Lessons for Life from Taoism

When developing his life-philosophy, John Cowper Powys drew on the wisdom and knowledge of many of the great philosophers including the Taoist ideas of Laotze, and Kwang-Tze.  He highlights what they can teach us about how to lead a happier and more contented life.

" .... It is from the doctrines of the Tao, as taught by Laotze, that one of the earliest and subtlest expositions of the art of philosophical solitude reaches us...The essence of the doctrine of the Tao seems to be that it is through withdrawing ourselves rather than asserting ourselves, through retreating rather than pursuing, through inaction rather than through action, through becoming quiet rather than through making a stir, that we attain wisdom and spiritual power.  Laotze teaches that we should cultivate the art of reducing our self-assertion to the supreme limit. He insists that we should un-learn our superficial cleverness and not only cease competing with others, but flow with them and into them, and through them, and lose our identity in their presence, deliberately becoming undistinguished, unimportant, insignificant — but thus becoming the most magical of magicians! .... from Laotze we learn to flow imperceptibly through life like running water, while like water we seek our own level in spite of every obstacle; ‘When water is still it is a perfect Level and the greatest artificer takes his rule from it. Such is the clearness of still water, and how much greater is that of the human Spirit’

   ... There is a delicate mixture of the sardonic and the artless in the thoughts of Kwang-Tze, and with these there is a far-away, almost elfin metaphysic, that reduces all the heavy pomposity of solid practical life, both where events and where persons are concerned, into something airy, fantastic, insubstantial. But there is the very truth of the spiritual chaoticism of things in Kwang-Tze’s writings. To his mind it is impossible to simplify and clarify the issues too much, or to become too childish in our peaceful fetish-worship or in our solitary lying back upon the Heaven and the Earth…from Kwang-Tze we learn to preserve an ironic detachment from all conceit of place, from all pride of system, from all pretence of moral superiority, while we learn from useless trees, from simple persons, from chance-omens of the way, the Protean art of retaining our identity by losing it…

   There is a sublime and, at the same time, a quaintly humorous quietism about the rambling wisdom of Kwang which lends itself more beautifully than the mood of any other sage to a cult of the Four Elements... Over and over again does Kwang teach us how superior is stupid contemplation to any lively or clever reasoning. The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things. Vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and non-action; this is the Level of heaven and earth, and the perfection of the Tao and its characteristics. . . . Vacancy, stillness, placidity, tastelessness, quietude, silence, and doing nothing are the root of all things." 

(John Cowper Powys, The Philosophy of Solitude)