t up for discussion at all. So the number of things that can genuinely be changed is smaller than most people assume when they ring me. Which is fine, because the adjustments that go along what’s already there are usually enough. Clear a patch at the entrance where keys and shoes can land. Move the bed half a metre so the head isn’t against the window. Those cost almost nothing and they hold, whereas opening up a wall costs a great deal and tends to breed problems that weren’t there before.
Teaching is the one I’m worst at. The student’s question is still forming, I hand over the answer, and it stops forming. I know I do this and I still do it.
The hard part isn’t holding still
Wu wei is difficult. You can see a place where something could be done, your hands are itching, and you leave it.
We treat effort as addition. One more rule. One more approval step. Or an object in a corner that nobody can later explain the purpose of. Having added it we feel better. Whether the original problem moved at all is not usually checked afterwards.
Chapter 48 puts it as a direction of travel: 為學日益，為道日損，損之又損. Learning piles up, the Way takes away and takes away again, until there’s nothing left worth removing. Subtraction is the harder discipline, mostly because it leaves nothing to show anyone. Merge three special cases into one, or talk a client out of opening a wall, and afterwards there’s no visible evidence that you did anything. Things just carry on working.
I don’t much like “go with the flow” as a rendering. In English it has drifted to mean acceptance, or not bothering, and it turns up printed on merchandise in wellness shops.
There’s another line of reading I ought to mention, which takes wu wei as a technique of rule: the sovereign doesn’t handle matters himself, the ministers hold their posts and do the work, and the state runs. It has a real scholarly pedigree. In class I name it and move on, because I haven’t worked it through to my own satisfaction, and going further would be me filling the hour.
Back to giving up
Some people use these two characters as cover for putting things off. The worse use is as cover for not seeing a doctor, and that one I stop. If your body is wrong, see a doctor. Same for the books, same for anything legal. There’s no grain to follow there.
Which brings the class round to where it always ends up. So do I act, or not.
Act. I just want to know you’ve looked at the whole animal before the knife goes in, and most of the time nobody has.