Effortless Action

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Effortless Actions The ChineseSpiritual Ideal of Wui-weiEdward Slingerland

Studen ts of Chinese ph ilosophy have usually seen their subjects as asuccession of people who lived, acted, taught and died, rather than aweaving of s trands , any one of which may be a subtle dialectic ofquestion and answer. David Nivison (1997:91)Western scholars have in recent years grown justifiably reluctant tomake sweeping generalizations about the character of Chinese thought.Not only is most of the history of Chinese thought complicated by the

presence of such "alien" traditions as Buddhism, but the pre-Buddhisttradition itself has shown itself to be more multifaceted than once wasthought. For example, the reconstruction of previously lost works suchas the later Mohist canons has made less convincing the often-heard claimthat "the Chinese" were not interested in problems of logic or language,while the renewed interest in the thought of Xunzi has shown the classicalConfucian tradition to be m uch m ore complicated than the Song-derivedaccount of Mencius as the sole orthodox successor to Confucius wouldhave it.Nonetheless, our increasingly sophisticated conception of early Chi-nese thought allows us to continue to maintain some generalizations,paramount among which is the claim that Chinese thinkers were inter-ested primarily in practical rather than theoretical questions. While therewas a certain a m ount of debate between various schools concerning suchtheoretical questions as, for instance, what the good life for hum ans mightbe, the prim ary focus of early Chinese thinkers remained the problem ofhow to become good. The sort of knowledge that was therefore valued wasnot abstract knowledge that the good was to be defined in a certain wayEdward Slingerland is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Religion and East Asian Languagesand C ultures at the U niversity of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion June 2000 Vol. 68 , No. 2, pp. 293-328 2000 Th e American A cademy of Religion


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294 Journal of the American Academy of Religionbut concrete knowledge concerning how to act in a way that was good,'and the various schools customarily defended their positions no t by theo-retical argum ent bu t by po inting to exem plars who personified their val-ues or by focusing on the practical implications of their own and others'theories.2 The religious exem plars that we find in early Chinese texts arethus admired more for the sort of practical skill knowledge they displayin their actions than the sort of argum ents tha t they could marshall in de-fense of their particular way of life.In "Pense occidentale et pensee chinoise: le regard et l'acte," Jean-Francois Billeter has formulated this distinction between theoretical andpractical forms of knowledge in terms of a contrast between ocular andaction-based metaphors for true knowledge. "The 'ocular metaphor' isconspicuous in Chinese texts through its absence," he observes, "and theepistemological problematics that developed from this metaphor in theWest are therefore also unk nown" (1984:34). This observation is perhapsoverstatedocular images are, in fact, found throughout the early Chi-nese corpus3 but its basic thru st is still quite valid. For what I will be re-ferring to as the "m ainstream" 4 early Chinese thinkers, true understandingis not an abstract gaze thatas for Plato or even the neo-Confucianssees through concrete reality in order to acquire a theoretical grasp of somesort of underlying (and ultimately more real) order. Rather, true "clarity"is an illumination of the actual landscape before one's eyes that serves toguide one through it and is always intimately and inextricably tied toaction. Thus, in place of the representational m odel of knowledge exem-plified by the "gaze" of a subject acquiring theoretical knowledge of aneternal order behind the phenom enal w orld, the Chinese instead em pha-size a sort of knowledge appropriate to a subject already engaged in theworld through the m edium of "the act."This is the import of Hall and Ames's contention that "thinking" (si)in the Analects is "not to be understo od as a process of abstract reason ing,but is fundamentally performative in that it is an activity whose immediate

1 The distinction between knowing how and knowing that is one developed by Gilbert Ryle.2 An im plication of this is that w ith regard to ethical standards these thinkers appeal no t to a setof maxims or abstract principles but rather to something resembling Aristotle's "good person" crite-rion. 3 Ignora nce, for instance, is often analogized to n ot being able to distinguish black from whiteand comp ared to blindness, while (in con trast) the do min ant metap hor in the Daoist texts for the sortof understanding that accompanies wu-wei activity is ming ("illumination," "clarity," "brigh tness" ).4 I join D onald M unro in referring to the early Confucian-Daoist worldview as "m ainstre am "(163-176) becausealthough it was challenged or o utright rejected in the pre-Q in period by think erssuch as Mozi or Han Feiziits absorption into the Han syncretist worldview won for it an enduringinfluence on the subsequent development of religious thought in China. This mainstream Chineseworldview went on to have a profound effect on th e adaption of alien modes of though t from Bud-dhism to Marxismto the Chinese intellectual milieu.


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 295consequence is the achievement of a practical result" (44).5 This distinc-tive character of the Chinese m odel of knowledge has been no ted by manyother scholars. For instance, Herbert Fingarette urges us to overcomeour western "m entalistic" bias in approaching the teachings of Confuciusand to redirect our focus from the "'interior' of the man . . . to the actof the man" (1972:54); Wu Kuang-ming speaks of Zhuangzi's ideal as aform of "body-thinking" (1992, 1997); and P. J. Thiel has described theChinese m odel of knowledge as a sort of "experience of Being": "It is verynoteworthy that we [in the W est] lack a specific expression for th is typeof knowledge. . . . This type of experience of Being [Seins-Erfahrung] isnot irrational, bu t is rather a deeper, entities-bound [ Wesensgebundene]type of knowledgeone th at is experienced with the entire spiritual per-sonh ood" (1969:85 n. 148). Several scholars have suggested that th is formof practical, engaged knowledge be viewed as a kind of "skill-knowledge"(Fingarette 1972: esp. 49-56; Hansen 1975: esp. 64 -65 ; Hansen 1983a; Han-sen 1983b; Eno 1990: esp. 8-10; Eno 1996; Ivanhoe 1993; and Raphals).That is, they propose that the early Chinese conception of knowledgeshould be seen in terms of mastery of a set of practices that restructurebo th one's perceptions and values. As we shall see, while the skill model isno t entirely apt in the Chinese context, it serves as a helpful illustration ofhow the early Chinese model of knowledge differs significantly from thatmost dom inant in recent western thought.6More im portan t for the development of mainstream C hinese thou ght,however, is the fact that this alternate model of knowledge inevitablybrings with it an alterna te ideal of perfection an ideal of perfectly skilledaction rather than of perfected theoretical knowledge. For the pre-QinConfucians and Daoists, the culmination of knowledge is represented byan ability to move through the world and h um an society in a m ann er thatis completely spontaneous and yet still fully in harm ony with the n orm a-tive order of the natural and hum an worlds the Dao or "Way." This stateof perfection is what I will be referring to as "wu-wei."The reader might note that app ropriating the term "wu-w ei" to referto a pre-Qin ideal shared by Confucians and Daoists alike is, strictlyspeaking, anachron istic. As a term of art, wu-wei does n ot appear at all inone of the texts we will be discussing (the Mencius) and is found only oncein another (the Analects)in a chap ter that is arguably of quite late prove-nance (15.5). I could very well have chosen a word of my own contrivance

5 The reader is also referred to the discussion of theory versus praxis in the western traditio n andits relationship to Confucian thou ght in Hall and Ames: 30-43.6 The theme of skill- or practice-knowledge has also been explored by western thinkers such asMichael Polanyi and Alasdair Maclntyre, who employ their ideas of "tacit knowledge" or practicemastery as foils to critique western rep resentational theories of knowledge.


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296 Journal of the American Academy of Religionto denote the subject of this article or perhaps adopted Billeter s "ideal ofperfected action" or "the perfect act." My reason for preferring "wu-wei"is that it is, in fact, the technical term the Chinese themselves eventuallychose to denote the ideal of perfected action. It is im portant in discussingearly Chinese thought that we avoid confusing the existence of a conceptwith the presence of a specific word.7 Although the term wu-wei itselfdoes no t com e into widespread use until fairly late in the W arring Statesperiod, the ideal that it describes acting effortlessly and spontaneouslyin perfect h arm ony with a normative standard and thereby acquiring analmost magical efficaciousness in moving throug h the world and attract-ing people to oneselfcan be identified as a central them e in Chinese reli-gious thought in texts as early as the Book ofOdes (Shijing) and the Book ofHistory (Shujing), and later Chinese commentators subsequently adoptedwu-wei as a term to describe this ideal. This personal spiritua l goal is alsointimately linked to the ideal of ordering of the world th rough the powerof one's "virtue" (de)s rather than through legal or military coercion,which is in tu rn one of the most archaic religious themes in China.9This concept has played an extremely important role in the devel-opment of Chinese culture but has rarely been the focus of systematicstudy in either China or the West.10 The one no table exception to this gen-eralization is Roger Ames's The Art ofRulership, which is a careful s tudy ofthe developm ent of wu-wei as a principle of governm ent in Confucian-ism, Daoism , Legalism, and the syncretist Huai Nanzi. Ames's treatmentof wu-wei reflects the dominant approach toward the subject: while thepersonal spiritual dimensions of wu-wei have not gone unnoticed, wu-wei as an ideal of government o r technique of social con trol has been theprim ary focus." This focus can be attributed to the fact that "wu -wei" as a

