Episode #007 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

It was a time of great social discourse in China. For hundreds of years, people saw the reins of power handed from one person with one set of ideas to another; dynasties rose and fell—the Xia dynasty, the Shang Dynasty—not to mention a period before any dynasties where it’s said that demigod kings with magical powers ruled over everyone and used their magical powers to help their subjects and the people they ruled over. The closest one of these dynasties to Daoism was the Zhou dynasty, and it was crumbling. It was an extremely scary and volatile time to live. But that’s not much different than most ancient history.

People started fighting within the Zhou dynasty. It started to separate, and people started trying to think of new, creative, effective ways to govern the populous. Because before this, they had ways of controlling people; they were just a little less cerebral. Things like the Mandate of Heaven, which, without going into it much, gave unquestionable legitimacy to a king’s rule and decrees because heaven endorsed him. So, according to the Book of Han—which is a pretty comprehensive history of ancient China among other things, written around AD 100—the Zhou dynasty began to lose power; the authority of the Zhou rulers began to dwindle; and then most of the officials that worked within the courts and the government lost their jobs and had nothing to do.

So, this demand to find strategies and guidelines to follow in an attempt to rule more efficiently and masterfully caused these officials to spread out and sort of innovate and teach their own versions of what the most effective way to rule people was. There were a lot of them, and a lot of great wisdom comes from their teachings. A few of these stood out from the rest, the best of which still affect Chinese and Asian culture to this day. But all of their ideas collectively became known as the One Hundred Schools of Thought. Daoism and Confucianism are two of these hundred. So, philosophy in the East arose by means of necessity.

Remember, around this time in the West, Thales had answers to everything around him in the ancient Greek religion of Orphism. But he looked at the night sky and the world around him and just wasn’t satisfied. The Chinese, on the other hand, needed a more effective way to govern people. So, it’s not surprising that their inquiry didn’t involve any metaphysics or epistemology, at least initially. It involved defining morality and asking what the most beneficial way to live life was.

Now, when things are going really well, and then over time things change and you find, all of the sudden, you’re living in an extremely volatile time, and things start to disintegrate, and you realize that change is on the horizon for the role of government or the role of the citizen within that government—there’s two directions civilizations typically go. One is the more progressive route where you try to create new programs, enact new legislation. You try to come up with something innovative because, obviously, what we’ve been doing before hasn’t been working very well.

And the alternative to that is a more conservative approach based on tradition—selectively choosing certain principles that worked well in the past and taking out all this extra stuff that’s been muddling them down—a back-to-basics approach. The main distinction between these two ways to thinking is, do we assign blame to the ideas themselves that we’re living by? Are the ideas faulty? Or is it man’s departure from those ideas?

Now, if you’re listening to this podcast, you value expanding your mind. You’re one of the most educated people on the planet. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you understand this wasn’t an exclusively ancient problem we’re talking about. This sort of thing exists in our political climate to this day. The ideas we’re arguing about may have changed. But the argument of whether to hold onto the ideas that have worked for us in the past or to try to create new, hopefully better ideas is still a huge part of modern politics.

Both Laozi and Confucius were part of the camp of people that thought their people had lost their way as a civilization. Things used to be a lot better back when things were simpler, they thought. People no longer value the things that really matter as much as they should. Now, Confucius talked a lot about adhering to tradition, family values, knowing one’s role in the world around them. But we’re going to talk about that extensively next episode.

Laozi went back even further than that. He thought human beings were much better off and happier when they lived a life closer to nature, without all the distractions of civilization. He thought civilization dehumanizes people and that scientific progress and man’s endless quest for more of it was really a sin against nature. He says this in the Daodejing. “Fame or one’s own self, which does one love more? One’s own self or material goods, which has more worth?”

Now, before we go further into this, there are a few things that need to be said about this guy Laozi. I guess the most important of which, first of all, is that he might not have even existed whatsoever. There’s certainly no hard evidence that he did. There seems to be ample evidence to say that a guy by a completely different name became known as Laozi and then had a book attributed to him—the only work he supposedly wrote, by the way, the one I just read from, the Daodejing.

