Three - Wu-Wei - Non-doing and The Purposeless Wandering of Chuang Tsu
So early in the text and we have run up against a truly alien standpoint to our everyday American sensibilities. In Chapter Two we had our first hint of wu-wei, the virtue of non-action. Here in Chapter Three we find ourselves confronted with wei wu wei or “action without action.” I like the phrasing that the author of the Wikipedia article on wu wei uses for wei wu wei: “effortless doing.” Lao Tsu writes:
“The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies, by weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.”
I believe I feel and even understand what Lao Tsu means when he writes about effortless doing. I think we have all had moments of clarity, when we are truly living in the present moment, when everything else (the ten thousand things) falls away and we are just what we are doing. There is no I; there is only the act. This mode of being is the clarity of the wise, that Lao Tsu is talking about in Chapter Three. An essential ingredient to achieving this way of being is one of the central tenets of Buddhism, the state of no-desire. When we cease our grasping, only then can we be free of suffering. When we achieve this mode of being whether it is momentarily or a way of life, we can feel the unity of all things– the connectedness that is always there, but which is hidden from us because of our grasping or desiring.