' It is precisely this sort of confusion that has lead some scholars to the rather absurd conclusionthat the early Chinese had no conception of "truth" because they lacked a single, specific term forit. For a cogent criticism of this sort of linguistic determinism, the reader is referred to Graham1989:389-428.8 In its earliest usages (as with the Latin virtus), de referred to the powers or qualities inheren t toand characteristic of a given thin g; by the time of the Odes it is portray ed as a charism atic power toattract and retain followers acccruing to one who accords with the moral standards handed down byHeaven. "Virtu e" or "charism atic virtue" are thus etymologically accurate renderings for de , as long aswe are careful to avoid reading m oralistic qualities into the te rm as it is used in the D aoist context,where it retains its more archaic sense of the vitalistic power original to and characteristic of a givencreature.9 See Nivison 1997:17-30, "'V irtu e' in Bronze and Bone."10 The C hinese scholar Li Shenglong, who has devoted a series of articles to the subject, notes ofwu-wei th at "th e scholarly world . . . has yet to systematically address either its content or course ofdevelopment" (1986:7).11 There are, of course, exceptions to this trend. In the West Donald Munro has noted the rolethat w u-wei plays as a com mo n "ideal state" for both Confucians and D aoistsa state of mental tra n-


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 297term of art is applied most commonly and prominently to the politicalideal, and its relationship to the personal ideal of effortless or perfectedaction has been correspondingly obscured. To a certain extent, this can beattributed to the fact that in the later Legalist and (arguably) syncretistwritings where wu-wei plays such a prom inent role, it is used exclusivelyin the sense of a principle of government (its function as a spiritual idealhaving been lost),12 and this sense of wu-wei has subsequently been readback into earlier texts. In contrast to the received approach to the subject,I would argue that it is the personal spiritual ideal of wu-wei that is mostbasic to the group of m ainstream Chinese thinkers we will be discussingand that wu-wei as a governmental ideal is, in fact, parasitic upon thismore fundamental conception.I have two main purposes in this article. To begin with, I hope tocoun ter a comm on perception of wu-w ei as an exclusively Daoist ideal bydem onstrating that it served as the cen tral ideal for all of the early main-stream Chinese thinkers, has quite venerable pre-Confucian roots, andeventually became one of the central themes of East Asian religiousthough t in general particularly in Chan (Zen) Buddhism and neo-Con-fucianism. Secondly, I wish to argue tha t th is ideal is a fundamentally reli-gious one:13 that is, it can only be properly understood when situatedwithin a specific m etaphysical con text that was also shared by Confuciansand D aoists alike. This poin t is intended to serve as a much-needed cor-rective to interpretations of Confucian or Daoist thinkers that would por-tray them as somehow post- (or simply anti-) foundationalist and also toprotect wu-wei from any potential relativistic implications. These two

quility resulting from a "un ion" with H eaven (151,155ff.) and Alan Fox has written on w u-wei as aspiritual ideal in the thoug ht of Laozi and Zhu angz i. The reader is referred also to Allinson, Ivanhoe(1993), and Yearley (1996). The recognition of the personal and spiritual dimensions of wu-wei hasbeen m ore com mo n in China and Japan (e.g., Kanaya Osa mu ; Fukunaga M itsuji 1966; Mori M ikisa-bur o 1967; Murak am i Kajitsu; Lin Cong shun; Pang Pu; Liu Xiaogan 1998) and Asian scholars writingin the W est (Feng Yulan; Wu K uang-ming 1981,1982).12 As will be argued below, the mainstream conception of wu-wei is a fundamentally religiousideal. Once stripped from its metaphysical context by thinkers such as Han Feiziwho rejects theearly ma instream worldviewit is reduced from a spiritual ideal to a mere administrative technique.13 The reader does not need to be reminded what a notoriously difficult task it has been forscholars to define w hat they mean by "religion" the implicit, de facto definition governing presentscholarship seem ing to be "I know it when I see it." I nonetheless feel that it is appro priate for me toexplain briefly what I mean by referring to w u-wei as a "religious" concept. I see at least two featuresof a system of thoug ht to be crucial in ma rking it as "religious": 1) the p ostulation of an all-embracing

an d normative order to the cosmos that goes beyond any given particular individual or individualobject (that is, a metaphysical scheme of some so rt); and 2) a program for either bringing the indi-vidual an d/or society as a whole back into their p roper place in this order (a soteriological project) o rfor preserving a realized, but constantly threaten ed, state of harm ony w ith this order. I would thuscharacterize any con cept o r practice belonging to such a system of thoug ht as "religious." For a relatedcharacteriza tion of religion, see Robert Neville's "Forewo rd" in Taylor: ix-x.


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298 Journal of the American Academy of Religionclaims lead to a third and perhaps more far-reaching thesis that, due tospace restrictions, can only be briefly developed here . This third thesis isthat the ideal of wu-wei has built into it a productive tension (the "para -dox of wu-wei") that serves as a prime motivating'force in the develop-ment of mainstream Chinese thought. This tension arises from the factthat the state of effortless, perfected action represented by wu-w ei is po r-trayed as a state that needs to be achieved: we are currently not practicingwu-wei, and the thinkers we will be discussing propose various soterio-logical paths designed to bring us from our current state of effort-full ac-tion into this ideal state of effortless action. The question that inevitablyarises is, how is it possible to try no t to try? That is, how can a program ofspiritual s triving result in a state that lies beyond striving? It would seemthat the very act of striving would inevitably "contam inate" the end-state.My argum ent is that the mos t illum inating way to view the developm entof pre-Qin Confucian and Daoist thought is to see it as a series of re-sponses to this paradox residing at the core of its central spiritual ideal.While the existence of this tension in the concept of wu-wei has notgone entirely unnoticed,14 to my knowledge only two scholars, David Nivi-son and Jean-Francois Billeter, have perceived its productive quality. In aseries of essays Nivison (1997) explores the tension that he refers to as the"paradox of virtue (de)" in early Confucian thought. Structurally equiva-lent to the paradox of wu-wei, the paradox of virtue revolves around thefact tha t virtue can only be acquired by someone who is no t consciouslytrying to acqu ire it. That is, perform ing a virtuous act while at the sametime being self-conscious of its virtuousness makes it, paradoxically, no tfully virtuous. Confucius himself did not directly address this problem,but Nivison attempts to demonstrate that one of the motivating forces inthe development of the Mencian and Xunzian secondary theories abou thu m an na ture is a desire to resolve this paradox.15 While Nivison fails toexplore the influence of this tension beyond the early Confucian con-text, Jean-Francois Billeter has hinted at its more comprehensive implica-tions. He notes that, while what he terms I'idee de I'actparfait (along withthe alternate model of knowledge upon which it is based) allowed earlyChinese thinkers to avoid the various epistemological d ilemmas involved

14 Donald M unro has discussed th e "appare nt c ontradiction" involved in Daoist wu-wei (143-144), and Joel Kuppermann (1968) has struggled with the paradox in his discussion of the "problemof naturalness" in the thought of Confucius. In addition, Wu Kuang-ming and Mori Mikisaburo haveboth noted, at least in passing, that this tension is endemic to both Confucian and D aoist tho ught(Mori 1967:16-17; Wu Kuang-ming 1989).15 Nivison (1997:31-44), "Th e Paradox of Virtue." See also, "Can Virtue Be Self-Taught?" (45-58),"Motivation and Moral Action in Mencius" (91-120), and "Philosophical Voluntarism in Fourth-Century China" (121-132).


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 29 9in, for instance, the Cartesian ideal of an isolated subject somehow ob-taining perfect knowledge of an external realm, it inevitably brought withit its own set of conflicts that exerted a unique influence upon Chinesethought:The ideal of perfected action seems to us a so rt of central insight that, inChina, exercises a stronger pull upon the mind than any other, and to-ward which speculative thou ght is constantly drawn In Chinese texts,this idea is most comm only present on ly in an im plicit form, because it isexpressed in and lies benea th all of the various forms to which we m ustrefer. The passage from the Zhuangzi that has served as our point ofdeparture [the story of Cook D ing cutting up the ox] seems to us to pos-sess a paradigm atic value, although this value rem ains as yet to be firmly

established. In any case, our idea will continue to rest upon a relativelyarbitrary edifice in so far as it has yet to prove its hermeneutic valuein contact with multiple texts. Before it can be accorded some degree ofimportance, it must be put to the test in a different fashion: by renderingmore intelligible not just a single isolated passage, but rather an entirephilosophical problematic as well as its historical development; andby revealing more clearly the coherence and the poweras well as thetensions, contradictions and the aporiasof Chinese philosophy, or,better, Chinese philosophies. In short, it must perform a service with re-gard to the C hinese context com parable to that which it seems one canexpect [in the West] from the notion of the "ocular metaphor." (Billeter1984:50)Before I became aware of Billeter's work I began a project (Slingerlandforthcoming) that takes up precisely this task, demonstrating that theideal of perfectly harmonious action not only serves as a powerful lensthrou gh which we can view early m ainstream Chinese texts bu t also pos-sesses implications for East Asian religious thought in general as well aswestern religious thoug ht and ethics. Although space limitations here willno t allow us to exp lore this third them e in detail, I will attem pt to brieflysketch it out in the conclusion.