But legend has it—and I do mean legend, not facts, and not Will Smith—says that the Zhou dynasty began to dissolve. Laozi, who was one of those administrators that worked in the courts who lost his job, grew even more weary of civilization than he was in the past and decided to ride away into the sunset on the back of an ox and live in isolation for the rest of his life. When he reached the final outpost—the furthest west you could go before you would be heading into the wilderness outside of the borders of China—the guard manning the post recognized him, and he begged him to write down all his wisdom before he left so it wouldn’t be lost. Laozi agreed and supposedly wrote a short book of around 5,000 characters and 81 chapters called the Daodejing.

Now, I guess the story could be true, but the Daodejing just as easily could have been a collaborative effort by many people, attributing the finished product to Laozi for simplicity. Regardless though, it really doesn’t matter whether we have a single man to connect the work to or a group of people. The important things are the ideas. And most people just give the credit to Laozi. But I’d like to apologize to any descendants of this secretive group of people who may have written it if you’re listening to the podcast.

But aside from him riding away on an ox, there are actually other stories leading us to believe that he existed. One other famous story comes from his rival political philosopher of the time who, by coincidence, was a contemporary of Laozi—Confucius. Now, the two obviously had their differences, but they certainly saw eye to eye on many things. And apparently when Confucius was in his early 30s, he visited Laozi and talked to him for a while. And apparently after this meeting, he seemed to have developed a deep respect for Laozi, comparing him to a dragon. I mean, that’s got to be a compliment, right?

Here's what Confucius had to say about his meeting with Laozi. “Birds can fly but will fall at the hunter’s arrow. Fish can swim but will be hooked by the fisherman. Beasts can run but will drop into people’s nets and traps. There’s only one thing that is out of man’s reach, that’s the legendary dragon. A dragon can fly into the sky, ride on clouds, dive into the ocean. A dragon is powerful, yet so intangible to us. Laozi is a dragon, and I’ll never understand him.”

There’s a refrain that I’d like to keep referring back to over the course of this podcast. This is where my greatness is really going to shine through. I’m amazing at coming up with super obscure ways to categorize information and remember it that no one understands or actually uses. And this one is certainly no exception to that, but here we go anyway. Well, actually, firstly I should ask, did anyone else hear the name Daoism and think that was a terrible branding move by Daoism’s marketing department? I mean, there’s Taoism too, right? Why would you choose a name that was so close to another religion’s name? The answer is, there is no reason, and they didn’t. The two are the exact same religion. It’s just spelled two different ways.

In fact, if you’ve ever done research or read about anything in English that’s a proper noun from Chinese history, you no doubt have come across many instances of these multiple spellings indicating the same thing. The reason for this is, when you’re translating Chinese characters, the symbols convey an idea. But when Westerners try to translate it into any sort of Latin variant, they listen to the way the symbols are spoken phonetically, and they try to determine the equivalent to it in English.

This process is called romanization. And for years the most popular version of this was called Wade-Giles after two guys, one named Thomas Wade and the other Herbert Allen Giles. They came up with a really effective version of romanization. Since Wade-Giles though, there have been several of these romanization attempts. Some of them have caught on in specific regions or countries, but none have caught on as much as one in particular—Pinyin. Pinyin was created in the 1950s and was quickly accepted as a much better way for linguistic reasons. But more importantly, the words looked a lot more like they sounded. Taoism is the Wade-Giles romanization of what we know as Daoism under the Pinyin romanization.

Now, Laozi is spelled two different ways too. When you look at it under the Wade-Giles it’s spelled L-A-O T-Z-U, Lao Tzu. But under the Pinyin, which if you’re reading any modern book is probably what you’re going to run across and by far the most common way to spell Laozi, is L-A-O-Z-I. I’ve heard so many people call him [lao-tsee] or [lao-zee] or [lay-oh-zee]. I mean, you can see why they call him that. And the way I think about it is, his name looks and sounds a lot like the word “lazy.” Like, if you take out the O in the middle of his name, it just reads as lazi. Yes, with an I instead of a Y. But bear with me for a second.

How I remember Daoism and the philosophy of Laozi is by thinking of him as a lazy hippie. There’s actually a lot of comparisons. And this is the chorus I’ll keep referring back to with each layer that we add onto his philosophy. Now, real quick, Daoists are not lazy people. It’s just an effective way to remember this stuff. And by the way, hopefully one day you guys know me well enough that I don’t need to give these disclaimers to convince you guys I’m not a bigoted person.

But let’s talk about him as a lazy hippie. Now, firstly, the way artists depict the guy fits the description of a lazy hippie. The guy has a long, wiry, unkempt beard. And he always looks like he’s wearing, like, a tablecloth from Chuck E. Cheese. You could picture this guy dancing around crazily in a drum circle is what I’m saying. And the lazy part will reveal itself throughout the podcast.

