Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life
B Y   A L A N   W A T T S

Chapter Ten
Philosophy of Nature

CONTRARY TO POPULAR belief, Americans are not materialists, as I have said before. We are not people who love material, and by and large our culture is devoted to the transformation of material into junk as rapidly as possible. God's own junkyard! Therefore, it's a very important lesson for a wealthy nation - and all Americans are colossally wealthy by the standards of the rest of the world - to see what happens to material in the hands of people who love it.

You might say that in Japan, and in China to a certain extent, the underlying philosophy of life is a sort of spiritual materialism. In the East, there is not the divorce between soul and body, between spirit and matter, between God and nature, that there is in the West. Therefore, there is not the same kind of contempt for material things.

We regard matter as something that gets in our way, something with limitations that are to be abolished as quickly as possible. We have bulldozers and every kind of technical device for knocking material out of the way, and we like to do as much to obliterate time and space as possible. We talk about killing time and getting from one place to another as fast as possible.

This is one of the great difficulties facing Japan. What is going to happen to Japan when it becomes the same place as California? In other words, you can take a streetcar from one end of town to another, and it's the same town. So, if you can take a jet plane from one city to another, then they're going to become the same place. To preserve the whole world from ultimate Los Angelization, we in the United States have to learn how to enjoy material and to be true materialists, instead of exploiters of material. This is one of the main reasons for exploring the philosophy of the Far East and how it relates to everyday life - to architecture, to gardens, to painting, and to rituals like the tea ceremony.

Basic to all of this is the philosophy of nature. The Japanese philosophy of nature is probably founded on the Chinese philosophy of nature, so we'll begin there.

To let the cat out of the bag right at the beginning: The basic assumption underlying Far Eastern and East Indian cultures is that the whole cosmos, the whole universe, is one being. It is not a collection of many things that floated together like a lot of flotsam and jetsam from the ends of space and just happened to end up forming this thing we call the universe. Easterners look at the world as one eternal activity, and that's the only real self you have. You are the works, and that thing we call you, the so-called "separate organism," is simply a manifestation of the whole thing. And this is not just a theory, it is a feeling that they have.

The great masters of the Far East and India, whatever sphere they're in, are fundamentally of this feeling that what you are is the thing that always was, is, and will be. And this eternal thing is playing the games called "Mr. Tokano," or "Mr. Lee," or "Mr. Mukapadya." These are special games it's playing, just like there's the fish game, the grass game, the bamboo game, and the pine tree game. These are all ways of saying, "Hello. Look at me. Here I am. It's me!" And everything is doing a dance, only it's doing it according to its own nature and the nature of the dance. The universe is fundamentally all these dances, whether human, fish, bird, cloud, sky, or star. They are all one fundamental dance or dancer. In Chinese, however, one doesn't distinguish the noun from the verb in the same way that we do. A noun can become a verb; a verb can become a noun. Now, that's a civilized culture!

Above all, an enlightened person in Eastern culture is one who knows that his so-called "separate personality," his ego, is an illusion. Illusion doesn't mean a bad thing; it just means a play. From the Latin word ludere, we get the English word illusion, and ludere means to play. The Sanskrit word maya, meaning illusion, also means magic, skill, art. The Sanskrit concept comes through China to Japan with the transmission of Buddhism.

The East Indian vision of the world as a maya, or as it is sometimes called in Sanskrit, lila, is also a play. So, all individual manifestations are games, dances, symphonies, and musical forms of the whole show. And the underlying belief is that everyone is the whole show.

But nature, as the word is used in the East, does not mean quite the same thing as it does in the West. In Chinese, the word we translate as nature is tse-jan, and it is made up of two characters. The first one means "of itself," and the second one means "so." What is so, of itself.

This is a rather difficult idea to translate into English. We might say "automatic," but that suggests something mechanical. This is something that is of itself so - what happens, what comes naturally. It is our sense of the word nature insofar as it means to be natural, to act in accordance with one's nature, not to strive for things, not to force things. When your hair grows, it grows without your telling it to do so, and you don't have to force it to grow. In the same way, your eyes, whether they are blue or brown, color themselves, and you don't tell them how to do it. When your bones grow a certain way, they do it all of themselves.

I remember a Zen master who taught in New York. He was a beautiful man, and his name was Mr. Sasaki. One evening, he was sitting in his golden robes, in a very formal throne-like chair with a fan in his hand. He had one of those fly whisks made of a white horse's tail. He was looking very dignified, with incense burning on the table in front of him. There was a little desk and on it was one of the scriptures that he was explaining. He said, "All nature has no purpose. Purposelessness most fundamental principle of Buddhism; purposelessness. Ahh, when you drop a fart, you don't say, 'At nine o'clock I dropped a fart.' It just happens."