W U - W E I AS A C O M M O N ID EA L"Wu-wei" literally means "in the absence of/without doing" and isoften translated as "doing nothing" or "non-action." It is important torealize, however, that wu-wei properly refers not to what is actually hap-

pening (or not hap pen ing) in the realm of observable action but rather tothe state of mind of the actor. That is, it refers not to what is or is not beingdone bu t to the phenom enological state of the doer. As Pang Pu notes inhis discussion of wu-wei, the term denotes "not a basic form of action,but the mental state of the actorthe spiritual state that obtains at the


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300 Journal of the American Academy of Religionvery moment of action" (14).16 It describes a state of personal ha rm ony inwhich actions flow freely and instantly from one's spontaneous inclina-tionswithout the need for extended deliberation or inner struggleand yet nonetheless perfectly accord with the dictates of the situation athand, display an almost supernatura l efficacy, and (in the Confucian con-text at least) harmonize with the demands of conventional morality. AsJean-Francois Billeter describes it, wu-wei I'ideal de I'activite parfaiterepresents a state of "perfect knowledge of the reality of the situation, per-fect efficaciousness and the realization of a perfect economy of energy"(1984:50).It represents not a transitory state but rather a character tha t has beenso thoroughly transform ed as to conform perfectly w ith Tightness. For aperson in wu-w ei, proper conduct follows as instantly and spon taneouslyas the nose responds to a bad smell and with the same sense of uncon-scious ease and joy with w hich the bod y gives in to the seductive rhythmof a song. The state of wu-wei harmony is even reflected in the agent'sphysical bearing and thus is perceptible to others. Wu-wei actions are not,however, automatic, unconscious, or purely physiological. Although ex-tended phenomenological accounts of wu-wei are only to be found in theZhuangzi, it is clear that this state of harmony contains complex cognitiveas well as somatic elements,, involving as it does the integration of thebody, the em otions, and the m ind. The individual still makes choicesand m ay even at times pause to weigh various options or consider the situ-ation aheadbut even such deliberations are performed with a sort ofeffortless ease. Unlike instinctual or merely habitual forms of actions,wu-wei calls for a high degree of concentration on the part of the agentand allows for a considerable am ount of flexibility of response.17 Althoughit does no t involve abstract reflection or ca lculation, it is not to be viewedas "mindless" behavior but should rather be seen as springing from theembodied mind..Pre-Confucian Roots

The theme of personal perfection being reflected in bo th h arm onious,efficacious action and in one's physical appearance can be found in texts asearly as the Book of Odes (Shijing).ls The aristocratic lord or gentleman16 Well-written and carefully argued, this article is to my knowledge the best short intro duc tion

to the subject of wu-wei as a spiritual ideal in pre-Qin China.17 For a discussion of the difference between virtuous dispositions (i.e., wu-wei morality) andmere habit, see Yearley 1990:108-110.18 Wu-wei as a comp ound term appears twice in the received Mao version of the Odesin Odes70 and 145but never in ou r full technical sense. As the Book of Odes is the only text th at scholarsagree represents mostly pre-Confucian material, it will be used as our so urce for "pre-C onfu cian"


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 301(junzi) is throughout the Odes described as embodying the martial andsocial virtues that becom e his station w ith an effortless easean ease thatmanifests itself in his efficacious skill as much as his personal bearing. Anadmiring female poet in Ode 214 describes the object of her affections insuch terms:

Magnificent are the flowers, gorgeous the ir yellow;I have seen this young o ne,And how glorious he is!How g lorious he is!This is why he enjoys good fortune . . .He rides to the left, to the left,My lord does it properly (yi);He rides to the righ t, the right,My lord has the knack.And because he has the knack,It shows in his deportment.19A similar picture of consummate mastery and effortless accordance withwhat is "proper" or what "fits" the situation (yi) is rendered the descrip-tion of a noble archer in Ode 106:

Oh! H ow illustrious he is!His beautiful eyes so clear.Perfect in prop riety,He.can shoot all day at the target,And never miss the ma rk.Truly a proper k insma n of mine!Oh! How handso me he is!His clear brow well-rounded ,When he dances, he is in perfect step,When he sho ots, he always pierces the target.His four arrows all find their m ark;In th is way he guards against disorder.20

The idea of being able to shoot all day while "never missing the mark(zheng)" has definite moral overtones zhengsignifying "proper" or mor-ally "upright" as well as the center of a target and it is in this metaph ori-cal sense that this Ode has been read by later com mentators. N onetheless,the wu-wei "lord" or gentleman in the Odes primarily represents a mar-tial, aristocratic idealthe handsom e and physically powerful warrior.thoug h t . The theme s w e w il l touch u pon can , how ever , a l s o be found in a rguab ly p re -C onfuc ian po r -t ions of suc h texts as the Book of History o r Zuo Zhuan.

19 After Kar lgren . Unless o therwise noted , t rans la t ions f rom the Chinese are my own.20 After Waley; cf. the desc r ip t io ns of the gen t lem an in Odes 143,17 3,174, and 189.


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302 Journal of the American Academy of ReligionA more explicitly moral ideal of wu-wei is displayed by another ex-emp lary type in the Odes: the virtuous sage-ruler of old. In Ode 241, forinstance, we find the Lord on High (shangdi) praising King Wen:

I cherish your bright virtue (de);Despite your great reknow n, you do n ot flaunt it,Despite your enduring prom inence, it remains unchanged.Unselfconsciously, innocently,You accord harm oniously w ith my princ iples.Although possessed of a powerful charism atic virtue (de), King Wen doesnot dwell upon it or parade it in front of others, nor allow it to becomecorrup ted by arrogance or pride. He enjoys his virtue naturally and un -selfconsciously and so is able to accord with the principles handed downby the Lord on High in a completely spon taneous manner. Such effortlessrealization of morality is displayed also by King Xuan as he is described inOde 304:

King Xuan martially established order.When he received a small state, it prospered,When he received a large state, it prospered.Realizing in his person the standards of conduct, never transgressing them,Wherever his gaze fell, order was manifested.

Confucian Wu-weiWe can hear echoes of the ancient aristocratic ideal of the skilledarcher or charioteer in the long account of Confucius's perfected ritualaction that makes up Book 10 of the Analects. Like the charioteer in O de214, Confucius's physical mastery of ritual as described in this book isfluid and smooth: "When summoned by his lord to receive guests, hiscountenance would become severe and he would quicken his steps. W henhe bowed to those in attendance beside him stretching out his hands tothe left or to the right, as their position required his robes remained per-fectly arrayed, bo th front and back. W hen it was time [in the ceremony] tohasten forward, he moved as thou gh he were gliding upon wings" (10.3).Like the archer in O de 106, Confucius also "never misses the mark" : everynuance of his expression, bod y language, and speech is portrayed as per-fectly and effortlessly harmonizing the demands of the situation withthe standards of ritual propriety. "At court, when speaking with officers

of lower rank he was pleasant and affable; w hen speaking w ith officers ofupper rank, he was formal and proper. When his lord was present, hism ann er was simultaneously reverent and relaxed" (10.2).There are no specific clauses in the rites to cover the myriad situationsthat might confront a gentleman. What is required to meet these con-


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 303tingencies is a keen sensitivity to what is ritually correct in any given s itu-ation combined with a set of dispositions flexible enough to instantlyadap t to changing conditions. Like the noble archer, this final state of con-summate ritual mastery does not involve constant effort or struggle onConfucius's pa rt bu t rather arises spontaneously from his trained disposi-tions. The spontaneity and naturalness of Confucius's ritual masterycompletely perfected at age seventyis summed up in Analects 2.4: "Hecould follow h is heart's desires without transgressing the bou nds [of pro -priety]." That is, without the need for deliberation or internal struggle,Confucius could achieve perfect accordance with traditional standardssimply by following his own spontaneous inclinations. Analects 2.4 bringsto mind not only the skillful warriors of Odes 106 and 214 but also theunselfconscious virtue of King Wen in Ode 241 and the effortless accor-dance with traditional standards evinced by King Xuan in Ode 304. Whatwe are seeing here is the evolution of the ideal of the "gentleman" intosom ething w ith a rather different moral valence than the aristocratic war-rior so prominent in the Odes. Confucius's consummate skill is focusedupo n specifically ethical rather than m artial arts, and in this sense the newideal tha t he represents m ight be seen as a combination of the two types ofwu-wei exemplars we see in the Odes: the noble wa rrior and the virtuousruler favored by Heaven. Like the noble warrior, his actions accord per-fectly with the d em and s of a shifting situation; like the sagely ruler, he isable spontaneously to em body m oral virtue in a natura l and completelyunselfconscious manner. The result is a new breed of aristocra t, skilled invirtue rather than war: the Confucian gentleman.This ideal of perfect, spontaneous wu-wei embodiment of virtuerooted in the classics and elaborated in a som ewhat new form by Confu-ciusis inherited by both Mencius and Xunzi. Mencius, for instance,describes the state in which "movement and facial expression everywhereaccord perfectly with ritual p ropriety" as the "ultimate flourishing of vir-tue (de)" (7:B:33). As with Confucius at age seventy, this perfect mastery isnot forced or maintained through effort butin the same way that thebody cannot help but m ove in tim e to the rhythm of a seductive beatarises spontaneous ly and inevitably out of the joy that the perfected per-son feels for the moral life. "W hen such joy arises, how can it be stopped?And when it cannot be stopped, then you begin unconsciously to tap yourfeet and move your hands in time with it" (4:A:27). As in the case of thenoble archer of Ode 106, this harmonious mastery and embodiment ofvirtue reveals itself in one's demeanor and physical appearance. The Con-fucian virtues , rooted in the gentleman's m ind, so permeate his characterthat they "reveal themselves in his demeanor: clearly manifesting them-selves in his face, filling his back and infusing his four lim bs. Without the


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304 Journal of the American Academy of Religionneed for words, every movem ent of his body thu s reveals their p resence"(7:A:21).One might not expect to find the ideal of wu-wei perfection in thethought of Xunzi, whose emphasis upon wei ("conscious effort") wouldseem deliberately aimed against such an idea. Yet we do find him advocat-ing wu-wei and even explicitly connecting it with Ode 106 cited above:

[The gentleman] is able to adapt the standard of Tightness (yii) 21 in re-sponse to changing conditions because he knows how to accord w ith anysituation, whether curved or straight. In the Odes we read,He rides to the left, to the left,the gentleman does it properly {yi);He rides to the right, the right,the gentleman has the knack.

