Taoism: The Watercourse Way

The jar lid will not turn. You brace the jar against your hip, wrap a cloth around the lid, grip until your knuckles whiten, and twist with everything you have. Nothing. So you twist harder, because that is the first thing a person does when the world pushes back. Push, and when pushing fails, push more. Some stubborn part of us is certain that enough force will eventually win.

Most of the time it will not, and the lid is a small, honest teacher. Run it under hot water for a few seconds and the metal expands and gives without a struggle. Tap the rim. Wait a moment. The thing you could not force opens easily once you stop forcing it.

There is a whole tradition built on that small reversal, and it is the oldest reply in this book to the idea that calm is something you get by trying harder. Taoism, sometimes spelled Daoism, starts from one observation about how the world actually works and then asks you to live as though it were true. The observation is that the things that last and prevail are usually not the hard ones. Water wears down stone. The supple branch survives the storm that snaps the stiff one. And the way through a life with less friction is not to push against its current but to learn the current and move with it.

Calm, in this tradition, is what is left when you stop forcing.

Two old books hold most of this. The first is the Tao Te Ching, traditionally credited to a sage called Laozi, "the old master," who is said to have ridden his ox west at the end of his life and, at a border keeper's request, written the whole book in one sitting before vanishing beyond the pass. Scholars now treat the man as largely legendary and the book as a composite, a collection of sayings that reached roughly its present form in the fourth or third century BCE. The oldest surviving fragments, a partial version on bamboo slips, were dug out of a tomb buried around 300 BCE. The second book is the Zhuangzi, named for Zhuang Zhou, a writer of the late fourth century BCE whose voice is wilder, funnier, and full of stories. Between them they are the source, and what this chapter covers is philosophical Daoism, daojia. A separate, later tradition grew up alongside and after it, religious Daoism, daojiao, with its own temples, priesthood, ritual, and practices of inner alchemy aimed at longevity or immortality. It shares the name and draws on the same water and wu wei, but it is its own long history, and this chapter does not attempt it.

The phrase that titles this chapter is not theirs. "The watercourse way" comes from Alan Watts, a twentieth-century writer who did a great deal to carry these ideas west. It is a fine phrase, and Watts is worth reading, but he is an interpreter, not the source, and it is worth keeping the two straight. The water, though, is genuinely the texts' own, and it is everywhere in them.

Tao means something close to "the way": the way things go, the grain of reality, the course a river takes when nobody digs the channel. And the single image the Tao Te Ching returns to, more than any other, for what it looks like to live along that grain, is water. "The highest excellence is like water," it says. Water benefits everything and competes with nothing. It seeks the low places people disdain, the valley bottoms and the gutters, "the low place which all men dislike," and precisely because it is willing to go low and refuses to contend, it is close to the Tao itself.[Tao Te Ching 8, trans. Legge] Sit with how strange that is as a model for a good life. Not the mountain. Not the fortress. The puddle.

When water meets a rock, it does not lower its shoulder and try to shove the rock aside. It does not take the obstacle personally. It parts, finds the lower way around either side, rejoins below, and continues, and the rock, for all its hardness, does not even slow the river down. Later the book extends the picture to people. Rivers and seas become "kings" of the hundred valley streams, it says, because they are good at being lower than the streams. Everything flows down to them because they put themselves beneath. None of this is weakness. Going low and declining to fight is a way of arriving that the rock, standing rigid in the current, will never reach.

The claim sounds backwards, and it turns out to be true: the soft overcomes the hard, and the weak outlasts the strong. "There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water," the Tao Te Ching says, "and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it." Everyone knows this, it adds, and almost no one can bring themselves to live by it.

The figure holds the two halves of the idea. On one side is the storm. The rigid branch, all strength and no give, snaps. The supple reed bends flat to the ground and stands back up once the wind passes. The book makes exactly this point about the living and the dead: a person alive is soft and supple, a person dead is stiff and hard, and the same goes for plants, green and bending as they grow, dry and brittle at the end. From that it draws the line that gives the whole tradition its spine. "Firmness and strength are the concomitants of death; softness and weakness, the concomitants of life."[Tao Te Ching 76, trans. Legge] The strong tree, it notes dryly, is the one the axe comes for first.