But Daoism today is one of the biggest and longest-surviving religions in the entire world. And Laozi over the years has garnered a super-human status within Daoism. See, whenever you’re a good philosophy that’s young—childlike wonder in your eyes, big dreams that one day you’ll move to the big city and become a full-fledged religion—it’s not enough to just be a good philosophy that makes you a happier and more effective person. It helps, but what you really need is some sort of an incentivization scheme to keep people committed to you. And nothing throughout history has proven to be more effective at motivating people to stay in line than some creative variant on the idea of a supernatural God condemning us to an eternal flame broiler in some weird, cosmic Burger King.

Now, there’s no flame broiler in Daoism. But what started as a revolutionary philosophy, whose ideas, simply on their own merits, deeply impacted Chinese society for thousands of years, and still do to this day by the way—at some point those ideas got a pantheon of gods tacked onto them, all sorts of rituals. Laozi became a demigod with an aura of light surrounding him like he’s a Super Saiyan. Things changed.

This podcast is not trying to distill Daoism down to 45 minutes. That would be impossible. There are thousands of regional versions of the religion, versions that flourished and fell depending on specific time periods, depending on the political climate of China. Daoism is extremely complex in the present day. And this podcast is not pretending to give you a comprehensive overview of it. At best what I can hope to do is let you know what it’s all about and pique your interest, so you study it further on your own. This podcast is not about religion; it’s about philosophy. And the Daoist philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi is the focus.

One other thing, the book that Laozi wrote when he was trying to make his heroic getaway on the back of the ox, the Daodejing, not only was it written thousands of years ago when language was far less sophisticated, but it was also cryptically worded even at the time. Some parts are pretty clear to understand. Some parts sound like Laozi outsourced the writing of the book to Nostradamus. There are literally—and I don’t misuse the word “literally,” folks—thousands of translations of the Daodejing. And if you’re a person that studies Daoism, you have your favorite translation. But none of these translations are universally accepted as the authoritative translation of the Daodejing.

And I think the best you can do is to read several of them and try to find the common ground among all of them. And it’s a pretty safe bet that is basically what Laozi intended for us to hear, that common ground. But for the sake of reading quotes in a podcast, for anyone interested, I’ve decided I’m going to be sticking partially to Lin Yu Tong’s 1955 translation and partially to Stephen Mitchell’s translation simply because I find it to be more palatable to modern, Western ears.

Now, it’s called Daoism, right? So, what is Dao? What is the Dao? I don’t know why I’m interviewing myself in this podcast, but there are many different interpretations of what the Dao is, Stephen West. But there are a couple that are the most common among Daoists, so we’re going to go over those. It’s pretty much universally agreed that the word “Dao” means path or road. The difference between the interpretations is in what context we look at the word “path” or “road.”

The first way is probably most obvious. It’s the way or the path the universe naturally follows. But as ancient people, they saw this through the lens of human beings and their relationship with nature. See, as Laozi saw it, the world is made up of ten-thousand things or ten-thousand manifestations. He describes it in a weird way. The Dao gives birth to the One. The One is the origin of all things. The One gives birth to the Two. The Two is the yin and yang, which is a concept we’re going to talk about later. And then the yin yang gives birth to the heavens and earth, which finally gives birth to the ten-thousand manifestations.

Here's how Laozi said it. “Dao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two give birth to Three. Three give birth to ten-thousand things. The ten-thousand things carry yin and embrace yang. They mix these energies to enact harmony.” Human beings are one of these ten-thousand manifestations. And it’s only because of our innate ability to reason that we’re able to stray from the harmonious balance of nature and the way all other animals and beings interact with their environment.

Human beings aren’t special to Laozi. And the Dao is this tranquil, balanced path that humans should follow, living in complete harmony with all parts of nature, making decisions intuitively so as not to cave into these modern evils of ambition or cultural traditions. And then, finally, you’re supposed to peacefully meditate on your own actions.

Now, on the other hand, the other common interpretation of the Dao is still that it’s a road or a path, but this interpretation sees the term “road” as really just implying that there’s an absence of something. Let me explain. Imagine you’re looking at a road from a bird’s eye view. You know, imagine you’re in a plane and you’re looking down at a road. There’s always things lining the road whether it’s buildings or trees or bushes. And the use of the term “road” is just referring to an area with an absence of those things or an absence of anything.