This expresses the idea th at the gentleman is able to employ his knowl-edge of what is right (yii) to bend or straighten in response to changingcond itions. (Wang Xianqian: 2.3b; Knoblock I: 175-6)22The s i tua t ion-respo ns iveness of Xunzi' s perfec ted person for w ho mwhat is "fitting" or "p rope r" (yi) in the mom ent accords with what is mor-ally right (yii) in an absolute senserequires neither prem editation norconscious effort but flows forth spontaneously. "The discriminations ofthe sage require no prior tho ugh t and no advance planning, yet when ex-pressed they are appropriate, and when formed they are proper to type.In repose or in motion, the sage responds inexhaustibly to every change"(3.11b; 1:210). Here tooas in the Odes and the Menciusthis state ofperfection is embodied in an observable fashion, and thus announces itspresence without the need for words: "The learning of the gentlemanenters through the ear, is stored in the mind, extends through the fourlimbs, and is given form in both his activity and repose. In all of hisactionsthe softest word or the slightest movementthe gentleman canbe taken as a model and princip le" (1.8b; 1:140).Xunzi and Mencius, then, would seem to share the same spiritualideal: an ideal of perfected action that can be traced back through Confu-cius to the Odes. Where they differ concerns the way in which th is ideal isto be achieved. Consider the m anner in which Xunzi, like Mencius, em-ploys the metaphor of dance to describe the wu-wei perfection of the sage:"How can we understand the m eaning of dance? I say the eyes by them -

21 This alternate roman ization has been adopted to distinguish yi i "rightness" from its homonymyi "fitting" o r "appropriate." Xunzi is deliberately playing upon this pun.22 F or the sake o f convenience, passages from the Zhuangzi and the Xunziwhich possess n ocommonly agreed upon section divisionswill be keyed t o page numbers in both the standard Chi-nese cri t ical edit ion and the most commonly used English translation.


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 305selves cannot perceive it and th e ears by themselves cannot hear it. Rather,only when the manner in which one gazes down or looks up, bends orstraightens, advances or retreats, and slows down or speeds up is so or-dered tha t every movem ent is proper and regulated, when the strength ofmuscles and bones has been so thoroughly exhausted in according withthe rhythm of the drums, bells, and orchestra that all awkward or discor-dant m otions have been eliminated only through such an accum ulationof effort is the meaning of dance fully realized" (14.4a; 111:85). In thedance metaphor as found in the Mencius, there is no m ention of training:the hands and feet spontaneously begin m oving in time to a rhy thm thatseems to call forth a primal response in the listener. Wu-wei perfectionthus represents for Mencius merely the full realization of responses thatare natural for hu m an beings. For Xunzi, "not trying" is no t so easy: theperfection of form and emotion that finds its expression in dance is ahard-won achievement resulting from years of difficult train ing and sub -mission to cultural forms, which serve to transform one's initially recalci-trant and ugly nature into something harmonious and beautiful. This isreally the substance of the famous disagreement between Mencius andXunzi on the subject of human natureMencius claiming that humanna ture is "good," and Xunzi counte ring tha t it is "bad." For Mencius, wu-wei represents the perfection of an innate set of tendencies; the source ofnormative standards is thus ultimately inside, and the role of training,external cultural forms, and traditional authority is consequently de-emphasized. For Xunzi, wu-wei is achieved only through the completereformation of a nature that is initially bereft of moral resources; thesource of norm ative standards is thus to be found outside the individual,and intensive training in cultural forms and submission to the autho rity ofthe tradition becomes crucial.Daois t Wu-wei

The im portance of wu-wei in the Daoist context requires perhaps lessintro du ction, since it is in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi that wu-wei is firstemployed as a technical term of art and becomes a central focus of con-cern. Indeed, wu-wei becomes a polemical weapon in the hands of theseearly Daoist thinkers, who p ut their prim ary emphasis upon the end stateof effortless action as a means of criticizing what they perceive as the Con-fucian obsession with the means of reaching this state.23 In the view of23 Of course, the Daoists themselves advocate m eans of their own for attaining the end of w u-weiand thu s involve themselves as much as the Confucians in the "paradox of wu-w ei." Nonetheless, weshall see below that the role of means is consciously de-emphasized in the Daoist texts, and theiralmost exclusive emphasis upon wu-wei as representing merely the re-establishment of a "natural"state might be seen as an attem pt to defuse the pa radox.


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306 Journal of the American Academy of ReligionLaozi and Zhuangzi the Confucian project has nothing to do with wu-wei, since their over-elaborated set of practices so contam inate the practi-tioner that the end result can be noth ing bu t forced behavior and shallowhypocrisy.This is the import of Laozi's famous dictum that opens the Mawang-dui version (and constitutes Chapter 38 of the received version) of thetext: "The h ighest virtue does not seem virtuous, and so possesses virtue;the lowest virtue never lets go of virtue, and so is withou t virtue." Tha t is,true charismatic virtue or inner power is not consciously seen or regardedas virtue or power, while that which is regarded to be virtue is, in fact,merely an em pty sham . That this is a jab aimed at the Confucians is madequite clear in the lines that follow:The person of highest virtue is without action (wu-wei)and holds nothing in regard;The person of highest benevolence acts, but also holdsnothing in regard;The person of highest righteousness acts and also holdscertain things in regard;The person of highest ritual propriety acts and, when the people do notrespond, rolls up his sleeves and forces them to respond.

Hence when the Way was lost there arose virtue;When virtue was lost there arose benevolence;When benevolence was lost there arose righteousness;When righteousness was lost there arose the [Confucian] rites.The rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and trustworthinessAnd the beginning of disorder.Note here the importance of "[holding something] in regard" (yiwei),which in the course of decline described above seems even more per-nicious than "doing" {wei). In Laozi's view it is the rise of Confucian m o-rality and values that ruined the original purity of the ancients andbrought about the fall from wu-wei. Once people come to value some-thing (to "hold it in rega rd"), they are motivated to act in pu rsuit of thatobject, and this marks the "beginning of disorder." By setting up the wu-wei em bod im ent of the virtues of benevolence and righteousness as ex-plicit goals to be consciously soughtand by establishing ritual practiceand study as the means to this endConfucius hopelessly confused thetrue Way and condem ned the world to disorder and hypocrisy.24

24 This is, of cou rse, not en tirely fair to the C onfucians. As we have seen, the ideal Confuciangentlema n is in the mom ent of action n o more self-conscious of his own virtue tha n the noble archerof the Odes is conscious of his consummate skill. Indeed, Confucius himself was worried about theproblem of hypocrisy (witness his attacks upon the "village wo rthy" in Analects 17.13). In t he view ofLaozi, however, Confucius has already hopelessly compro mised the ideal of wu -wei by raising up v ir-


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 307Laozian wu-wei thus embraces two different but complementarycomponents. The first, cognitive component involves remaining free of"regarding"that is, rejecting conventional knowledge and valuesand

instead cleaving to what the com mon lot would consider "ignorance," bu twhich actually represents a higher sort of know ledge. The second, behav-ioral component25 consists of refraining from action in the conventionalsense, or perhaps more accuratelyacting in a way that is a negationof conventional conceptions of action. "Do that w hich consists in doingnothing (lit. "wu-we i"), act in a way that is not acting, taste that w hich hasno taste," Laozi advises in Chapter 63. "Make small the big and few themany; repay injury with kindness." Laozi's purpose is thus by means of asort of via negativato reverse the process of decline begun by Confuciusthrough stripping away the accreted layers of cultivation and learning thathave obscured the Way, thereby allowing hum an beings once again to real-ize wu-wei perfection:

One who engages in study [i.e., a Confucian] does moreand more every day;One who has heard the Way does less and less every day.One does less and less until one does nothing at all (wu-wei),and when one does nothing at all (wu-wei) one will alsohold nothing in regard (wuyiwei). (Chapter 48)Paradoxically, it is precisely through refraining from consciously en-dorsing values and through "doing no thing" that one can in the end actu-ally attain one's ends:

By not going out the door, one can come to know the whole world;By not gazing out of the window, one can come to knowthe Way of Heaven.The further one goes,The less one knows.Therefore the sage knows without going abroad,Attains clarity without having to look,And is successful without acting. (Chapter 47)In the end, Laozi's ideal thus resembles the form of wu-wei action wesee in early Confucian thinkers: spo ntan eous action that flows forth fromthe individual w ith no sense of effort and yet accords perfectly with thetuous exemplars for people to emulate, setting up standards of virtue for people to strive after, andpresenting wu-wei perfection as the end goal of a life-long process of conscious effort. In this wayLaozi's critique of Confucian self-cultivation roughly resembles the later critiques of "gradual"approaches to enlightenment in the Chan (Zen) Buddhist tradition.2 5 1 am indebted to Alan Fox (1995) for the labels "cognitive" and "beh avioral" to describe thisdistinction in Daoist wu-wei.


