In pursuit of knowledge,
everyday something is added
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.True mastery can be gained
Chapter 48, Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell Translation
by letting things go their own way.
It can’t be gained by interfering.
Doing nothing
It is impossible to overstate the effect this particular chapter of the Daodejing had on me when I first read it. Part of why I was so attracted to Daoism, and why I remain attracted to it, is the way it resonated with my own observations and perceptions of the world. Reading the Daodejing for the first time amplified many of my intuitions while simultaneously offering a new way to experience life. This passage, and specifically the lines, “when nothing is done, nothing is left undone,” became the compass I used to navigate my life. I even had it read at my wedding, it was that important to me.
What wasn’t clear to me then was the extent to which the ideas in this chapter were being shaped by preexisting biases. It seemed, at the time, that this new lens was altering how I saw everything but was unaffected by all of my previous beliefs and assumptions about the world. But it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that this is not true, and never could be. Those prior beliefs I had about the world, some of them obvious and some of them hidden, were influencing how I received these new Daoist ideas in ways that actually undermined them.
The word translated above as non-action, wuwei (無為), can also be translated as inaction, doing nothing, non-doing, etc. This is an important concept in Daoism, a guiding principle for how to act in the world. It is also a radically different way of engaging with the world than I was used to. But how I incorporated this approach in my life strengthened a belief I had but was unaware of at the time, one I now think is gravely mistaken. That belief went something like this:
Humans should not interfere with nature. Nature will, when left alone, do what is best for all beings. Wuwei, or doing nothing, was the best course of action for resolving not just human conflict, but for reversing the degradation of the natural, nonhuman world caused by humans. Humans have done too much, so a good dose of doing nothing would allow nature to recover.
Behind this belief is something insidious, something at odds with Daoism and wuwei, something that has corrupted those approaches and ways of being in the world.
Doing something
My belief that the best course of action was doing nothing, to not interfere with nature and let it do its own thing, was well-intentioned. I care deeply about the natural world and its inhabitants. The adoption of this Daoist approach was intended to be an antidote to what I perceived to be the poison of over-extraction, over-harvesting, and over-production. Stop doing so much, too much, and leave nature alone to take care of itself.
But it wasn’t always a comfortable belief for me. Often I felt it was at odds with another, seemingly incompatible belief: that humans have a responsibility to take care of the natural world and its inhabitants. Doing nothing was certainly easier and required much less—nothing, in fact. But aside from the fact that caring for nature required effort, doing things (and it was obvious that doing things was precisely how we’d managed to destroy nature) raised another issue: what are we to do and how do we do it?
If I wanted to care for nature, do something, what should the guiding principles to direct my action be? I couldn’t possibly understand the immense complexity of the natural world so how could I know whether any particular action would result in the destruction of that complexity? How do I know whether something that I think might be beneficial won’t turn out to be disastrous? Another benefit of doing nothing is the avoidance of unintended harm—just get out of the way and let nature do it’s thing and everything will turn out for the best. Easy.
Architects of abundance
I’ve written before about the nature–culture divide, the associations of particular values with each side of that divide, and how those associations feed anthropocentrism. In part, anthropocentrism requires first a division between humans (culture) and everything else (nature) and then a privileging of the human at the expense of the nonhuman. This twofold move, dividing humans from nature and then turning all nonhuman entities into objects for exploitation, is at the root of the ecological crisis and has ushered in the Anthropocene. It is also what is behind my personal struggle to reconcile the belief that I doing nothing is best and the belief that I should actively care for nature.
I do think that the tension between passively letting nature do its own thing and actively participating as an agent in nature has always been there, just below the surface. But it wasn’t until very recently that it burst into my awareness. It’s difficult to trace those moments of clarity back to a single source, but I distinctly remember that reading this article in The Atlantic was at least one of the catalysts. Especially this paragraph near the beginning:
More than a century ago, in the pages of this magazine, Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden “favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.” But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley’s sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness—an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin—is an illusion.
Return the National Parks to the Tribes, by David Treuer, emphasis mine
I had flashbacks to high school science classes after reading that. I remember learning about forest succession and climax communities, those mature and self-sustaining ecosystems that have reached an equilibrium and will stay there forever. The idea was planted in me that this was the most natural, that these types of ecosystems—the massive mature forests of the Eastern US, where I live—is what nature will achieve without human interference. But suddenly I realized that wasn’t true. The images I had of primitive, abundant, productive forests untouched by humans were illusions.
