Subtracting Daily
The Teaching
In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done until non-action is achieved. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.
Commentary
This chapter reverses the entire assumption of Western achievement culture and most conventional religion. Spiritual growth is not accumulation, more knowledge, more practices, more certainty, but subtraction. The ego is stripped away layer by layer.
‘When nothing is done, nothing is left undone’, Wu Wei at its most paradoxical. The Gita teaches the same: action performed without the ego claiming it becomes perfectly efficient. The Sikh teaching on Hukam: when you stop insisting on being the doer, the divine does through you what effort alone could never accomplish.
This is the mystical logic of kenosis, the self-emptying Eckhart made the center of his teaching. ‘God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.’
Themes
Connections 19
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Travelled
Taoism reached Buddhism by 65 CE. Buddhism entered China in the 1st century CE. Early translators borrowed Taoist words, and Chan grew out of the meeting.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hinduism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Sikhism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Gnosticism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Stoicism and Taoism while these teachings took shape.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Taoism.
Travelled
Alan Watts read and drew on Taoism.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Unsure
Chinese yin-yang and Taoist practice reached Japan (Onmyōdō). How much they shaped Shinto is argued.
Travelled
John Vervaeke read and drew on Taoism.
Arose apart
Both took shape before Buddhism and Taoism were in documented contact (from 65 CE).