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308 Journal of the American Academy of Religiondictates of the situation and yields wonderful results. He is quite radi-cal, thou gh, in seeing this ideal spiritual state as attainable only th rou gha complete rejection and negation of all conventional values and con-ceptions of ac tion. Laozi thus uses wu-w ei in something close to its literalsense of "no n-ac tion" or "non-do ing" and wields it in concert with othernegative slogans such as "no-activity" (wushi), "no-desires" (wuyu), and"no-regarding" (wuyiwei) in order to dramatize his opposition to theways of the contem porary, fallen world.Whereas wu-wei as a term of art appears through out the short text ofth e Laozi, it appears only three times in the seven so-called "Inner C hap -ters" of the Zhuangzi, although it appears with great frequency and playsa prominent role in the "Outer" and "Miscellaneous" Chapters.26 At leasttwo conclusions can be drawn from this fact. To begin with, wu-w ei wasprobably just coming into use as a technical term of art around the timethat the Inner Chapters were composed, but by the time that the Outerand Miscellaneous Chapters were put together it had become a very estab-lished and popular term of art. Secondly, our borrowing of wu-wei as aterm to describe everything from Cook Ding's skill in cutting up an ox tothe state of being free from conv entional d istinctions is no t at all idiosyn-cratic but rather represents a venerable practice begun by the writers ofthe O uter and M iscellaneous Chap ters of the Zhuangzi.17Like Laozi, Zhuangzi perceived the pernicious influence that conven-tional values and standards exert upon the human spirit: enslaving it tothe pursuit of artificial goals, wearying it with the petty logical quibblingof the mind {xin), and cu tting it off from any sort of genuine fulfillment.Similarly, Zhuangzian wu-wei resembles Laozi's ideal in that it springsfrom a sort of cognitive shift: a releasing of the mind from human conven-tions so that it is free to perceive the Heavenly nature of things. In a fa-mous metaphor in Chapter 4 Zhuangzi refers to this cognitive transform a-tion as the "fasting of the mind." Yan Hui, Confucius s favorite disciple28excited by the learning he has acquired under Confucius's tutelage andeager to put it into practice announces that he is off to seek an audience

26 This di scuss io n of "Zh uan gzi ' s" thou gh t wi ll be based u po n the fi rs t seven Inn er C ha pte rs ,c au t i ous l y suppl ement ed wi t h ma t e r i a l f rom t he s i x Out e r C hapt e r s (C hapt e r s 17-22) t ha t bo t hAn gus Gr aha m (1986 ,19 89) and L iu Xi aogan (1994) agree repre sen t "School o f Zhu angz i " ma t e r i a l s .

27 In these la te r chap ters we find wu -w ei be ing use d as technica l t e rm em bra c ing m an y Inn erC h a p t e r s t h e m e s : b e i n g " t e n u o u s " (xu) or "st i l l" (jing) (457,810; 142,259 ); fol lowing wh at "cann ot beo t h e r w i s e " (budeyi) or be i ng moved by t he " sp i r i t " (shen ) (369 ,810; 116 ,259); be ing free of wo rr ies ,conve nt i ona l d i s t i nc t i ons o r pa r t ia l i ty (35 9 ,46 2 ,40 6 , 519 ,834-835 ,909f f .; 113 ,143 ,127 , 162 , 266 -267 ,290f f. ); emb rac i ng s i mpl i c i t y o r one' s o r i g i na l na t u re (36 9 ,43 8; 116 , 136 ); and r e spo ndi n g t o t h i ngsl ike a m irr or (538-539; 167-168)!

28 Th e tongu e-in -ch eek use of Co nfu c ius an d his di sc iples as mo uth -pi ece s for hi s ow n ideas istypica l of Zhuangzi ' s sense of humor.


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 309with a despotic ruler in order to persuade him to reform himself. Con-fucius is very dub ious about his chances for success, noting that "BrightHeaven" will no t deem "fit" (yi) one who is under the sway of the m indthat is, in the grip of preconceived notions about right and wrong.29 Theonly way to get rid of these notions is to fast the m ind, a process in whichone stops listening with the senses and the m ind and begins to listen w iththe qi,x thereby ultimately rendering the mind "tenuo us" (xu) and recep-tive to the Way as it is manifested in things. Only if Yan Hui is able to makehimself receptive and tenuous in this fashion will he be able to hand le theruler with the sort of effortless ease and perfect responsiveness that char-acterizes wu-wei: "If he listens, then sing; if not, keep still. Have no gate,no urge to control, but rather dwell in oneness and lodge in what cannotbe o therwise (budeyi). Then you will be close to getting it!" (Guo Qing-fan: 148; Watson 1968:58)The state of being in which one is able to respond to "what cannot beotherwise"that is, to what the situation itself dem ands is often associ-ated by Zhuangzi w ith the loss of a sense of self. "Before I had begun to becapable of this, I was certain that I was Hui," Yan Hui declares after hear-ing abou t the fasting of the mind; "But now tha t I am capable of pu tting itinto action, there has not yet begun to be a Hui." One might w onder pre-cisely who it is that is acting once "H ui" has been cast aside. The answer tothis question is to be found in the famous story of Cook Ding, whoamazes his audience by cutting up a ceremonial ox with a degree of effort-less skill that recalls the noble archer of O de 106 or the chario teer of Ode214: "At every touch of his hand, every bending of his shoulder, every stepof his feet, every thrust of his kneesw ish! swoosh! He guided his bladealong with wh oosh, and all was in perfect tu ne one m om ent as if mov-ing in time with the dance of the M ulberry Grove, ano ther as if harm oniz -ing with the Jingshou music" (117; 50). When praised for his technicalskill, Ding counters that his performance arises from a devotion to theWay rather than adherence to a mere technique. As he explains it, byrejecting perceptual know ledgethat is, the sort of sense impressions andinstrum ental knowledge abstracted from the senses that are the main con-

2 9 In this sense, Zhuangzi goes a step beyond Laozi: whereas Laozi proposed subverting conven-tional values by negating them or celebrating the "low er" element of any conven tional dyad (valuingweakness over strength, darkness over light, ignorance over knowledge), Zh uangzi feels that merely tonegate conventional values is to remain under their sway. He thus call for a com plete transcendence ofthe dichotom ies inher ent in conventional values, displayed in an ability to straddle both sides of anyconventional dichotomy pairan ability that is referred to as "walking the two paths" (liangxing).Zhuangzi's exemplars are thus not shadowy rulers who achieve their ends through the mysteries ofinaction and desirelessness but are, rather, active m embers of society who no netheless seem to havesomehow transcende d the conventional even while dwelling and a cting in the midst of it.

3" The "vital essence" or energy that an imates all living things.


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310 Journal of the Am erican Academy of Religioncern of the m ind he has created a space of tenuousness into which hisspirit (shen) can emerge and take over from the mind the control of hisactions. The impulses of the spirit, in tu rn , put h im in touch w ith the Wayand allow him to act with wonderful efficacy: "I follow the H eavenly pat-tern (tianli), thrusting into the big hollows, guiding the knife th rou gh thebig openings, and adapting m y movements to thefixednature of the ox. Inthis way, I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, m uch less a mainjoint" (119; 51).Cook Ding and the post-fast Yan Hui are joined in the Zhuangzi bymany othe r exem plars of skillful living engaged in a wide range of activi-ties, including a hunchback cicada catcher, a carver of bellstands, a ferry-man, and even a skillful tax collector. The only quality that all of theseindividuals have in common is that they have freed themselves from thecontrol of the mind and the dom ination of conventional values and havelearned to listen with their qi and respond with their spirit. Whereas Con-fucian wu-wei m ight be said to represent the ultimate perfection of ordi-nary human activity, Zhuangzian wu-wei calls for a transcendence of thehuman and a surrender of the ordinary self, marked by a fundamentalshift in the locus of agency from the "human" mind to the "Heavenly"spirit or qi. The result is a perfect realization of one's original natu re. Asa "School of Zhuangzi" writer explains in Chapter 18 ("Perfect Happi-ness"): "I regard wu-wei as true happiness, though ordinary people con-sider it bitter. Thus it is said: perfect happiness know s no hap piness, per-fect fame knows no fame. What is right or wrong in the world can in theend not be fixed, and yet through wu-wei one can determine it. Perfecthappiness, a vibrant selfonly wu-wei allows you to come close to pre-serving this!" (612; 191).

L I NKI NG WU- WE I T O T HE COS M I C ORDE R:HEAVEN (TIAN), DAO, AND V I RT UE (DE)As such references to wonderful efficacy and seem ingly magical tran s-formative power suggest, the various portrayals of wu-wei we have dis-cussed above have more in common than merely a set of phenomeno-logical features. In addition to portraying wu-wei as being characterizedby a feeling of spontaneous ease and graceful effortlessness, the main-stream Chinese thinkers link this personal state of mind to an observable,

almost supernatura l efficacy in the w orld. It is this efficacy that allows thesage-king Shun to order the world merely by taking the proper ritual posi-tion (Analects 15.5), the Laozian sage to achieve personal im m un ity fromharm and to lead the entire world back to simplicity, and Cook Ding to cutup oxen for nineteen years without ever dulling his blade. As A. C. Gra-


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 311ham has pointed ou t, whereas spontaneity in the West is typically associ-ated with subjectivity, the opposite may be said of the so rt of spontaneityevinced in wu-wei: it represents the highest degree of objectivity, for it isonly in wu-wei that one's embodied mind conforms to the somethinglarger than the individual the w ill of Heaven or the order represen ted bythe Way (1983:9-13). This is why the state of wu-wei should be seen as aspiritual ideal, for it is only by harm onizing w ith the objective, norm ativeorder of the cosm os tha t the ind ividua l is able to realize it.From the aristocratic charioteer in the Odes to Zhuangzi's skillful ex-em plars and Xunzi's perfected sages, wu-wei is conceived of as a state of"fitting" (yi) with the ord er of the cosmos. In the Odes this order is iden-tified with Heaven, and the state of being in constant accord or "fit" withthis order is described as one of the gifts Heaven is capable of granting.Such a link between "fitting" {yi) and the grace of Heaven is to be found inOde 166:

Heaven protects and settles you,It causes your grain to flourishSo that there is nothing that is not proper/fitting (yi).You receive from Heaven the hundred emoluments;It sends down to you enduring good fortune.Only the days are not sufficient (to hold so much blessing).31

In this Ode this fortunate ruler is also said to have accumulated by meansof "auspicious and pu re" offerings and flawless ritual behavior a power-ful virtue {de). This concept of virtue provides another (albeit indirect)link between Heaven and wu-wei, for virtue is portrayed th rougho ut theOdes as a sort of charism atic power that accrues to those who are rituallycorrect that is, who accord with Heavens order. Attaining a state of w u-wei harmony with Heaven's order, they are thus rewarded with a powerthat not only brings them personal benefit but that also allows them torealize m ore effectively Heaven's will in the world. This is because Heavenhas created people in such a way that they respond instinctively to virtue;by rewarding the ritually correct ruler with this power, Heaven thus as-sures the efficacy of his rule. The idea of virtue as a power granted byHeaven to one who accords with its willand thus serves as the keeper ofthe Heavenly mandate is found not only throughout the Odes32 and His-tory bu t is also one of the earliest identifiable religious themes in Ch ina,being traceable to the most ancient written records in China, the Shangoracle bones and Zhou bronze inscriptions.

