The Tao is Silent

book review, sorta

One of the least Taoist things you can do is write an essay about Taoism, right after reading a book on Taoism. Nonetheless that is what I am going to do, after having read Raymond Smullyan’s The Tao is Silent,¹ as a transmission to my future self, and to bring the right people closer to me.

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Smullyan is one of the most interesting figures I have ever come across. He was an accomplished mathematician and also a mystic; his wikipedia page describes him as a “mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher.” It’s quite rare to run into such a combination.

One of the things that Smullyan and I seem to share is that we have never liked being told what to do. In my own case, growing up with a successful and strong-willed older brother led to an intense desire to be my own person at all costs. To this day I am hypervigilant to other people’s attempts to control me, and have a complicated relationship to my own attempts to control myself.

This has naturally drawn both me and Smullyan towards Taoism, which is all about surrendering control.

Now, “surrendering control” is a big theme in self-help books in general, like the recently viral Let Them theory. But there is something else that drew me to Taoism and to Smullyan’s work in particular: there is a humor to his writing. The last thing he could ever do is take himself too seriously. And for someone who has approached their own personal development as One Serious Quest after another, that is a breath of fresh air.

Smullyan starts the book like this:

At all costs, the Christian must convince the heathen and the atheist that God exists, in order to save his soul. At all costs, the atheist must convince the Christian that the belief in God is but a childish and primitive superstition, doing enormous harm to the cause of true social progress. And so they battle and storm and bang away at each other. Meanwhile, the Taoist Sage sits quietly by the stream, perhaps with a book of poems, a cup of wine, and some painting materials, enjoying the Tao to his heart’s content, without ever worrying whether or not Tao exists. The Sage has no need to affirm the Tao; he is far too busy enjoying it!

Taoism, to me, is a philosophy of childlike joy. Unlike so many other philosophies, it does not shy away from paradox, absurdity, or ambiguity. In this way, it is a freer way of looking at the world than any other philosophy I’ve encountered. Let me share, for example, Smullyan’s passage on Crazy Philosophy and Sensible Philosophy:

I would roughly divide philosophies into two categories, “crazy” and “sensible”. Of the two, I definitely prefer the former. Sensible philosophies are noted for their sobriety, propriety, rationality, analytic skill, and other things. One definite advantage they have is that they are usually quite sensible. Crazy philosophies are characterized by their madness, spontaneity, sense of humor, total freedom from the most basic conventions of thought, amorality, beauty, divinity, naturalness, poesy, absolute honesty, freedom from inhibitions, contrariness, paradoxicalness, lack of discipline and general yum-yummy ness. Their most important advantage over the sensible philosophies is that they come far closer to the truth! Many philosophers of the “sensible” school will surely dispute this, and ask me whether I can “prove” this statement. My answer is, “Yes, quite easily, providing I am allowed to give a crazy proof rather than a sensible one.” But of course they will not allow this!

Crazy philosophies are known for their general yum-yummyness. If you had given me this passage four years ago, and I would have recoiled in disgust. What is this postmodern sarcastic pseudointellectual deepity nonsense. This exemplifies everything wrong with the irrational, unserious state of our civilization. It is the epitome of intellectual decay.

Today, I look at that passage, and I take delight in it. It makes me laugh. It want to print it out on a piece of paper and frame it on my wall.

Between the two reactions I can have to that passage, the latter is a lot more fun.

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Naturally, any attempt to talk coherently about Taoism will come up short, because, you know, the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao. So rather than trying to put together a structured synthesis of what I learned from the book, or any “doctrine” that a true Taoist practitioner might advocate, allow me to share, via free-association, what Taoism means to me:

• It is impossible to ever get to the heart of what you want to say.

• The world was not “willed” into existence. It was not consciously and deliberately planned. Conscious and deliberate planning is what gives us skyscrapers, crosswalks, leather-bound notebooks, and a tedious tax code. The fundamental process of the world is a spontaneous one. Waterfalls, forests, nervous systems, and human conversations are examples of the fruits of spontaneity. The world, as a whole, is more like a forest than like a crosswalk.

  • The conscious planning is still part of the world, and it is the precondition to lots of amazing things in our world. But the precondition to the orderly planning is the chaotic spontaneity.²

  • (This is the part I imagine theists will most strongly disagree with, which is a conversation I’m very interested in.)

• Sometimes what you need is not more philosophy, but a slap in the face:

  A monk came to the Zen-master Ma-Tsu for enlightenment and asked: “What is the ultimate message of the Buddha?” The Master replied “I will show you. But when discussing such solemn matters, you should first make a bow to the Buddha”. The monk meekly complied, and whilst in the bowing position, the Master gave him a terrific kick in the pants. This unexpected kick sent him into a paroxysm of laughter and totally dissolved all his morbid irresolutions; at that moment he obtained “immediate enlightenment.” For years after he said to everyone he met, “Since I received that lack from Ma-Tsu, I haven’t been able to stop laughing.”

• Anyone who justifies their way of life with reasons and arguments is insecure. (It is natural to be insecure.)

• Foucault was right that many people’s claims to “objectivity” are indeed attempts at imposing their perspective on other people (but not always):

  I do not believe that you are consciously or deliberately hiding your subjectivity behind a mask of objectivity. You don’t know that you are doing this. And the only reason I am trying to convince you is my absolute faith that once you recognize what you are doing, you will no longer wish to continue doing it. You see, our main difference is that I have far more faith in the essential goodness of human wants than you do.

• When you believe in the fundamental goodness of human nature, it is no longer an urgent matter to control yourself or others.

• “Someone once compared freedom with Zen by saying that freedom is doing what one likes; Zen is liking what one does.”

• “In my simple opinion, those who are most intolerant of irrationality are not those who are most rational, but those who repress their irrationalities while at the same time “priding themselves” on being so rational.”

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To see the point

Is to miss it completely

1. Ok so, you may have seen Taoism also spelled as Daoism. I never looked into the different spellings until I was about to publish this post and I realized that, according to this thread, the spelling with “d” is more modern/standard. Smullyan’s book is from 1977 (!!!!) though, so it uses the “t” spelling. For a minute I tried switching all of the t’s in this post to d’s but that didn’t feel quite right. Oh well.

Also see this commentary on Smullyan’s book.

2. These ideas I got more explicitly from Brook Ziporyn’s Experiments in Mystical Atheism, though I believe Smullyan’s work also embodies it implicitly.