On the other side is the drop and the stone. No single drop does anything to a rock. But water does not work in single drops, and it never needed to win the first exchange, or the thousandth. It only keeps yielding and keeps coming, and given time it carves a channel through the hardest stone that no hammer could match. That is what softness means here. Not collapse, not having no effect, but a slower and surer kind of strength, the kind that does not break because it never made itself rigid in the first place.

A quick word on a line you may be carrying. "Be water, my friend." That is Bruce Lee, from a television interview in 1971, and "go with the flow" is a modern idiom from around the same time. Both pulled something real out of this tradition, but neither is a quotation from Laozi.[Bruce Lee, 1971] The water is ancient. The slogans are ours.

If water is the image, wu wei is the name of the practice, and it is the most misread idea in this chapter. The two characters translate literally as something like "non-doing," which has led plenty of readers to picture Taoism as a philosophy of lying around. It is not. The translation most scholars now prefer is "effortless action," or simply "non-forcing."[Slingerland] Wu wei is not the absence of action. It is the absence of strain.

That distinction is the one to get right, so it is worth pinning down. Effort is the energy a task genuinely requires. Strain is the extra friction you add on top by fighting the task, or fighting yourself, or fighting the plain fact that the task is what it is. One is built into the work. The other is optional, and it is most of what wears us out.

Zhuangzi's story of Cook Ding makes this concrete, and it has stayed famous for two thousand years for good reason. A cook named Ding is butchering an ox for his lord, and the lord watches in something near awe, because the man is not hacking at the carcass. He moves through it almost like a dance, the blade slipping along with a sound like music, and the ox seems to fall open of its own accord. The lord asks how he does it. When he began, Ding says, all he could see was the whole ox, a solid wall of resistance. Now he does not look at it with his eyes at all. He knows its structure, the natural seams and hollows and gaps between the joints, and he simply guides the blade through the spaces that are already there. He never cuts through bone, because he never needs to. A good cook changes his knife once a year, he says, because he cuts. A clumsy one changes it monthly, because he hacks. Ding's own knife has carved several thousand oxen across nineteen years, and the edge "is as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone."[Zhuangzi 3, trans. Legge]

That is wu wei exactly. The cook works hard. He is skilled, attentive, completely engaged, and the work genuinely gets done. What he leaves out is the forcing. He does not drive the blade against the grain, he finds the openings the grain already offers. The edge stays keen because nothing is being battered. And the same thing is available to you in almost anything. There is the effort a hard conversation or a stuck project or a long day actually asks for, and then there is the strain you stack on top by gripping, by resisting, by insisting it be easier or other than it is. The first is unavoidable. The second is the part you can set down.

One honest caution, so this does not turn into an excuse. Cook Ding did not begin effortless. He spent years seeing nothing but the solid ox before the openings opened to him. Wu wei is what skill feels like on the far side of long practice, not a shortcut around it. So when this tradition tells you to stop forcing, keep showing up anyway. The ease it promises sits further down the road you are already walking.

Zhuangzi has one more story, and it is the most literal watercourse in the whole tradition. Confucius stands watching an enormous waterfall, the kind where the spray hangs in the air for what the text calls forty li and no creature could survive the churn below. Then he spots a man in the water at the bottom and sends his followers running along the bank, sure they are about to watch someone drown, only to find the man stroll out of the torrent downstream, singing, and walk along the bank with his hair streaming. How, Confucius asks, do you do that. Is there a method. There is no method, the man says. "I follow the way of the water, and do nothing contrary to it." He goes down with the swirl and comes up with the whirl. He grew up beside the water until moving with it became his nature, and now he does it without knowing how. That last part is the secret. He has so completely stopped opposing the water that there is no longer a separate, straining self in there fighting the current. There is only the swimming. The Taoists had a word for that easy being-what-you-are: ziran, "self-so," the naturalness of a thing simply following its own grain.

