SKYE stephenson

To seek knowledge is to gain every day
To hear the Tao is to lose every day
To lose and to lose
Until one is empty of doing

Wei wu wei means nothing not done
To control the world is to be empty of doing
Those who are busy doing
Cannot control the world. 

This quote is the 42^nd of the eighty-one total verses in the Tao Te Ching, that revered Chinese compilation first written down more than two thousand five hundred years ago. No one knows who was the original author or authors of this ancient sacred text, since these verses were transmitted orally for thousands of years before someone got the idea to write them down on silk fabric and bamboo slips.

Of late, I have been reading a verse each night, before falling asleep, from Rosemarie Anderson’s new translation. The one above I find particularly compelling, and enigmatic.

It’s ending two lines – Those who are busy doing/cannot control the world – reminds me of how I often spend my days and fill my hours with busy-ness. My job. My house. Cooking and cleaning. Shopping. Spending time with family. Trying to keep up with what is happening in the world. Looking on the internet. And so on and so forth. Thus pass many of my days.

What might be an alternative approach to living, as suggested in the Tao Te Ching?

What is this Wei wu wei – being empty of doing, yet having nothing not done?

How might we both seek knowledge every day, while at the same time losing every day, losing and losing until one is empty of doing?

Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s recent memoir Writer as Vocation offered me a clue. As a child, Haruki Murakami enjoyed reading novels, but he never considered writing one until he one day when he was twenty nine years old. That particular sunny morning he went to the ball park in Tokyo to see his favorite team, the Yakult Swallows. And when the first batter hit a double, he had the epiphany that he could write a story. After that game, he went to the stationary store and bought some supplies. That evening, he began writing on his kitchen table. His first novella earned a national prize.

After he wrote two novellas that sold reasonably well, Haruki Murakami realized that in order to be the kind of writer who could sustain production over the long term, he would had to give up his successful jazz nightclub in Tokyo, which kept him very busy making and serving sandwiches, and reorient his life to focus only upon writing.

All of his friends said he was crazy.

That was forty years ago. He is now one of the most well-known and successful contemporary writers.

He never studied writing or had any literary mentors. He is a self-taught writer. Or is he really?

Every morning Haruki Murakami wakes up around 4 am, drinks a cup of coffee, and then sits down to write. When he begins to write, he says that he changes from an rather ordinary person, into someone rather special because he enters through a door into an underworld where all his developing characters, as well as the story, exist. This is not a realm that is real; nor is it unreal. It not of this world, yet it is also not fantasy. All his inspiration and ideas come from this deep well, whose doorway he carefully shuts tight as he exits every afternoon when he has finished his day’s writing. 

Could this realm, which Haruki Murakami describes as a dark place, be the Tao? The first verse of the Tao Te Ching ends like this: A oneness called dark/Dark beyond dark is/The door to all subtleties?

During the year I lived in Japan in 1981, teaching Japanese in Toyama prefecture, I met a young Japanese man who had just returned from spending two years in Europe. He was an artist, and an afficionado of Hieronymus Bosch. He told me he had spent two years every day in front of one of Bosch’s painting trying to reproduce his work on a canvas.

At the time, I could not imagine spending two full years of my life in front of any painting, trying to copy it. This man is now a painter who exhibits nationally in Japan, and uses Flemish techniques in his works of art.  Did he find the Tao, in his own way, through the Wei wu wei of single-minded focus on a single work of art over a sustained period of time?

What does this mean to me, and to you? It suggests that the way to do more might just be to do less. And the way to be more, might just be to eliminate rather than add activities to our already crammed lives. Cutting to the bare bone so as to leave only what is truly most important and essential to us – whether it be writing or painting or gardening or helping others or partnering or teaching or healing or simply being our true selves may just be both the easiest and hardest of paths and possibilities. And also the way to find that deep well of eternal sustenance and inspiration that can nourish and sustain our souls.