Now, the people that interpret it this way usually refer to chapter 25 of the Daodejing where Laozi says, “Before the heaven and earth existed, there was something nebulous, silent, isolated, standing alone, changing not, eternally revolving without fail, worthy to be the mother of all things. I do not know its name and address it as Dao. If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great. Being great implies reaching out in space. Reaching out in space implies far reaching. Far reaching implies reversion to the original point.”

Now, don’t worry if all this seems a little confusing. To be honest, I’m pretty sure they wrote it that way on purpose. In fact, the very first line of the Daodejing is, “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao,” or “The Dao that can be explained is not the eternal Dao.” So, I guess in a way, I’m fighting a losing battle from the beginning with this podcast trying to explain the Dao. But I’m going to try anyway.

Basically, what he meant by “The Dao that can be explained is not the eternal Dao” —he’s touching on the fact that these restrictive words that we use to try to convey ideas, really they’re just sounds that we make as humans to try to draw generalizations or categorize things so we can communicate ideas to people. And to Laozi, this inherent property of language makes it incapable of ever adequately describing the Dao because the Dao isn’t something that can be classified or categorized. The Dao is everything. It’s the origin of all things. But at the same time, it’s nothing. It’s sometimes described as the emptiness that surrounds things, like the road. And it’s that emptiness that gives any object its significance.

This ambiguity reminds me of something I’d hear a hippie say at some point. And yes, that hippie could be right. And I’m not putting down hippies or discounting any of their ideas, but you can’t deny it sounds like it. You know, “It’s the universe, man! It’s all around us, man, but it’s nowhere at the same time!” I mean, you know, we have to forage around for sticks and get back to our roots and make a nest inside of a tree like we’re birds or something. You know, I’m just going to stop. You get the reference to the hippie.

Maybe it’s impossible for everyone to agree on exactly what the Dao is, but there seems to be a lot of common ground among all the different ways people practice Daoism and the things they value. They all seem to agree on this idea of circumventing resistance. More specifically, they don’t believe there’s any reason to push or strain against the balance and harmony of the Dao.

See, so many things we do as humans go against the Dao. Like, pretty much all tradition falls into that category, which is completely the opposite viewpoint of Daoism’s rival political philosophy, Confucianism, that saw tradition as the most important thing. Traditions, among other things, are humans straining against the Dao. What Laozi thought you really should be doing is practicing wu wei.

Now, wu wei means nonaction. But it doesn’t mean we just sit around and eat Flamin’ Hot Cheetos all day and actually do nothing. I mean, actually that’s a bad example because even that would be eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos all day. What I mean is, it doesn’t mean do nothing at all. It means go with the flow, the flow of the universe. You know, the universe.

Let me explain. A humorously common example of this idea of wu wei is about encountering a giant boulder that’s blocking your path. You can’t get around it. You can’t get over it. And plastic explosives won’t be invented for another thousand years. So, what do you do? Well, you can punch it. That’s going to hurt. You can push it really hard. That’s not going to work. All these things are our futile attempts to unnaturally strain against this massive boulder that’s in our way. What we really should be doing is practicing wu wei, action through nonaction.

Figuratively speaking, we should be like water. We should just flow as nature does, like water through the cracks of the boulder, underneath the boulder, along the sides of the boulder. And given enough time, albeit thousands of years in this case, the water will have eroded that boulder down into a grain of sand. And this obstacle that seems so giant and important at one time is now neutralized.

So, this going with the flow harkens back to that lazy hippie reference. I mean, if you had to think of a stereotypical lazy hippie in your mind’s eye, you’d probably think about somebody that sits around all day and often has people telling him he should get a job. The concept of wu wei, or action through nonaction, can be remembered by thinking about this stereotypical hippie and how he doesn’t work as much as society thinks he should. And I’m pretty sure that same hippie, if he encountered the giant boulder blocking his path—something tells me he wouldn’t be karate-chopping the boulder trying to destroy it. He’d take a much more passivist approach.

When you asked him for advice about it—like, if you told him there was a boulder in your way and asked him what you should do about it—the wisdom Daoism preaches sounds pretty similar to the advice he might give you. You know, there is no boulder. “It’s not real, man!” You just turn into water and erode the boulder away like you’re the terminator. And wu wei applies to everything.