31 Cf. Od es 20 9,2 40 , an d 299 an d 304 .32 See, for ins tan ce, Od es 157, 161, 191, 209, 220, 223 ,24 2, 249 ,25 6, 260, an d 299.


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312 Journal of the American Academy of ReligionUnderstand ing this archaic conception of Heaven and its relationshipto virtue is im portan t, because this early worldview permeates and s truc-tures the conception of wu-wei as it is formulated in the pre-Qin texts wehave discussed above. In all of these texts wu-wei is portrayed as a state ofperfect harm ony with the order of Heaven (often referred to as the Way ofHeaven or, more simply, the Way) that results in the accruing of a num i-nous power (de), which in turn allows its possessor to influence others andmove through the world with great efficacy. Wu-wei can therefore notbe understood without locating it in a worldview where it is intimatelytied to the concepts of Heaven, the Way, and virtue . Indeed, the direct linkbetween wu-wei and Heaven or the Way wu-wei being described as the

m anne r in which Heaven or the Way functions is a com mo n them e inpre-Qin writings. In Ode 254 Heaven's way of leading and ordering thepeople is com pared to the influence of gentle music or respect inspired bysubtle symbols of authority:Heaven's guiding the people isLike an ocarina, like a flute,Like a zhang jade, like a gut jade;33As if taking hold of them , leading them by the han d;As if leading them by the hand, and noth ing more.Heaven guides the people with g reat ease.

Heaven has no need to resort to violence or force in ordering theworld bu t can bring it into harm ony in an effortless fashion, as one wouldlead a small child by the hand. We find an analogous theme in Analects17.19, where Confucius laments the fact that he m ust try so hard to bringthe world back to the Way and longs to share with Heaven the ability toguide the processes of the universe without having to teach, admonish, orissue orders.34 Heaven remains silent in the fullness of its wu-wei, and yetfrom this wu-wei "the four seasons find their course and the myriadthings acquire life." Similarly, wu-wei is described throughou t the Laozi asthe "Way of Heaven" or the m anner in which the Way functions,35 and this

33 Both sym bols of authority.34 Wh at C onf uciu s says is, "I wish I d id no t have to speak/ inst ruct (yan)" a n d Heaven is alsodescribed as accomplishing all that it does "without speaking." Since t h e t ime o f the Odes (see, forexa mple , Ode 198, where the gift of clever speech is attr ibu ted to flatterers and shameless hypocrites),yan (talking, speech, teachings, words) has served as a general symbol fo r all that is not wu-wei . One

who is wu-wei and genuinely possesses virtue accomplishes his ends quietly and has no need t o resortto speech. O n the other hand, one who speaks a great deal is often suspected o f hypocrisy o r m en-dacity. This accounts for Confucius's suspicion of those wh o are too "glib" and his hatred of flatterers,Mencius's rather defensive protestations that he is not a t all fond o f debate but is forced into it by cir-cumstances (3:B:9), and the abiding suspicion of yan that is most commonly identified with Laozi andZhuangzi but that, in fact , runs throughout mainstream Chinese thought.35 See especially Chs. 9, 30,37 ,40 ,48 ,51 ,73 , and 77 .


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 313theme reappears in the Zhuangzi, where we read that "The Way is wu-weiand w ithou t physical form" (246; 81).*

All five of the thinkers discussed above thus share a worldviewone that has its roots in archaic Chinese religion in w hich Heaven, theWay, wu-we i, and virtue are intimately linked w ith one another. Part ofthe prob lem with past treatments of som ething like the ideal of perfectedskill mastery by scholars such as Robert Eno or Chad Hansen is that theplace of skill-perfection within this worldview has been misrepresented.Most crucially, while these scholars acknowledge the relationship betweenskill-perfection and dan or Dao, they strip these latter term s of their meta-physical significance and reduce them to the status of conventional con-struc ts. Eno, for instance, writes of the early Confucians that they "createda Heaven essentially void of consistent features and so were free to reflectthe growing image of their new philosophy and their unique lifestyle"(1990:2). Such a concep tion of tian or Dao as a "lifestyle choice" is insidi-ously anachronistic, reflecting more the views of modern western, post-foundationalist thinkers than anything that would have been intelligibleto an early Chinese person.This essential link between wu-wei and the mainstream Chineseworldview suggests tha t we should be cau tious in choosing m odels for dis-cussing the concept. For instance , it is clear that the idea of sk ill-masteryis a powerful and illuminating way to undertsand w u-wei and is, indeed, amode l that early Chinese thinkers themselves often employ. However, thismodel is also potentially misleading if not situated in its proper culturaland religious context. The skill-knowledge valued by these thinkers is notto be understood on the analogy of skill in a limited practicesuch aspiano playing or carpentryfor we can imagine som eone being a skilledpianist, for instance, and yet still an atrocious human being in otheraspects of her life. What wu-wei represents is a perfection of a uniqueand ultimate skill: the skill of becoming a fully realized human beingand embodying the Way in the full range of one's actions. This is whyConfucius is rather contem ptuo us of any practice more limited than the"master-craft"37 of becoming fully human (ren) and why Cook Ding'smagnificent performance in cutting up an ox in the Zhuangzi is under-stand by Lord Wen Hui in a me taphorical sense ("Excellent!" he exclaimsat the conclusion of this story, "I have heard the words of Cook Dingand lea rned the secret of caring for life"). As the form ulation of this idealin the early Chinese context involved relating the individual to a larger

36 Cf. G uo : 612; Watso n 1968:191 and G uo : 735; Watso n 1968:236-237.3 7 Borrowing the term from Aristotle; for a discussion of the "master craft" of living well seeNichomachean Ethics 1.2.


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314 Journal of the American Academy of Religionnormative cosmic orderas well as working out an at least implicit pic-ture of hum an nature as it relates to this orderw u-wei should be seenfirst and foremost as a religious concept. For the early Chinese (Daoist orConfucian), the Way represented a normative, metaphysical order thathad once been realized in the world during a past Golden Age but fromwhich their contemporary world had strayed. In this past age when theWay had been realized in the world everyone and everything had func-tioned in an wu-wei fashion, because wu-wei represents the manner inwhich Heaven or the Way acts. The fact that wu-wei was portrayed assom ething that needed to be cultivated was thus for these thinkers a reflec-tion of the fallen state of their contem porary world, and the achievementof wu-wei therefore represented a soteriological goal: a reestablishm ent ofthe original state of harmony between the human and Heavenly whichhad been lost.For these thinkers, "proof" that their specific way of reestablishingcontact with the Way was correct was provided by the phenomenon ofvirtue . That is to say, the. manifestation of charism atic virtue by the ex-emplars of their tradition served in each thinker's view as perceptible evi-dence tha t their soteriological pa th w ould lead to success. Therefore, w u-wei avoids the possible relativistic im plications of the skill model by beingexplicitly linked to both a normative, metaphysical order and a charis-matic power tha t was thought to be clearly apparent to believers and no n-believers alike. "If there was a ruler who achieved order th rough wu-w ei,was it not Shun?" we read in Analects 15.5; "He did nothing but makehimself reverent and face South [the proper ritual position for a ruler],that is all." For the author of this passage, the fact that Shun had achieveda state of wu-wei and thus unified and ordered the entire world solelythrough the power of his virtu e was a historical fact tha t proved the v ia-bility and superiority of the Confucian way. Wu-wei as a spiritual ideal isthus coupled w ith a strong sense of realism.Alasdair Maclntyre has noted that a model of skill-mastery in anyform provides one w ith access to a type of realism that differs significantlyfrom and lacks some of the weaknesses ofthe sort of realism found inCartesian representational theories of knowledge:

It is a central feature of all crafts, of furniture making and fishingand farming, as much as of philosophy, that they require the minds ofthose who engage in the craft to come to terms with and to make them-selves adequate to the existence and properties of some set of objects con-ceived to exist independently of those minds. The embodied mind, in andthrough its activities, has to become receptive to forms (eide) of what isother than itself and in being constituted by those formal objects be-comes, in the appropriate way, them. It is therefore not judgements which


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 315prim arily correspond or conform to those realities abo ut which they areuttered; it is the embodied mind which conforms adequately or inade-quately to the objects, the res, the subject m atter, and which evidences thisadequacy or inadequacy in a num ber of ways, one of which is the truth orfalsity of its judgem ents. It is in becoming adequate to its objects that theem bodied mind actualizes its potentialities and becomes what its objectand its own activity conjointly have been able to make it. (1990:68)

The realism that governs the skill of cabine t-mak ing, for instance, is thusreflected in the fact tha t cabinets can be made well or poorly, and the dif-ference between these two types of cabinets is observable in the materialrealm. A cabinet that c ann ot fulfill its intended use because its doo rs donot close properly or because it falls ap art after a short period of use canbe said to have been m ade by a bad cabinet-maker. When we realize tha tthe object of the "skill-knowledge" being cultivated by both Confuciansand Daoists in early China was the Waya norm ative order existing inde-pendently of the minds of the practitioners and that one's embodiedm ind becoming "adequate" to this object was though t to be evinced by anapparent ease of action (wu-wei) and the possession of a sort of numi-nous power with observable effects (de), it becomes apparent why theideal of wu-wei did not lead to relativistic consequences for the Chinese.38Although they disagreed with one another, each of these thinkers felt quiteconfident that his way was the only Way to be wu-wei.

