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Harish's Reviews > Tao: The Watercourse Way

Tao by Alan W. Watts
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"Just as Chinese writing is at least one step closer to nature than ours, so the ancient philosophy of the Tao is of a skillful and intelligent following of the course, current, and grain of natural phenomena� seeing human life as an integral feature of the world process, and not as something alien and opposed to it. Looking at this philosophy with the needs and problems of modern civilization in mind, it suggests an attitude to the world which must underlie all our efforts towards an ecological technology. For the development of such a technology is not just a matter of the techniques themselves, but of the psychological attitude of the technician.

Hitherto, Western science has stressed the attitude of objectivity� a cold, calculating, and detached attitude through which it appears that natural phenomena, including the human organism, are nothing but mechanisms. But, as the world itself implies, a universe of mere objects is objectionable. We feel justified in exploiting it ruthlessly, but now we are belatedly realizing that the ill-treatment of the environment is damage to ourselves� for the simple reason that subject and object cannot be separated, and that we and our surroundings are the process of a unified field, which is what the Chinese call Tao. In the long run, we simply have no other alternative than to work along with this process by attitudes and methods which could be as effective technically as judo, the “gentle Tao,� is effective athletically. As human beings have to make the gamble of trusting one another in order to have any kind of workable community, we must also take the risk of trimming our sails to the winds of nature. For our “selves� are inseparable from this kind of universe, and there is nowhere else to be."

"The fountain of creative work is an intelligent questioning of the rules"

Lancelot Whyte: "Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the processes of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become... Confucius is the first clear example of a man in this situation. Concerned at the disintegration of primitive Chinese civilization, he sought to restore order by relying on the power of ideas to organize behavior. He was aware of what he was trying to do: society was to be set right by calling everything by its right name, or as he put it, the "rectification of names"."

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Reading Progress

April 27, 2009 – Shelved
Started Reading
August 1, 2009 – Finished Reading

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message 1: by David (last edited Aug 10, 2009 12:12AM) (new) - rated it 4 stars

David Lau I just read the book again and it's still definitely one of my favorite Alan Watts works. I love his comprehensive, but short and elegant portrayal of Tao. The quotations from Chuang-tzu go perfectly with his lucid examples. Amongst my favorites were the many quotes from Chinese history. Rulers that governed with as little effort as possible achieved success as compared with the quick demise of empire's that enacted too much forceful control, like the Chin dynasty war machine. It's also great to have a work of this caliber in English because Tao isn't a distant eastern mystery. It's there, always has been, and will keep on being there after we're gone. And it begs the question: What is east and what is west?


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