I’m camping in a rainforest in Far North Queensland, far from the familiar open woodlands, Mallee scrub, and temperate forests of my home in the south. Acclimatising to the different rhythms of the days…
…A lazy afternoon. I’m regarding the meandering flight of a Ulysses butterfly, its stunning azure wings flickering brightly through the shadows of the palms, fig trees and lianas. Drowsily following the dazzling blue apparition as it briefly lands on a leaf, then takes flight again, glittering in the sun, my thoughts inevitably turn to Zhuangzi and his famous dream:
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly fluttering around joyfully, just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou had been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Now surely Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities, as two quite different beings! And just this is what is meant when we speak of transformation of any one being into another – of the transformation of all things. (Zhuangzi chapter 17, translated Ziporyn 2020).
https://blogsarchive.sites.haverford.edu/decentered/2016/06/zhuangzis-butterfly-dream/
A wealth of sophisticated cosmological understandings and assumptions about the ‘nature’ of nature and the ‘myriad things’ underpins Chinese philosophical thought. The story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly reflects and draws together a number of these ideas, and most powerfully reminds us of our interconnectedness, beneath and beyond our ‘distinctions’.
Although the foundational understanding of human interconnectedness informs and shapes Chinese thought, including Confucian and other philosophical schools, it is in Daoism that the idea of human connectedness with ‘all under heaven’ – and thus the understanding that human flourishing is tied to the flourishing of all things – takes its most intentional and developed form.
‘Nature of nature’. Transformations: the flow and flux.
Here in Far North Queensland we are constantly cautioned about the diverse dangers from critters large and small – crocodiles, snakes, mosquitoes, electric ants. Prominent signs warn us to be alert, to stay clear of river banks. Stations are set up at entrances to beaches with supplies of vinegar and instructions in case of stinger bite. In our camp we are required to share our space with goannas, toads and geckos, green ants and brush turkeys, and with the raucous screeching of stone curlews. We enjoy the unassuming presence of sunbirds, bandicoots, butterflies. I’m made more aware than I’m accustomed to of the fact that we share our Earth with myriad others, animate and ‘inanimate’.
John Wolseley 2018 The life of inland waters – Durabudboi river.
And, following Zhuangzi, I’m conscious that it is an arbitrary fact of existence that we – temporarily? – take the human form. As philosophers Roger Ames and David Hall (2011) observe, Zhuangzi explicitly challenges human exceptionalism, describing the possibility of assuming a human form as an ‘arbitrary and not especially welcome perturbation within the larger process of transformation’.
John Wolseley 2019 Windblown insects on the salt – Lake Tyrrell (for JC)
Ceaseless transformations, which even contemplate humans transforming from, and into, other forms, have been pervasive throughout Chinese culture from ancient times. As philosopher Tu Wei-ming (1989) observes,
‘from the cosmic vantage point, nothing is totally fixed’.
For Daoist painter, Shi Tao even
‘mountains flow like rivers’.
The Zhuangzi is replete with transformations – the beginning chapter tells of the transformation of Kun, an enormous fish transforming into Peng, an equally enormous bird. The introductory chapter also immediately provides an insight into different perspectives, possibilities and values – on the nature of experience, of being, of the relative importance or unimportance of ideas, usefulness and uselessness: things we might hold to be necessary or ‘true’.
In Zhuangzi’s stories we – humans – are assigned our proper place in the world. Zhuangzi famously declared:
‘the world and I being born together, I am continuous with all things’.
The ‘nature’ of nature is interconnected, in flow and flux. We are just one (fleeting) manifestation of the myriad things, which are constantly, ceaselessly in flux, in transformation. The Zhuangzi brings us back again and again to the reminder of the interconnected, enmeshed nature of all ‘things under heaven’.
“It is in this way that all things are one. People take what they consider beautiful to be sacred and wonderful, and take what they dislike to be odious and rotten. But the odious and rotten transform into the sacred and wonderful, and the sacred and wonderful transform into the odious and rotten. Hence it is said, ‘Just open yourself into the single energy that is the world.’ It is for the sake of this that the sage values oneness.” (Zhuangzi chapt. 22, translated Ziporyn)
Embodying the Dao, nurturing the environment.
The first point of interconnectivity and continuity is with the ‘myriad things’ – ‘all that exists’. By extension, this encompasses the natural world, in which all is simultaneously creating and being created. Tu Wei-ming describes the Chinese conception of nature as grounded in the acceptance of the ‘continuity of being’, with all modalities of being ‘organically connected’.
All modalities of being (the myriad things) arise from Ch’i, (‘Qi’), the ‘Breath-Energy’ that in Chinese traditional thinking is
‘the basic substance out of which the entire universe is composed’ (Minford 2019).