It is fundamental to this idea of nature that the world has no boss. This is very important, especially if you're going to understand Shinto. We translate kami, or shin, as God, but it's not God in that sense. God, in the common Western meaning of the word, means "the controller," "the boss of the world." And the model that we use for nature tends to be the model of the carpenter or potter or king. Just as the carpenter takes wood and makes a table out of it or as the potter takes inert clay and evokes a form in it or as the king tells people what order they shall move in and how they shall behave, it is ingrained in the Western mind to think that the universe is a behavior that is responding to somebody in charge - somebody who understands it all.

When I was a little boy, I used to ask my mother many questions. Sometimes she'd get fed up with me and say, "My dear, there are some things in this life that we are just not meant to know."

And so I said, "Well, what about it? Will we ever know?"

"Yes," she said. "When you die and you go to heaven, God will make it all clear."

And I used to think that maybe, on wet afternoons in heaven, we'd all sit around God's throne and say, "Oh, Heavenly Father, why are the leaves green?" And he would say, "Because of the chlorophyll!" And we would say, "Oh!"

Well, that idea - of the world as an artifact - could prompt a child in our culture to ask his mother, "How was I made?" And the question seems very natural. So when it's explained that God made you, the child naturally goes on and says, "But who made God?"

However, I don't think a Chinese child would ask the question, "How was I made?" And this is because the Chinese mind does not look at the world of nature as something manufactured, but rather grown. The character for coming into being in Chinese is based on the symbol of a growing plant, and growing and making are two different things. When you make something, you assemble parts or you take a piece of wood and you carve it, working gradually from the outside inward, cutting away until you've got the shape you want.

But when you watch something grow, it isn't like that. If you see, for example, a fast-motion movie of a rose growing, you will see that the process goes from the inside to the outside. It is, as it were, something expanding from the center. And far from being an addition of parts, it all moves together and grows out of itself all at once. The same is true when you watch the formation of crystals or a photographic plate being developed. Suddenly, all over the area of the plate, all over the field, the photo appears.

So the world as a self-generating organism does not obey laws in our sense of "the laws of nature," and in Chinese philosophy there is no difference between the Tao (in Japanese, dao), the way or power of nature, and the things in nature. Everything is said to have its own Tao, from which it acts according to its own nature. Of course, here I am using nature to mean the character or qualities of a thing and not something distinct from man.

When I stir up the air with a fan, it isn't simply that the air obeys the fan. There wouldn't even be a fan in my hand unless there were air around it. So unless there is air, there is no fan. The air brings the fan into being as much as the fan brings the air into being. Because the Taoists see the unity implied in the interdepen-dence of things, they don't think of things as obeying all the time, of masters and slaves, of lords and servants.

Lao-tzu, who is supposed to have written the Tao Te Ching, the fundamental book of Taoist philosophy, is said to have lived in China around the time of Confucius. In his book, he wrote, "The great Tao flows everywhere, to the left and to the right. It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them. And when merits are attained, it makes no claim to them." Now it seems probable that this book was actually a collection of the wisdom of the day. And if this is the way nature is run, why not the government as well? By letting everything follow its course, the skillful man or woman - and also the skillful ruler - interferes as little as possible with the course of things.

Of course, for the reasons noted above, you can't help but interfere a little. Every time you look at something, you change it. Your very existence is, in a way, an interference, and if you think of yourself as something separate from the rest of the world, then you will think in terms of interference and noninterference. But if you know that you're not separate from it, that you are just as much in and of nature as the wind or the clouds, then who is it that interferes?

The same principle is seen in the notion that life is most skillfully lived when one sails a boat rather than rowing it. It's more intelligent to sail than to row. With oars I have to use my muscles and my effort to drag myself along the water. But with a sail, I let the wind do the work for me. And it is more skillful still when I learn to tack and let the wind blow me against the direction of the wind.

That balance of participation is the whole philosophy of the Tao. It's called, in Chinese, wu wei; wu is "non," and wei is "striving." Mui is the Japanese version of this concept. In Japanese, mu is the Chinese wu, and so in this context becomes mui, as distinct from ui. Ui means to use effort, that is, to go against the grain, to force things. So together they mean not to go against the grain, that is, to go with the grain. If you travel through Japan, you will see around you, in every direction, examples of mui, of the intelligent handling of nature so as to go with it rather than against it.