There is a social face to all of this, and it touches the ordinary frictions of a week more directly than anything else in the chapter. The Tao Te Ching calls it not contending. "Because he does not strive," it says of the sage, "no one finds it possible to strive with him." The wise person leads by putting themselves below and behind, the way the sea lies below the streams, and the closing line of the book lands the same way: with all his doing, the sage "does not strive." This is the move that quietly ends most of the arguments you were never going to win. When you stop pushing against the other person, there is suddenly nothing for them to push back against. The contention needed two. It runs on the strain you keep feeding it.

This is the place where Taoism shakes hands with the Stoics and parts from them in the same gesture. Both agree that almost everything outside your own conduct is not yours to command. The Stoic answer is to master the inner judgment and accept what fate sends. The Taoist answer is gentler and stranger: stop standing apart from the current as a separate self with demands, and the question of acceptance hardly comes up, because there is no longer anyone braced against the stream. It is also the same friction the second arrow names in Buddhism. The pain of a situation is the first arrow. The forcing, the strain, the war you wage against it, that is the second, and it is the one you are firing yourself.

Zhuangzi pushes the idea to a place that is good for anyone who feels they must always be useful, always producing, always justifying the space they take up. He keeps telling stories about useless things. A tree so gnarled and knotted that no carpenter will touch it, and so, unlike every straight and useful tree around it, it is left alone to grow huge and old and shade travelers. A giant oak by a village shrine, worthless as timber, that outlives every prized tree precisely because nobody can find a use for it. Even a disfigured man, passed over for the army and the labor gangs, who lives out his full span because no one has any use for him either. Zhuangzi is not praising uselessness as a virtue. His target is the relentless drive to be useful, the constant forcing of yourself into shape for someone else's purposes, which is its own kind of axe. There is a deep permission in these stories to stop carving yourself, to rest, to be the thing you actually are. That is ziran turned inward. The Tao Te Ching points the same way with its image of the uncarved block, the plain unworked wood that holds every possibility precisely because it has not yet been forced into a single use.

Enough description. The thing to feel is the difference between forcing a situation and moving with it, and what each one costs. Below, pick a situation that will not move no matter what you do, then work the single slider between pushing against it and going with it. Two things move as you slide, and they move differently. The rock, the situation itself, never changes, because it was never yours to move. And the strain, the choppy water piling up behind you, rises and falls entirely with you. The effort never drops all the way to nothing, because flowing is not the same as quitting. Then, at the bottom, run the same question across your own life.

Take a real one. There is a standoff with someone close to you, a parent, a sibling, a partner, that has gone on for months. They keep doing the thing. You have built the case against it a dozen times, sent the pointed messages, raised it again at dinner, applied steady pressure in the hope that enough of it will finally move them. It has not. And you are exhausted in a specific way, the way you are after pushing on something that does not give.

Start by naming the forcing honestly. You have been the dam. Look at what all that pushing has actually moved. The other person is right where they were, because their conduct was never in your bin to begin with, the same lesson the dichotomy of control drew. The only thing that grew is the strain, and you supplied every bit of it. That is the second arrow, fired by you, lodged in you.

Now find the watercourse move, which is not surrender and not pretending you do not care. You stop trying to carve them down to your line, the way Cook Ding stops trying to cut through bone, and you meet the person who is actually there. You drop the need to win the exchange, the way the sage goes low and declines to contend, and the argument, having lost its second party, loses most of its heat. You put your effort where it can land, on your own part and your own conduct, and you let the rest ripen on its own time instead of yanking at it. The Tao Te Ching would tell you to deal with things while they are still small and to refrain from grasping, since the one who grasps loses hold.

Here is what changes, and it is worth being precise about it. The strain drops almost at once, well before anything external shifts, because the strain was the part you were adding. Sometimes, once you stop pushing, the wall finds it has nothing to brace against and quietly moves on its own. And sometimes it does not move at all, and you live alongside it without being at war with it, which is its own large relief. Flowing is not winning by a softer name. It is stepping out of the fight you could not win and getting your life back from it.