The view of humanity as forming one body with the universe is ‘widely accepted by the Chinese in popular as well as elite culture as a general Chinese world view’, with human life
‘part of a continuous flow of the blood and breath that constitutes the cosmic process. Human beings are thus organically connected with rocks, trees, and animals’ (Tu 1989: 74).
The idea that the human being is irreducibly ‘person-in-environment’ alters the notion of personal responsibility, according to Roger Ames (1989: 142),
‘since we cultivate the environment not as an “other” but as an immediate dimension of ourselves’.
In the Laozi the sage is represented as the guardian of life – a ‘gardener in the garden of the Dao’. Laozi himself has been canonised as the ‘Guardian Spirit of Ecology’ by the Chinese Taoist Association. This responsibility was given a concrete form as early as during the first centuries of the common era, when Daoism developed institutions and regulations with the purpose of protecting the environment and to ensure that its natural balance would not be destroyed.
Daoism, (Deep) Ecology (and the Anthropocene)
For the past half century or more there has been a growing recognition among environmental philosophers, theorists, and activists that we need to move beyond ‘old modes of thought’, such as anthropocentricism and ‘man-nature dualism’, to inhabit a new worldview that is capable of effectively responding to the crisis of the Anthropocene.
Identifying a corrupted relationship to nature that is grounded and enmeshed in the belief in human dominion over nature – a relationship established within the early history of western thought – a growing number of authors have explored the significance of the Daoist worldview in relation to nature, to promote the potential of Chinese philosophy to contribute to the ‘reevaluation of values’ necessary for the development of solutions to the planetary crisis.
The Dao of Civilisation is a philosophical exploration of the ways that Daoism may inform the creation of
‘a new form of civilisation patterned at every level to serve and sustain the biosphere.’
Mathews is interested in the question of how philosophical Daoism is expressed/enacted in a praxis that is directed to serving and sustaining the biosphere, and asks whether we should be considering the need for a ‘reinvention of praxis’ that will allow us to ‘align with a living cosmos’. She draws on the Daoist idea of wuwei – literally ‘do not do’ – as a guiding philosophical principle.
Philosopher Martin Schönfeld conceives of wuwei as harnessing the flow of being
‘like a sailor capturing wind in the sails…[T]he style of non-action is one of pliancy and … its form is gentleness’.
As Mathews explains, wuwei is not to be interpreted as
‘passivity or quietude but action that is taken with rather than against the grain of things’ (Matthews 2023: 51).
Daoism, notes Mathews, is adaptive
‘throughout its long history it has continually accommodated new historical circumstances…Today then it behoves us to read wuwei against the background of environmental emergency. To do so…immediately suggests wuwei as a modality of synergy, a path of conativity, whereby practitioners seek their own ends by accommodating the ends of others’.
As a
‘strategy, this means deferring to elemental and organic tendencies, forces and energies – including conativities – already at play in one’s own environment, at least to the extent that doing so does not irremediably diminish one’s own existence.’
It involves
‘adjusting one’s desires so that in fulfilling them one helps to create the conditions for the flourishing of others’.
Such a (wuwei) relationship may involve not only the attainment of one’s own ends by accommodating the ends of others but may in fact lead to the transformation and enlargement of the respective ends, intentions -‘conativities’ – of others. A relationship Mathews terms ‘biosynergy’ (Matthews 2023: 83).
‘Synergy achieves, in other words, in good Daoist style, a kind of “morality without morality”: in sustaining others we assure our own best existence’.
Mathews illustrates this strategy in practice, with examples of international initiatives reflecting adherence to a similar philosophy, for instance, ‘nature-led’ agricultural and conservation projects, regenerative practice, ‘co-evolutionary design’, and indigenous architectural practice (p. 83). She also reminds us that, vital to ‘our own best existence’ is the creation of ways to foster and honour a poetic engagement with the cosmos. By
‘engaging communicatively both amongst ourselves and with the cosmos itself, we co-create the field of meaning’ (p. 85).
Mathews finishes with her own (onto)poetic engagement with the cosmos, when, in her reveries, she imagines the ancient Dragon of Chinese lore appearing in the passing landscape. Carrying evocations of the Australian rainbow serpent, the dragon is symbol, or manifestation, of cosmic energy. For Mathews the dragon embodies the potential for a wuwei, synergistic, relationship between humans and their/our earth others. Mathews is led to reflect:
‘What does this great living, dreaming coil of slip-streaming energy that slithers along its path of least resistance and is nothing less, ultimately, than the core of reality itself, make of our hectic presence, our distracted activities, in its world? What are the opportunities that we represent for it?’
It has never been ‘our world’ at all, but belongs to itself. As part of that world, we belong to it. What is our role in the dragons world? (Mathews 2023: 88).
And, living in that world, how may we live well, and live true to ourselves? The following blog considers a number of ideas from Chinese philosophy that might provide some answers to such questions.