For example, the famous art of judo is entirely based on this principle. When you are attacked, you don't simply oppose the force used against you. Instead, you go in the same direction as the attack is headed, and lead it to its own downfall. This is the same strategy seen in the way a willow tree survives the winter. Nearby there is a strong pine tree that has a tough branch that reaches out, flexing its muscles. Then the snow piles up and up, and this unyielding branch holds a huge weight of snow. It cracks. However, the willow tree has a springy, supple branch, and when a little snow comes on it the branch just goes down. The snow falls off, and the branch goes up again.

Lao-tzu said, "Man, at his birth, is supple and tender. But in death, he is rigid and hard. Plants when they are young, are soft and supple. But in death, they are brittle and hard. So, suppleness and tenderness are the characteristics of life, and rigidity and hardness the characteristics of death." He made many references to water and said, "Of all things in the world, nothing is more soft than water, and yet it wears away the hardest rocks. Furthermore, water is humble; it always seeks the lowest level, which men abhor. But eventually, water overcomes everything in its path."

When you watch water take the line of least resistance and you see, for example, water poured out on the ground, you will see it projecting fingers from itself. Some of those fingers stop, but one finger goes on, because it has found the lowest level. Now, you might say, "Oh, but that's not the water. The water didn't do anything. That's just the contours of the land, and because of the contours of the land, the water goes where the land makes it go." But think again. Isn't it also the nature of water that makes it go?

I will never forget that once, when I was out in the countryside, a piece of thistledown flew out of the blue. It came right down to me, and I put out a finger, and I caught it by one of its little tendrils. Then it behaved just like a daddy longlegs; you know, when you catch one by the leg it naturally struggles to get away. Well, this little thing behaved just like that, and I thought, "It is just the wind doing that. It only appears as if the thistledown is doing that." But then I thought again, "It is the wind, yes, but it's also this thistledown that had the intelligence to grow itself so as to use the wind to help it get away." That little structure of thistledown exhibits a high form of intelligence, just as surely as the construction of a house that follows the contours of the land is a manifestation of a high level of human intelligence. But the thistledown is using the wind instead of the slope.

In much the same way, the water uses the conformations of the ground to get away. Water isn't just dead stuff. It's not just being pushed around. In fact, nothing is being pushed around in the Chinese view of nature. What they mean by nature is something that happens of itself; it has no boss. Nobody is giving orders, and so nobody is obeying orders. That leads further to an entirely different conception of cause and effect. Cause and effect is based on giving orders. When you say, "Something made this happen," you are saying it had to happen because of what happened before. But the Chinese don't think like that. Their concept, which does duty for our idea of causality, is called "mutual arising."

As an example, let's consider the relationship between the back and the front of anything. Is the back the cause of the front, or is the front the cause of the back? What a silly question! If things don't have fronts, then they can't have backs. If they don't have backs, they can't have fronts. Front and back always go together; that is to say, they come into being together. And so, in just the same way as the front and the back arise together, Taoist philosophy sees everything in the world arising together.

This is called the philosophy of mutual interpenetration - in Japanese, jiji muge - and it goes way back in history to the Chinese idea of nature. To look at it very simply, let us suppose that you had never seen a cat, and one day you were looking through a very narrow slit in a fence, and a cat walked by. First you would see the cat's head. Then there's a rather nondescript fuzzy interval, and then a tail follows. And you say, "Marvelous!" Then the cat turns around and walks back. You see the head, and then after a little interval, the tail. You might say, "My! That's just incredible! The head caused the tail." The cat then turns around and walks back, and again you see first the head and then the tail. So you say, "This has some regularity, and there must be some order in this phenomenon. Whenever I see the thing that I've labeled head, I then see the thing I've labeled tai. Therefore, where there is an event that I call 'head' and it's invariably followed by another event that I call 'tail,' obviously the head is the cause, and the tail is the effect."

We think that way about everything. But if you suddenly widened the crack in the fence, you would see that the head and the tail are all one cat. Like everything else that comes into being naturally, a cat is born with a head and a tail. In exactly the same way, the events that we seem to call "separate" are really all one event. But we chop it into pieces to describe it, just as we say, "The head of the cat and the tail of the cat," although it's all one head-tail cat. We've chopped it to pieces in order to describe it, but then we forget that we did that. We try to explain how the pieces fit together. So we have invented a myth called "causality" in order to explain how they do fit together.