Now, this is probably a good time to talk about the other big player in Daoist philosophy. Now, make no mistake, there have been a lot of Daoist philosophers over the years. But two of them stand out among all of them for the substantial impact their thought had on Daoism. One is the founding father, Laozi. And the other is Zhuangzi. Now, you’ve probably seen Zhuangzi’s name before. In the Pinyin it’s translated to Z-H-U-A-N-G-Z-I. So, you might first read it as [Zoo-ong-zee], but it’s [Dju-ong-tsuh].

And he wrote a book with a very creative title called Zhuangzi. And it’s famous among philosophers for not just being a natural and brilliant extension of a lot of Laozi’s work, but for doing it in an interesting and, a lot of times, funny way. See, Laozi and Confucius lived during the years in China when the Zhou dynasty was falling. Things kept getting worse and worse. And after all these people began trying to come up with new, effective ways to govern people, there was still a period of a few decades where Daoism and Confucianism existed, but they weren’t yet put into use in a political sense because the Zhou dynasty hadn’t completely crumbled. Once it had, China separated into several parts, most of them controlled by warlords trying to fight for the reins of power and reunite China under their rule.

This period is an important period in China’s history. It’s known as the Warring States period, and it lasted for over 250 years. Now, as you can imagine, this time—the Warring States period—is a time of extreme volatility and violence. And it spawned innovation. Brilliant philosophers continued to try to refine ideas and discover what the best method of ruling people was. The falling of the Zhou dynasty and the subsequent Warring States period is known as a golden age in Eastern philosophy, and not just because of the many auxiliary types of thinkers that emerged like logicians and legalists and naturalists, but also because people took the doctrines laid out by Confucius and Laozi and expanded upon them.

Zhuangzi lived right in the middle of the Warring States period. He lived from 369 to 286 BC. And he’s the guy that expanded upon Laozi’s work. And he really may be the nexus between Daoism as Laozi put it and the Daoism that massively impacted Chinese culture and society for thousands of years. See, almost 100% of the time when people wrote a philosophical text during the Warring States period, it aimed at trying to lay out the most effective way of governing a state. But Zhuangzi’s book, strangely, aimed at trying to lay out the most effective way of being a happy individual. It was centered around following the Dao and relentlessly practicing the art of wu wei.

Zhuangzi thought that human beings are much better off when their lives are simpler and closer to their natural state or, the way he saw it, in accordance with the Dao. Zhuangzi actually wouldn’t have been a huge fan of this podcast. He wouldn’t have liked it at all. He didn’t think aggressively pursuing knowledge was a very beneficial use of someone’s time. It just makes things more difficult as far as he saw it. His thinking was, we only live for a short, limited period of time. And there’s a seemingly endless amount of knowledge to be gained just in the world we live in. Zhuangzi thought it was pointless to try to pursue something that was unlimited with a life that is limited.

He says it best here: “My life is limited, but knowledge is unlimited. If I pursue unlimited knowledge with my own limited life, the result must be dangerous. If one has realized this but still does so, the result must be even more dangerous.” It is “common knowledge”—and I’m saying “common knowledge” in little air quotes. This I me doing visual things on an audio podcast. It’s “common knowledge” among people that study Daoism that Daoism and Zhuangzi aren’t really fans of people always looking for more knowledge.

You guys are incredibly smart people. You understand these are old texts. And especially Zhuangzi’s book, it’s often written in humorous story form or poems or paradoxes. It’s widely open for interpretation, and it’s important to note that some people don’t think this is what Zhuangzi thought at all. In fact, there’s a whole big group of people that think that because of how strangely worded some of these passages are, depending on the translations you read, some people think the only disdain he really had for the pursuit of knowledge is that you shouldn’t spend too much time pursuing knowledge in an area where the answer is impossible to know for sure. And the people that think this way usually refer to this passage from the Zhuangzi: “Learn what one can and stop searching on what one cannot, is the best way.”

But then on the other hand, it seems to be a pretty common theme throughout the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi to shed oneself from the traditions of mankind and artificiality and to pursue a life more in line with nature. The people that argue this point usually say something to the effect of, when you pursue a life of knowledge, the goal is for each day something new to be added. When you pursue a life of the Dao, the goal is for each day something new to be shed from you or removed. The extensive pursuit of knowledge is just another thing weighing us down in the unnatural lifestyle that we live.

