Tags
autobiography, cancer, insomnia, Laozi, Martha Nussbaum, Martin Broadwell, Nancy Houfek, Ted Slingerland, Zhu Xi, Zhuangzi
In previous years I have aimed to provide what are now known as content warnings when my posts contained swear or curse words. But just in the years since LoAW began, English swear words have undergone a striking shift; the formerly shocking F-word has become relatively unremarkable, while a six-letter derogatory term for black people is now regarded with horror. In keeping with the likely shift in audience expectations, in future posts I will be warning only about the new crop of swear words rather than the old. I use this post as an occasion to make this transition because the F-word appears in it quite frequently, as the title indicates. That title is probably the last time I will mark that word with asterisks; the word is uncensored in the text.
My wife’s previous round of cancer treatment, in 2015, was one of the most difficult periods in my life. Near the beginning of it I started describing myself as a Buddhist, based on a mere passing question in her hospital survey. But by the end I had become a practising Buddhist, having derived a great deal of support and comfort from Buddhism and its practices.
In the middle, though, I was still experimenting with a variety of ideas and practices from different traditions. The Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reminded me of the spiritual benefit of practising scriptural reading, and I turned to multiple traditions for help in that regard. Buddhism proved the most valuable by the end, after a long period of learning from other traditions. Among these, I had a particularly powerful reaction to Daoism – perhaps I should say, against Daoism.
“Daoism” here referred almost entirely to the teachings of Laozi and especially Zhuangzi, at least through the explanations of modern commentators – an approach I am happy with. I was especially drawn to Ted Slingerland’s Trying Not To Try, because its discussion of Daoist “effortless action” (wúwéi 無爲) seemed particularly pertinent to my insomnia, which was newly exacerbated by the stressful situation. (The harder you try to get to sleep, the less likely you are to succeed.) That discussion seemed to fit with the interpretation of Zhuangzi that I had gleaned from Chris Fraser’s writings, where one has an appropriate but automatic reaction to the situations one faces. Slingerland’s claim was that Confucians advocated a gradual self-cultivation, and Daoists preferred a more sudden letting-go – and that some situations called for each approach. He suggested dating as an example of the latter, noting how we often seem to find love more easily when we’re not looking.
But, I noticed, that wasn’t how dating had worked for me. I had left my divorce feeling excited about dating and being newly single, a positive attitude – which was almost immediately crushed, as I found myself leaving dozens of personally crafted messages to women on dating sites that went almost entirely unanswered. That was its own difficult time. But what got me through in the end was working on tenacity and courage, against my shyness and fear of rejection. I resolved that in 2007 I would ask out at least one woman every month, and I did. The January and February dates went terribly, but in March I met the love of my life. My success in dating came through a gradual path of deliberate effort: what Slingerland would describe as a Confucian method, not a Daoist.
And regarding my immediate situation in the time of cancer and insomnia, I wrote in my journals: “The thing about ‘just let go’: fucking how? If you’re not already doing it? Letting go with insomnia is not easy. It keeps hold of you. It’s hard.” I realized we need practices to get better – practices that I was starting to find in Buddhism and not seeing in Daoism – and it seemed to me that Daoist emphasis on sudden liberation inhibited practice. Nancy Houfek, a brilliant vocal teacher who taught me most of what I know about giving good presentations, provided a helpful model of skill development that went from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. (Wikipedia attributes this model to a Martin Broadwell.) But what Laozi and Zhuangzi seemed to do was skip the first and third stages, pretending that it was being conscious that made us incompetent, in a way that seemed obviously false to me.
Slingerland’s book drew from cognitive psychology – especially the ideas of Daniel Kahneman – as well as Daoism, and it struck me at the time that modern psychology probably had practices that were more helpful, as I was noting the rise of secular meditation. My journal noted how many doctors recommended mindfulness meditation, and added this comment:
Because science is into practices that work. And frankly I think they do it better than the Daoists. Who, it seems to me, aren’t into practices that work. Sudden-enlightenment people don’t bother with practice; they say “just do it, let go, it’s easy.” To which I say: fuck you. If it were that easy we would have goddamn well done it already. Fuck Laozi and Zhuangzi, fuck the Daoists, fuck Daoism. And really what do you expect from people who are dumb enough to think human nature is good???