We chop the world into bits as a matter of intellectual convenience. However, our world is very wiggly through and through, and you will notice how people, although they hold up models of symmetry as seen in most houses, love the wigglyness in their garden. Nature is fundamentally wiggly.

I remember as a child wondering why Chinese houses all had curved roofs, and why all the people in the landscapes looked more wiggly than ours. Finally I figured out that this is because they see that the world is wiggly! We say, "Now, what can you do with a wiggly world? You've got to straighten it out!" Always, our initial solution is to try and straighten things out.

Of course people are very wiggly indeed. It is only because we all appear pretty much the same that we look regular. We have two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two ears, and so on. We look regular, so we make sense. But if somebody had never seen a person before, he might ask, "What is this extraordinarily wiggly phenomenon? It seems to wiggle all over the place!"

One of the wiggliest things in the world is a fish. Somebody once found out they could use a net and catch a fish. Then they thought of an even better idea than that: They could catch the world with a net and use it to make sense of a wiggly world. But what happens if you hang up a net in front of the world and look through it? You can count the wiggles by saying, "This wiggle goes so many holes up, so many holes down, and so many holes across. It goes so many to the left and so many to the right." But what do you end up with? What you have as a result of this exercise is a calculus. Your net breaks up the world into countable bits.

In the same way, a bit is a bite of something, just as when you go to eat chicken, you can't swallow the whole chicken at once. To eat it you have to cut it into bites. But you don't get a cut-up fryer out of the egg. So in the same way the real universe has no bits. It's all one thing; it's not a lot of things. In order to digest it with your mind, which thinks of one thing at a time, you have to construct a calculus. So you chop the universe into bits, and you think about it, and talk about it one bit at a time.

You can see this whole page at once, but if you want to talk about it, you have to talk about it word by word, idea by idea, and bit by bit.

So to describe things, you go into all the details. But how does one select which details? Well now, if you don't realize that's what you've done, that you've "bitted" the world in order to think about it when it isn't really bitted at all, then you have troubles. Not only do you have to explain how the bits go together, but in order to explain how they connect with each other you have to invent all sorts of ghosts. Some of these ghosts are called "cause and effect," influences used to explain things. Indeed you may ask, "How do I influence you?" But what does this really mean? These influences - the ghosts and spooks we regard as things - only come into being if we forget that we made the initial step of breaking the unity into pieces in order to discuss it. That is, they are a part of the illusion.

Stepping back, we have these basic principles to consider. The world as nature, what happens of itself, is looked upon as a living organism. It doesn't have a boss because things are not behaving in response to something that pushes them around. They are just behaving, and it's all one big behavior. However, if you want to look at it from certain points of view, you can see it as if something else were making something happen, just as we looked at the cat through the slit in the fence. But you only see the parts because you divide the thing up.

This might lead you to ask, "In Chinese philosophy, is nature chaotic? Is there really no law?" There is no Chinese word that means the law of nature. The only word in Chinese that means law - tse - is a character that represents a cauldron with a knife beside it. It goes back to very ancient times, when a certain emperor made laws for the people. He had the laws etched on the sacrificial cauldrons so that when the people brought sacrifices they would read what was written on the cauldrons. But the sages, who were of a Taoist persuasion during the time that this emperor lived, said, "You shouldn't have done that, Sir, because the moment the people know what the law is, they become a little devious. And they'll say, 'Well now, did you really mean that precisely or did you mean this?' The next thing you know, they will find a way to wrangle around it." So they said that the nature of nature, Tao, is wu-tse, which means lawless.

But although we say that nature is lawless, this is not to say it is chaotic. The Chinese word for the order of nature is li. In Japanese, it is ri. Li is a curious word that originally meant "the markings in jade, the grain in wood, or the fiber in muscle." Now, when you look at jade and you see these wonderful, mottled markings, you know that somehow these markings are not chaotic, although you can't explain why. And when you look at the patterns of clouds or the bubbles of foam on the water, it's astounding, because they never make an aesthetic mistake.

Look at the stars. They are not arranged; instead they seem to be scattered through the heavens like sea spray. Yet you could never criticize stars for displaying poor taste, any more than you could criticize mountain ranges for having awkward proportions. These designs are spontaneous, and yet they demonstrate the wiggly patterns of nature that are quite different from anything you would call a mess. We can't quite put our finger on what the difference is between the two, but we certainly can see the difference between a tide pool and an ashtray full of garbage. We may not be able to define the difference, but we know they are different.