But not surprisingly, this one little issue isn’t where the arguments end. They’re all over the place. It’s clear to historians that Zhuangzi’s book wasn’t written entirely by him. In fact, some believe none of it was written by him, and it’s just a collection of sage wisdom from oracles over decades. This explanation would definitely tell us why the style of writing varies so much from section to section. But it’s important to note that it’s widely accepted that Zhuangzi had a hand in at least some of the writing. I mean, most people think the very first chunk of the book was written by Zhuangzi.

Now, all these things combined—the varying translations, the strange stylistic choices, the seemingly contradictory ideas within the exact same book—all these things have led to modern scholars not really knowing exactly how to define Zhuangzi. Was he a relativist? A skeptic? A perspectivist? It’s tough for me to delve into the philosophy of someone in a fair way that has so many different interpretations of what he even meant when he said what he said. That’s a problem we don’t really run into much with future philosophy like British and European philosophers from the Renaissance.

There’s no doubt Zhuangzi made huge progress for epistemology in the East, progress that’s more easily understood when comparing it to Confucian and Buddhist epistemology. So, we’re going to cover that in an episode in the very near future. But for now, if there’s one thing that most philosophers acknowledge, it’s the possibility of Zhuangzi espousing a form of relativism, interestingly enough, not too far ahead of the time of Protagoras and his relativism in the West, and certainly during the height of sophism in Athens—and thus the height of relativism from a purely numbers standpoint.

The people that make the case for Zhuangzi being a relativist usually point to a few different quotes. But I’m going to save your ears and just stick to one because, honestly, it’s pretty tough to listen to, let alone read. I mean, it sounds like I’m doing a tongue twister. But I’m going to try anyway. Here’s Zhuangzi in one of his more relativist moments. “What is It is also Other. What is Other is also It. There they say, ‘This is true and that is false,’ from one point of view; here we say, ‘This is true and that is false,’ from another point of view. Are there really It and Other? Or really no It and Other? Where neither It nor Other finds its opposite is called the axis of the Way. When once the axis is found at the center of the circle, there is no limit to responding with either, on the one hand no limit to what is it, on the other no limit to what is not.”

Again, I just want to touch on this again. It’s really tough for me to give an unbiased account and label him a relativist absolutely. Take it for what you will, but you can definitely hear in that passage that he’s being critical of the idea of arriving at true knowledge from any one individual perspective.

Here’s something we can talk about though. Both Zhuangzi and Laozi applied the concept of wu wei to the system of government that a country has. It’s pretty funny and, I guess, ironic that Daoism came into being by means of finding the most effective way of governing people, and the conclusion that they came to was that the government that governs best is the one that doesn’t govern at all. Their reasoning was simple. People perform best when they aren’t under the thumb of some central power. Laozi compared governing people to pulling fish out of water. He thought that people work best when they aren’t governed or the presence of a government is so small that the people hardly even notice it exists.

And I mean, you can kind of see where he’s coming from. I’m sure all of us can relate to how much more comfortable we feel to do our work at our respective jobs when our boss isn’t sneaking into the room looming over your shoulder, breathing onto your neck like a serial killer, asking you what you’re up to all the time. Government to Laozi was similar to that boss. He thought that whenever someone commits an evil act, it’s evil because it’s undermining some established mechanism or entity in society. And if you give evil nothing to oppose, it just kind of ceases to exist.

I mean, just try to imagine the Joker from Batman if there wasn’t any societal order to disrupt in Gotham City. He might be merely a struggling circus performer in that world. Laozi thought this dynamic applies to most things created by a society. “Not exalting worth keeps the people from rivalry. Not prizing what is hard to procure keeps the people from theft. Not to show them what they may covet is the way to keep their minds from disorder.”

Now, if you think Laozi is taking this too far, Zhuangzi may have been the first anarchist in the history of the world. He thought that the world doesn’t need to be governed and that good order results spontaneously when things are let alone. The opinions of both of them can be seen as two very similar applications of the concept of wu wei to governing people: action through nonaction.

And Laozi’s view on government is yet another example of something that a modern-day lazy hippie might echo: you know, constantly talking about the man keeping him down or having contempt for authority figures that would presume to have the right to control people and tell them what the best way to live life is. Hippies would be more interested in the live-and-let-live mentality. You know, go with the flow and various other colloquialisms that directly compare to the concept of wu wei.