The anger that that passage expresses toward Daoism was not something I had felt before that time, and it is not something I feel now. I think it was what Nussbaum calls transition-anger: the potentially helpful initial anger that arises with a newfound awareness that something is wrong. For me it marked a break with Daoism and with sudden-liberation approaches more generally. Being good is hard and we need to work at it, and Daoism isn’t going to help us. Only a gradual path of self-cultivation will do that.
So I thought then, anyway. But that wasn’t the end of the story. In the intervening decade, I haven’t become a Daoist by any means, but I’ve nevertheless come to accept a lot of the Daoist ideas to which I had previously said “fuck”. I’ll talk about that in the next few posts.
Chris said:
Very interesting thoughts, as always.
“But what Laozi and Zhuangzi seemed to do was skip the first and third stages, pretending that it was being conscious that made us incompetent, in a way that seemed obviously false to me.”
I don’t know, in Zhuangzi’s 19th chapter, which is where most (not all) of Zhuangzi’s knack stories come from, there’s quite a bit of attention paid to people having practiced their skills for a long time prior to reaching mastery.
I can’t think of any Daoist source expressing the point of view of human nature being good. The notion of moral good is, in fact, attacked quite strongly in both the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.
I find it interesting that you equate Daoism with sudden enlightenment, with the Zhuangzi having quite a few references to meditation (zuò wàng, xīn zhāi etc.), and with the Laozi having been used as a meditation manual throughout the history of religious Daoism.
Lee Sarpel said:
How to practice letting go, according to what I was taught:
– Don’t speak at all for a week
– Drink weird herbs
– Ritual dance and martial arts
– Ingest psychedelics/get really stoned
Amod Lele said:
The Zhuangzi is plenty weird, but later Daoism is a lot weirder.
Amod Lele said:
Thank you, Chris, and welcome.
I don’t think the presence of meditation means Daoism isn’t a sudden tradition – the quintessential sudden tradition is Chan, whose name means meditation. As I understand it, that means you meditate a lot on the hope that eventually during the meditation it’ll click – but all that matters is the moment that it does click, not any skills you built on the way up.
As for the other points… I’ll have to think about those (and probably reread the Laozi and Zhuangzi)! I was a beginner with the Zhuangzi and Laozi then and still basically am. A lot of it was coming from Slingerland’s interpretation, which seemed consonant with the Zhuangzi as I’d read it to that date. I was trying my best to learn the core lessons of (Zhuangist) Daoism and what they had to teach me in that difficult time, and what I learned seemed like it would make things worse. As you’ll see from my upcoming posts, I’m already in a different place now – though perhaps in ways that come more from Chan and other Chinese Buddhist traditions than from Daoism proper.
Nathan said:
“Wikipedia attributes this model to a Martin Broadwell.”
I’m not sure that’s the best way of saying it: Wikipedia mentions that Broadwell wrote an early article about the model in 1969, but the model predated that article. An earlier source that Wikipedia mentions is the textbook Management of Training Programs by Frank A. De Phillips, William M. Berliner, & James J. Cribbin (1960).
Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey made an interesting variation of this model in their book Immunity to Change (2009) that focused on the shift from being unconsciously committed to a mindset (or set of “big assumptions”), to consciously committed, to consciously released, to unconsciously released, constituting a model of mindset/worldview shift—a model of unlearning implicit assumptions instead of learning skills, although the unlearning could also be called learning.
Amod Lele said:
Good catch, you’re right. I think the Wikipedia article might actually have changed since I first wrote this piece. The De Phillips et al. textbook is a more likely source, though I note that Wikipedia merely says the stages appeared in that textbook, and the book itself doesn’t say “we propose this model” or anything, so it’s possible it’s even earlier.