If you could define aesthetic beauty, however, it would probably cease to be interesting. That is, if we had a way of capturing it and a method that would automatically produce great artists - and anybody could go to school and become a great artist - art would soon become the most boring kind of expression. But precisely because you don't know how it's done, that gives spontaneous art a level of excitement.

And so it is with the philosophy of nature. There is no formula, no tse or rule according to which all this happens. And yet it's not a mess. So, this idea of li, or organic pattern, is the word that they use for the order of nature. Instead of our idea of law, where the things are obeying something, they are not obeying God in the sense of a governor. They are not following principles, like a streetcar that follows along the track.

Do you know that limerick about the streetcar?

So that idea of the iron rails, along which the course of life goes, is absent in the East. And that accounts for a certain humanism that is very present in these cultures. The people in the Far East, and particularly in China and Japan, never feel guilty. They may feel ashamed because they have transgressed social requirements, but they do not have the sense of guilt that we generally equate with sinfulness. They don't feel, as with the idea of original sin, that you are guilty because you owe your existence to the Lord God - or perhaps you were a mistake anyway! They don't feel that. They have social shame, but not metaphysical guilt, and that leads to a great relaxation. You can feel it, if you're sensitive, just walking around the streets. You realize that these people have not been tarred with that terrible monotheistic brush that gives one the sense of guilt.

Instead they work on the supposition that human nature, like all nature, although it consists of the passions as much as the virtues, is essentially good. In Chinese the word un means human-heartedness, or humanness, but not in the sense of being humane out of a kind of necessity, but of being human. So when I say, "Oh, he's a great human being," I mean he's the kind of person who's not a stuffed shirt, who is able to come off it, who can talk with me as a person, and who recognizes that he is a rascal, too. And so when a man, for example, affectionately calls a friend "you old bastard," this is a term of endearment, because he knows that "the old bastard" shares with him what I call the "element of irreducible rascality" that we all have.

So then, if a person has this attitude, he is never going to be an overbearing goody-goody. Confucius said, "Goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue." Because the philosophy of the goody-goody is, "If I am right, then you are wrong, and we will get into a fight. What I am is a crusader against the wrong, and I'm going to obliterate you, or I'm going to demand your unconditional surrender." But if I say, "No, I'm not right, and you're not wrong, but I happen to want to win. You know, you've got the most beautiful temples and I'm going to fight you for them." But if I had done that, I would be very careful not to destroy the temples.

However in modern warfare we don't care. The only people who are safe are in the air force, because they are way up there. The women and children will be gone, because they can be frizzled with a Hiroshima bomb. But we in the plane will be safe. Now this is inhuman because we are fighting for idealogy instead of for practical things like food, and for possessions, and for greed.

So this is why the Chinese recognize both sides of human nature, and a Confucian would say he trusts human passions more than he trusts human virtues: righteousness, goodness, principles, and all that highfalutin abstraction. Let's get down to earth; let's come off it. And this, then, is why there is a kind of man in whom trust is put, because he recognizes the kind of nature that human nature is. If you are like the Christians who don't trust human nature - who say, "It's fallen, it's evil, it's perverse" - that puts you in a very funny position. If you say, "Human nature is not to be trusted," then you can't even trust the fact that you don't trust it! And do you see where you'll end up?

Now, it's true that human nature is not always trustworthy, but you must proceed on the gamble that it's trustworthy most of the time, or at least 51 percent of the time. Because if you don't, what's your alternative? You have to have a police state, and everybody has to be watched and controlled. But then who's going to watch the police? So, you end up the way they did in China just before 250 b.c. when there was the Chi'in Dynasty that lasted fifteen years. The emperor decided that everything would be completely controlled in order to make his dynasty last for a thousand years. In the process, he made a mess. So the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 206 b.c. to a.d. 220, came into being, and the first thing they did was abolish all laws, except those about elementary violence and robbery. But all of the complexity of law was removed, and historically the Han Dynasty marked the height of Chinese civilization. It was a period of real peace and great sophistication. It was China's Golden Age, although I may be oversimplifying it a bit, as all historians do.

This marvelous reign was based on the whole idea of the humanism of the Far East, recognizing that although human beings are scalawags, they are no more so than cats and dogs and birds. So you must trust human nature, because if you can't, you're apt to starve.

Excerpted from Eastern Wisdom Modern Life © 2006, by Alan Watts. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA, USA 94949. 1-800-441-2100, www.newworldlibrary.com.