Now, whenever I think of Laozi and this bizarre way I have of remembering all this information about him—the lazy hippie because you take the O out of the middle of his name and it’s the word “lazi.” Like I said before, you remove the O from his name: L-A-O-Z-I. You take the O out, and you’re left with “lazi.” But that O in the center of Laozi’s name reminds me of probably the most important concept in all of Daoism and most of Chinese culture—no doubt in the center of Laozi’s thought process and fittingly in the center of his name—the yin-yang symbol.

The yin-yang symbol is conveniently circle shaped, like the O, and represents a cyclical, circular force of the universe that’s the true governor of all things. The concept of yin and yang predates Daoism by a while. In fact, the way of the Dao is to keep yin and yang balanced at all times. Now, there is a whole lot more to yin yang than is useful in this podcast about Daoism. But generally speaking, it’s a mysterious force of the universe that has to do with the interdependence of opposites.

Try to think of it this way. It’s impossible to have the top of an iPhone without also having the bottom of that iPhone. The significance of what the top of something is is given by its relation to its opposite. Top and bottom, good and evil, day and night, are just two sides of the same coin. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Wow, this sounds a lot like Heraclitus and what he thought about the interdependence of opposites and his flux theory. The concept of yin yang in the East greatly predates Heraclitus. Did Heraclitus rip this idea off? We might never know.

But isn’t it interesting that the concept of yin yang caught on and completely pervaded Chinese culture even to this day? I mean, it was a revolutionary concept. On the other hand, the doctrines of Heraclitus did almost nothing. I mean, they did little more than give Parmenides and the Eleatic school something to rail against. I mean, isn’t it interesting that the same ideas revolutionized one region and were dismissed in the other?

These opposites that yin yang talks about may not seem similar, but they’re actually the same thing in a way. Think of the yin-yang symbol for a second. It’s not just a symmetrical design that looks terrible when tattooed on someone’s lower back. Each piece of the symbol means something. Each piece of the symbol matters. You have two teardrop-shaped blobs which are known as yin and yang. Even where the yin is largest, at the thickest point of the teardrop, there’s still a little bit of yang near the edge. One can’t exist without the other.

Both yin and yang contain the essence of its opposite. And because of this, they aren’t really seen as opposites but more as complimentary of each other. The dot of yin in the center of yang—those two dots in the middle of the teardrops—symbolizes the seed of the other side of the coin that’s inherent within that side. There’s always a little bit of yin inside of yang.

The constant flux of yin and yang, when it comes to how Laozi thought the universe was brought into being, represent the Dao and the unity out of which all existence arises. The yin and yang are seen as having both masculine and feminine energy, respectively, and through their interaction with each other gave birth to the ten-thousand manifestations that the world is made up of and the 5 elements: earth, fire, water, metal, and wood. But it didn’t just stop at the universe. The concept of yin yang has been applied to basically every avenue of Chinese culture, even medicine where how healthy a person is is directly related to the balance of yin and yang within their body and mind.

We’re going to talk a lot more about yin and yang in future episodes. I mean, it’s a concept that was well established in Chinese culture before Confucianism and Daoism and this age of the One Hundred Schools of Thought. So, as you can imagine, it had a pretty big influence on the systems of government these thinkers developed. And to be honest, it would have been impossible for any of these systems to get off the ground even initially if they weren’t compatible with yin yang. Your school of thought needed to be.

Whenever there are good moments to compare something we’re covering in the future with something from Daoism that we haven’t covered here in this episode, we’re going to do so. And on that same note, very soon Western philosophy enters the Dark Ages, and most philosophical progress is limited to religiously minded philosophers expanding upon what Plato and Aristotle wrote about. So, I strategically saved a few important concepts from both of them to cover when comparing them to these medieval philosophers. And I think it’s going to work out well.

But look at these guys, Laozi and Zhuangzi—two pretty extreme viewpoints on the role of government in a civilized society. Now, I think everyone has their own political viewpoints, but I wonder if anyone listening legitimately believes in a way a government should behave that’s as extreme as these two guys and what they thought.

Earlier in the episode we were talking about the different approaches people take when trying to problem solve on a civilization-wide scale. Philosophize this: if you had a giant spectrum—on one end was the most progressive approach to problem solving imaginable, then on the other end you had the most conservative, tradition-based, trimming-the-fat approach to solving the issues of the population—where do you fall on that spectrum? And here's the interesting question. Is that the same doctrine you follow when solving problems in your own life?

Thank you so much for listening.