In a podcast interview about indigenous food systems, Lyla June Johnston, indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer, further dispels this myth of an untouched and pristine wilderness, and adds another dimension to it:
…Native people were not primitive, running around eating hand-to-mouth trying to find a berry to eat or a deer to hunt, but these were actually architects of abundance. These were people who designed entire landscapes, like gardens of Eden, augmenting the natural food-bearing capacity of the land. Namely, not just for themselves, but to benefit other species as well.
Lyla June Johnston, Lifeworlds podcast, emphasis mine
Two things become apparent to me when I consider these together: first, that the ideal of a wilderness untouched by humans is a lie rooted in brutal colonialism and anthropocentrism; second, that human action in nature, as nature, can benefit all things. Humans participating in the processes of nature is not inherently bad and can actually result in abundance for all.
While it would of course be easier for me to do nothing, the idea that I can do nothing and somehow nature will just become this abundant, thriving landscape isn’t as true as I believed. Further, it reinforces the split between nature and culture and pushes humans and nature further apart. It rests on an assumption that the natural is a separate domain from the human, and so to interfere, to do something, would be to cross a boundary that shouldn’t be crossed and so disrupt the natural order and balance of things.
Making the earth say beans
The tension I feel between doing nothing and doing something has become most apparent in recent years while in our backyard, of all places. When we first moved in it was a typical suburban monoculture wasteland. Initially I thought we shouldn’t try to do too much, that eventually it would become a healthy, flourishing ecosystem if we just waited long enough and didn’t get in the way. It took a lot convincing to overcome my inertia but, reluctantly, I did start doing something.
We started first by making new beds and planting native wildflowers for pollinators, removed invasive plants (this is an ongoing process), dug a small pond, and spread mulch and compost to help improve the nutrient-depleted soil. Still, I couldn’t shake the thought that maybe we were doing too much, that we should to let nature take over that we would mess it up. But, somewhat miraculously, the earth seemed to subtly respond to our labors: new insects and animals we hadn’t seen before were making homes in our yard and the plants seemed to be healthy and happy. It wasn’t all successes of course, but we were starting to catch a glimpse of what was possible.
Now we are putting in raised beds for vegetables and it even looks like we will have berries this summer. I feel a little like Thoreau in his bean patch, but instead of beans we’re making the earth say native plants.
Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass,—this was my daily work.
The Bean-Field, Walden
My assumptions about what it means to do nothing were, without realizing it, influenced by an anthropocentric worldview that separated humans from nature. Doing nothing wasn’t augmenting the natural capacities or engineering abundance. It was, by keeping the human and the natural in separate categories, ensuring that exploitation and destruction continued unabated. Doing nothing is certainly easier than making the earth say beans, or berries, or native wildflowers. But doing nothing, at least in the Anthropocene, strengthens the illusion that humans and human activity are superfluous to nature. When in truth, humans and human activity are nature.
It’s not a given that these things just run on their own, they take management, they take care.
Lyla June Johnston
A new translation
I wish that I would have known sooner that there are other possible translations of wuwei aside from the ones I’ve mentioned. Some translators use ideas like noncoercive action or effortless action to translate wuwei. The act of translation itself is always fraught as there are always multiple ways to interpret any given word, phrase, or idea. It is difficult to convey these all simultaneously but it is important to remember that they are all present simultaneously.
Ascription of beliefs, meanings, concepts, emotions, logical principles, and so on are all involved in the process of interpretation. Every particular interpretation depends on innumerable other interpretations, every particular one of which can be wrong, but many have to be right. Every interpretation is relative to a context or background that cannot be described completely.
Beyond the Troubled Water of Shifei by Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel
Without knowing it I was incorrectly translating one translation into a context that had biases I was unaware of, which only further translated the concept wrongly in ways that, as I’ve described, turned an idea I hoped would bring restoration and healing to nature into one that did the opposite.
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains.
Conclusion, Walden
These other translations of wuwei—noncoercive action and effortless action among others—offer not just a corrective to the lopsided translations I encountered early on, but a way to avoid falling into the anthropocentric trap of interpreting human activity as separate from nature’s activity. Noncoercive action or effortless action suggests an active process, doing things but in a particular way or mode.
It is naive to think that had I known about these other translations I would have been able to avoid forming that belief about not doing anything. I think the point of all of this is that the seeds of the anthropocentric nature/culture divide had already sprouted and spread their roots by the time I came across wuwei as an idea. It is possible, and very necessary, to be an active participant in and of nature in noncoercive ways, to do things that benefit not just humans but all beings, to work with the land to benefit the land and all its inhabitants.
One does things noncoercively
Chapter 48, Daodejing, Ames and Hall translation
And yet nothing goes undone