T HE P ARADOX OF WU- WE IIn order to provide at least a general sense of how the ideal of w u-weiand the tension it contains (the "paradox of wu-wei") can serve as a pow-erful lens through which to view the development of early Chinese

thought, it migh t be helpful before we conclude this discussion to roughlysum m arize the early Chinese responses to the paradox of wu-w ei as wellas the sorts of problems these responses encountered. The "solu tions" tothe paradox can be classified along two axes: internalist-externalist andsudden-gradual. Because the paradox generally played itself ou t along theinternalist-externalist axis in pre-Qin China39 and because there is a fair38 I n this respect it is interesting to contrast wu- wei with som ethin g l ike the concept of "flow"which phenomenologically resembles wu-weideveloped by the University of Chicago psychologist

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Because "flow" is not situated in any kind of metaphysical context, Csik-szentmihalyi is forced t o struggle with certa in relativistic implicatio ns o f his ideal that simply do n o tarise for the early Chinese.39 In later Chan (Zen) Buddhist debates internalism h a d become t h e unques t ioned or tho-doxy and th e tension played i tself out exclusively along the sudden-gradual axis, whereas t h e neo-Confucian debate between the Cheng-Zhu and Lu-Wang schools was between, respectively, external-ist /gradualists and internalist /subitists.


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316 Journal of the American Academy of Religiondegree of overlap between the two axes (internalists generally also beingsubitists and externalists gradualists),40 the internalist-externalist axis willbe our focus.Each response merely chooses a horn of the dilemma upon which toimpale itself. The internalists answer the question of how one can try notto try to be good by gravitating toward the "not trying" horn: at somelevel, they claim, we already are good, and we merely need to allow thisvirtuous potential to realize itself. Zhuangzi, Laozi, and Mencius fall intothis cam p. The externalists, exemplified by Xunzi (and most likely includ -ing Confucius as well), maintain on the contrary that it is essential that wetry not to try. That is, they claim that we do not possess the resources toattain wu-wei on our own and that wu-wei is a state acquired only aftera long and intensive regime of training in traditional, external forms.Toward this end they formulate a rigorous training regime designed tolead us gradually from our original state of ignorance to the pinnacle ofspiritual perfection. Unfortunatelyas I illustrate in detail in my book(Slingerland forthcoming)neither of these responses to the paradoxproves entirely satisfactory or even internally consistent, and both areplagued by superficial and structural difficulties.

For instance, the Confucian internalist Mencius is confronted with thesuperficial p roblem tha t by placing the locus of moral authority within theindividual he has apparently undermined the need for traditional Con-fucian ritual practices and the classics. They are often portrayed as merelyhelpful aids to moral self-cultivation, dispensable in a pinch and ulti-mately subordinate to the individual's own inner moral guidethe heart/mind.41 This becomes the focus of the Xunzian critique of Mencian thoughtbut is less of a problem for the Daoist thinke rs, who are in any case alreadydoctrinally committed to undermining traditional Confucian institutions.The deeper, structural problem faced by any internalistConfucianor Daoistis the question: if we are already fundam entally good , why dowe not acdik e it? The fact that we are not, in our current fallen state, actu-ally manifesting our "innate" goodness calls into question the internalistposition and makes the externalist solution seem more reasonable. Theresult is that all early Chinese internalists feel the need to fall back occa-sionally into an externalist s tance. We can thus find in the Mencius severalquite Xunzian-sounding statements abou t the indispensable role of the40 The ove r l ap is not perfec t , as is i nd i ca t ed by the fac t tha t Mencius is ac tua l ly a gradua l i n t e r -

na l i s t .41 C o ns i de r the discre t ion displayed by the M e n c i a n g e n t l e m a n in a d a p t i n g or even viola t ing the

dic ta tes of the ri tes if they fail to accord wi t h wha t is " r i g h t " for the s i tua t ion (3:B:10,4:A:17,4:A:26 ,5:A:2), fol lowing his i n t u i t i on in r e i n t e rpre t i ng or even re jec t ing por t ions of the classics (5:A:4,7:B:3),o r the case of the s o n s who s p o n t a n e o u s l y and i n d e p e n d e n t l y i n v e n t a c rud e bur i a l r i te by fol lowingthe i r na tura l inc l ina t ions (3:A:5) .


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 317rites and classics in shaping human inclinations and the folly of relyingexclusively up on the individual's na tura l resources42comments that co-exist rather uneasily with the m ain thru st of his argument. Similarly, Laoziand Zhuangzi temper their faith in our spontaneous, natural tendencieswith hints of concrete practices and specific disciplines that are necessaryif one is to actually realize wu-wei.43The externalist position, however, is plagued by its own superficial aswell as structural problems. Xunzi, for instance, is faced with the moresuperficial difficulty of trying to explain how, if hu m an beings are com-pletely bereft of innate m oral resources, morality itself was invented, sinceas a Confucian he is doctrinally com m itted to the position that the sage-kings who created the rites and wrote the classics were themselves hum anbeings just like us. That this prob lem is superficial is indicated by the factthat Christian externalists in the West are able to circum vent it by locatingthe source of morality in an extramundane realm. The deeper problemfaced by externalists concerned with moral self-cultivation Confucian aswell as Christian is the deeper question of how the novice is to be movedfrom the pre-cultivated state to the state of moral perfection.Tha t this is perceived as a problem in the developm ent of wu-wei m o-rality (virtue) illustrates ano ther im po rtan t way in which the wu-wei/skillanalogy is not perfect. In the case of a skill such as piano playing thereis no prob lem in conceiving how forced training can eventually result inan internalized, settled disposition, because there is no assum ption or de-mand that the novice enter the training regime with any prior inclina-tion toward the practice. That is, no one w ould fault a beginning p ianistbecause she did no t at first feel the em otion that Beethoven was trying toconvey, for it is thought that an appreciation of such goods internal to apractice are only gradually acquired after the fundamental mechanicalaspects of the practice have been thoroughly m astered. It is therefore takenfor granted in the acquisition of a skill such as piano playing that the nov-ice will need simply to grind away at acquiring these new and alien skillsetssubmitting against her initial inclinations to mind-numbing, re-petitive drillsbefore there can be any hope of a truly skillful dispositionto develop. More to the point, internal motivation is in the final analy-sis irrelevant with regard to a technical skill (what Aristotle would call a"craft"): although we might roman tically suppose tha t the performer of aprofound ly m oving and beautifully executed piano sonata is experiencing

42 See, for ex am ple , 3:A:4,6:A:20, an d espe cial ly 4:A:1 and 4:A:2.43 In thi s respec t i t is qu i te revea l ing tha t , regardless of w heth er o r no t such cry pt ic phr ases as

"b l ock t he open i ngs and shu t t he doors" (Laozi Ch. 52) or ins t ruc t ions to "fas t the mind" {ZhuangziCh. 4) or igina l ly re ferred to concre te , physica l prac t ices , they were cer ta inly unders tood in thi s senseby la te r Daois t prac t i t ioners and were subsequent ly developed into e labora te sys tems of yogic , medi -ta t ive , a lchem ica l , and sexual reg imes .


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318 Journal of the American Academy of Religionthe same deep emotions that the piece inspires in us, we could hardly faulther if we subsequently discovered tha t she had, in fact, been merely think-ing about the tim ing of the notes and (incidently) w hat she was to have forlunch that afternoon. The performance stands on its own m erits, regard-less of the internal state of performer.Things are quite different with regard to the development of moralskill, however. While it seems qu ite clear to us tha t forcing ourselves to re-peat over and over the same chords and simple compositions howeverboring or oppressive we m ight find itwill eventually help us to develop adegree of genuine skill in p iano playing, it is somew hat less apparent thatforcing ourselves to help little old ladies across the road while inwardlycursing the bother involved will make us more compassionate o r that com -pelling ourselves begrudgingly to give money to the poor will make usmore generous. This is because moral or virtuous acts are inextricably tiedup with the internal state of the actor. If it turns out that I gave moneyto the poor in order to make myself look good or merely to win a taxbreak for myself, this fatally ta rnishes the act itselfa "generous" ac tionperformed in the absence of genuinely generous motivations is merely asemblance of generosity. Reflecting upon this phenomenon, Aristotlequite carefully explains the disanalogy between "craft-knowledge" (merelytechnical skill) and v irtue : "In any case, what is true of crafts is not trueof virtues. For the products of a craft determ ine by their own characterwhether they have been pro duced well; and so it suffices that they are inthe right state when they have been produced. But for actions expressingvirtue to be done temperately or justly [and hence well] it does not sufficethat they are themselves in the right state. Rather, the agent m ust also be inthe right state when he does them" {Nichomachean Ethics 1105a27-31;Irwin: 39-40).

The crucial imp ortance accorded to internal states when it comes tomoral vitue leads to the conclusion that, as Aristotle puts it, "if we do whatis just or temperate, we must already be just or temperate" (1105a21-22;39). The p roblem , of course, is that if one m ust in some sense already bejust or at least have the beginnings of just inclinations in order to per-form a truly just act, it is somewhat difficult to see how it could be possibleto train someone to acquire a virtue he or she did not already possess, atleast in some incipient form.Like Mencius, Aristotle thu s solves the paradox in an internalist fash-ion ethical training merely nu rtures the "seeds" of virtue already presen tin one who has the prope r so rt of upbringing44 because he considers it** Where Aristotle differs from Mencius is that this poten tialty is not inborn in all hum an beingsbu t is rather the result of prop er childh ood influences (1179b20-32; 292).


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 319impossible artificially to create virtuo us dispositions in som eone entirelylacking them. It is precisely this difficulty that any externalist teacherof virtue m ust try to circumvent, the mystery being how the student is tomake the transition from merely acting out morality to actually becomings.moral person. The comm on danger is that this transition w ill not be madeand that the training regime will thus produce nothing m ore than a moralhypocrite who merely goes through the motions of morality. It is thispoten tial danger one felt by the Confucians no less than the Daoists45that explains the perennial appeal of the internalist position. That this wasa source of uneasiness for bo th Confucius and X unzi is evidenced by thefact that both of these thinkers found a need to bolster their argumentswith occasional internalist borrowings. While continuing to emphasizethe crucial importance of traditiona l ritual practice and classical learning,Confucius also suggests more than once that these practices are only use-ful when suppo rted by the proper "native substance" (zhi) and an inher-ent passion for learning.46 Similarly, Xunzi at times is forced to smuggleinternalist elements into his pictu re of self-cultivationhaving to posit aninnate hu m an "distaste" for disorder and chaos, for example, in order toconstruct a plausible explanation for the origin and a dop tion of Confu-cian ri tual practice.47In short, it seem that the early Chinese tradition was never able toformulate a fully consistent or entirely satifying solution wh ether inter-nalist or externalistto the tens ions created by its central sp iritual ideal,and this conceptual instability was subsequently transm itted to later EastAsian schools of thought that inherited wu-wei as an ideal. It resurfacesin Chan Buddhism in the form of the sudden-gradual controversy,48 inJapanese Zen Buddhism in the form of the debate between the Rinzai andSoto schools, and yet again in both Chinese and Japanese neo-C onfuc ian-ism in the form of the conflict between the Cheng-Zhu and Lu-Wang fac-tions.49 The tenac iousness of this tension is illustrated by its resistance tobeing resolved by doctrinal fiat. The victory of the Southern (sudden)school of C han Buddhism , for instance, was designed to settle the p rob -lem in an internalist/sub itist fashion: all hum an beings originally possesspure, undefiled Buddha-nature; practice and other external aids to en-

45 C ons i de r , fo r i ns t ance , t he con ce rns vo i ced by bo t h C onfuc i us and M enc i us (Analects 17.13,Mencius 7:B:37) abo ut th e so-ca l led "vi l lage worthy," w ho o bserves perfec tly a l l of the externa l formsof vi r tue but i s comple te ly lacking in the proper inte rna l di sposi t ions . Confuc ius re fers to the vi l lagewor t hy a s t he " th i e f o f v i r t ue" a m ere count e r fei t o f t he t rue C onfuc i an gen t l em an.

*6 Se e Analects 3.4, 3.8 ,5.2 2,6 .18 , 7.8, 15.16, 15.18, and 16.9.47 See Xun zi 2.6a /1177, 11.4a / II243,2 .19a / I19 2,and 1.13b/I151.48 Th e reader i s re ferred to P e ter Grego ry for an anth olo gy of essays on thi s topic .49 See R od ney Tayl or 's "Th e Sudd en/ G radu a l Pa rad i gm an d Neo-C on fuc i an M i nd C ul t i va t i on"

(1990: 77-92) .


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320 Journal of the Am erican Academy of Religionlightenm ent (scrip ture, etc.) are thu s essentially superfluous. Yet the prob-lem refuses to be so easily conjured away and simply re-em erges bo th inBuddhism and neo-Confucianism (which also adopts the Buddhist "so-lution" of an originally pure na ture) in the subsequent splits between themore internalist, "sudden-sudden" Rinzai and Lu-Wang schools andthe more externalist, "gradua l-sudden" Soto and Cheng-Zhu schools. Thecontinued, stubborn re-emergence of this splitultimately related to afailure to produce an entirely consistent or satisfying internalist or exter-nalist position suggests that the paradox of wu-w ei is a genuine paradoxand that any "solution" to the problem it presents will therefore neces-sarily be plagued by the sort of superficial and structural difficulties de-scribed above.Indeed, as the above discussion of Aristotle suggests, the implicationsof this problematic extend beyond its con tribution to our understandingof Chinese or East Asian thou ght. The tensions p roduced by the paradoxof wu-wei are to be found not only in Aristotle's claim that "to becomejust we m ust first do just actions" bu t also in Plato's belief that to be taughtone must recognize the thing taught as something to be learnedtheso-called "Meno problem."50 We can also make ou t the contou rs of an in-ternalist-externalist split in the early western trad ition tha t seems to followthe battle-lines drawn in China. Christian externalists such as Augus-tine oppose the Greeks' pagan faith in the hum an intellect or the na turaldispositions of a well-born Athenian, butas Alasdair Maclntyre hasnotedinvolve themselves in their own paradox:

In medieval Augustinian culture the relationship betw een the key texts ofthat culture and their reader was twofold. The reader was assigned thetask of interpreting the text, but also had to discover, in and through hisor her reading of those texts, that they in tu rn interp ret the reader. Whatthe reader, as thus interpreted by the texts, has to learn about h im or her-self is tha t it is only the self as transformed throu gh and by the reading ofthe texts which will be capable of reading the texts aright. So the reader,like any learner within a craft-tradition, encounters apparent paradox atthe outset, a Christian version of the paradox of Plato's Meno: it seemsthat only by learning w hat the texts have to teach can he or she come toread those texts aright, but also that only by reading them aright can heor she learn what the texts have to teach. (1990:82: italics added)

It is, I think, no accident that this Augustinian paradox resembles the onefaced by Xunzi of how beings entirely bereft of any inn ate moral sense canbegin the task of se lf-cultivation that is, even recognize it as som ething50 Meno, 80d ff. The "Meno problem" and its relevance to the early Confucian "paradox ofvirtu e" is discussed by N ivison 1997:36,85, and 237-238.


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Slingerland: Effortless Action 321worth pu rsuing . Augustine's proposed "solution" to the paradoxfaith inone's teacher and an obedient tru st of tradition are also quite Xunzianbu t arguably also fail in the end to resolve the initial tension in an entirelysatisfactorily or consistent manner.It seems that something resem bling the paradox of wu-wei will plaguethe thought of any thinker who can be characterized as a virtue ethicistthat is, anyone who sees ethical life in terms of the perfection of norm ativedispositions.51 We might thus be justified in seeing the "subtle dialectic ofquestion and answ er" circling about the paradox of wu-wei as having sig-nificance no t only for early Chinese thinkers b ut also for any thinker con-cerned with the problem of self-cultivationthat is, with the problemof not merely winning from the individual rational assent to a system ofprinciples bu t actually transformingher into a new type of person. Seen inthis way, our discussion of the Chinese ideal of effortless action takes on asignificance that goes beyond the merely sinological, for it can serve as awindow through which we can gain new insight into the ideals and pro b-lematics of our own early tradition.

REFERENCESAllinson, Robert1989

Ames, Roger1994Billeter, Jean Francois

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Chuang-tzu for Spiritual Transformation. Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.The Art ofRulership: A Study of Ancient Ch inese Politi-cal Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press."Pense occidentale et pensee chinoise: le regard etl'acte." In Differances, valeurs, hierarchic, 25-51. Paris:Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales."La ph^no me'nologie de l'activit^ d ans le Zhuangzi."Asiatische Studien 47/4:545-558.

Chen Zizhan1991Csikszentmihalyi,Mihaly

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Shiji Zhijie. Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chubanshe.Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York:Harper.

51 In this contex t it is revealing that th e significance of Aristotle's paradox and Plato's Meno p rob -lem have been "rediscovered" by Maclntyr e in the course of his retrieval of ou r own lost virtue ethicaltraditon.


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The Confucian Creation of Heaven. Albany: State Uni-versity of New York Press."Cook Ding's Dao and the Lim its of Philosophy." In Es-says on Skepticism, Relativism and Ethics in the Zhuangzi,127-151. Ed. by Paul Kjellberg and P. J. Ivanhoe. Albany:State University of New York Press.History of Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.Confucius: Secular as Sacred. New York: Harpe r Torch-books."How the Analects Portrays the Ideal of EfficaciousAuthority." Journal of Ch inese Philosophy 8/1:29-49."Reason, Spontaneity, and the LiA Confucian Cri-tique of Grahams Solution to the Problem of Fact andValue." In Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts,209-225. Ed. by Henry Rosemont. La Salle, IL: OpenCourt." Wu-wei in Early Philosophical Daoism." Paper deliv-ered at the 1995 Eastern Division M eeting of the Ameri-can Philosophical Association, December 18."Reflex and Reflexivity: Wuwei in the Zhuangzi." AsianPhilosophy 6/1:59-72.Soshi. Tokyo: Asahi shin bun sha.

"'No-mind' in Chuang-tzu and Ch'an Buddhism."Zinbun 12:9-41.Boshu Laozi Jiaozhu. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju."Chuang-tzu's Essays on Seeing Things as Equal." His-tory ofReligions 9:137-159.Later Moist Logic, Ethics and Science. Hong Kong: Chi-nese University Press.Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. London, Boston:Unwin Paperbacks.Chuang-tzu: Textual Notes to a Partial Translation.London: School of Oriental and African Studies

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