What lazier way is there to title a book than the “Tao of…” (other, of course than “Zen of…,” with apologies to Mr. Pirsig, he did do it first and best). It’s an easy way to flog a book on some particular or quotidian thing, just bard it with a bit of Eastern mysticism, and an often shockingly superficial understanding of Asian religion, but it’s OK, because most of your reading public will be familiar with these concepts in name only. So off you go, and the “Tao of Fly Fishing” it is.
(Note to self: check if that’s a real thing lol omg of course it totally is, and maybe the author is a true sage, but let’s just say my suspicions are not assuaged)
So, without going to Wikipedia, what could most of us say about Taoism?
To be fair to my fellow damaged occidentals, it’s a devilishly difficult system to put your finger on, especially given its longstanding historical associations with esoteric and mystical beliefs despite the lack of mystical language in the Tao Te Ching, especially given the ways in which it has, like all Asian faiths, lent itself to syncretism, and the sheer openness of interpretation of the texts themselves, even by the woo-woo standards of religious literature. It is written in these dense, hermetic little aphorisms, which along with the allegories of the Zhuangzi as well as countless astrological guides, herbals, and alchemical manuals, form the corpus of Taoist holy text.
If I have to compare the whole thing to anything, it would be Robert Burton’s maddening, lengthy The Anatomy of Melancholy, an equally hermetic 1000-page Baroque treatise on the nature of the melancholic, rooted in the theory of the four humors, largely consisting of peculiar cures and musings on ancient Greek thinkers and legends.
In that openness, I naturally found an appeal. Rather than religion, the Tao seemed more like a poetic, gestalt approach to the world. Even the first line of the Tao Te Ching is a fuck-you. The way which can be walked is not the eternal way. Sorry, next. Instead, we can only hope to listen closely to the music of the spheres, and try not to be idiots or assholes. Let that move me rather than being bogged down trying to make a rational decision in the infinite choices that flaunt themselves like streetwalkers in the grim stage of history in which I find myself. I can only try to move through as gracefully as possible, hoping to take effortless action, or what they call wuwei.
Knowing that there was no “knowledge” there, per se, no ultimate faith, I decided to take a cue from William James, and embrace the will to believe. I didn’t even know what I was believing in, but that was beside the point. I made a conscious decision, and chose to see where it leads me.
So the wuwei led me to China.
Everyone has a take. The nation of the future. The number one enemy of human freedom. The inscrutable empire. The spearhead of communism. The spearhead of capitalism. The world’s oldest and noblest human civilization. A country irrevocably destroyed. A pillar of strength. A Potemkin village, a whole Temu-ass nation.
Eh to all of that.
I’d rather smile at the aunties sitting next to me by the West Lake in Hangzhou. They laugh and gossip and enjoy their bags of medlars and their bayberries and their boiled peanuts, and their husbands smoke Chunghwa cigarettes, once a privilege of the Politburo, through stained teeth. They all loudly cackle and hack up phlegm and sip their tea.
Robert Burton used to watch the boatmen of Oxford screech and swear and spit between writing the Anatomy.
They were men and women of an age where they may well have been sent down to the country. So let there be a blessing upon the sunny terrace and their medlars and cigarettes. They say that there are ten scenes of West Lake, depending on the seasons – the spring dawn on the Su Causeway, the lingering dawn, the autumn moon. This spring afternoon felt more than enough.
Karl would have loved it. So would Rosa. But that Jiang Qing was a real ass, wasn’t she? Those were quite a few dead sparrows.
Nonetheless, the water still flows under the climbing vines on the old stone bridges of Zhouzhuang. Nonetheless, the stoic warriors still stand in silent formation, holding watch for their emperor beneath the mercury-fouled silt.
And I can sit in a Shanghainese restaurant dating to the late Qing Dynasty, where the eels are slightly charcoal-grilled before being braised in spices and rock sugar, the chafing dish adding a second layer of char. The pork knuckle is cold and stodgy and dense under aspic, and a sip of hot Pu Erh tea turns it into an incomparably rich soup. A private joke among the last generation of mandarins. Men who would set their teacups on lilypads as they dreamed about butterflies.
“This is a way of showing the small in the large: in an unused corner plant some bamboo, which will quickly grow tall, then plant some luxuriant plum trees in front to screen it.
This is a way to show the large in the small: the wall of a small garden should be winding and covered with green vines, and large stones decorated with inscriptions can be sent into it. Then one will be able to open a window and, while looking at a stone wall, feel as if one were gazing out across endless precipices.
Here is a way to show the real amidst an illusion: arrange the garden so that when a guest feels he has seen everything he can suddenly take a turn in the path and have a broad new vista open up before him, or open a simple door in a pavilion only to find it leads to an entirely new garden.” – Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life
I take a taxi through the hutongs midway through demolition in the northern suburbs of Beijing, a little Ethel Cain playing on my headset, to the base of the Back Hill in the Garden of Harmonious Pleasures, on the north edge of the Summer Palace. It’s a steep climb, straight up amid old brick pavilions. These were once full of splendors, but when the Second Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion came, loutish British soldiers marauding through, sacking and stealing, smashing screens, pocketing jewels, grabbing curios which would go on to decorate the bourgeois living rooms of West London.
Because a trip to China is a trip through the horrors of human history. Here, the plaque says, is where caves in the Northwestern loess collapsed en masse in the great earthquake of 1556, burying thousands in their dugout homes. Here, the next plaque says, is where the Song Dynasty intellectuals committed suicide rather than submit to the Yuan. And over here is where the emperor’s mistress was tossed into a well alive. The stone lid they put on it that day is still there.
In Nanjing, where the crayfish are beautifully sweet, the self-titled rulers of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom slaughtered the Manchu men first, and the Manchu women second, and then 30 million of their own Han Chinese were killed in the fracas, and 70 years later, the debonair and handsome Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, uncle of the Taisho Emperor sanctioned the industrialized mass murder of 200,000 civilian residents of the same city – and given his royal status, he was granted immunity. He died in 1981, a pious Catholic and wealthy golf course developer, living on my beloved Izu Peninsula coast west of Tokyo.
On the Back Hill, I am exhausted, the midday sun shining bright, amid the scars of old wars.
But then I reach the pine-crested top, and the trees part and reveal Xanadu.
The mandarins are long gone, and us commoners get to traipse the plaisance along the Kunming Lake below. The girls get to do their hair into elaborate updos and dress up like empresses and concubines and water-sleeved fairies and interwar Shanghai femmes fatales. Along with the occasional anime schoolgirl.
Not that it’s all lovely – a pox upon the gaggle of fat old ladies in jewel tones who nearly pushed me into the ponds in the Humble Administrator’s Garden in Suzhou while they took a group photo, hideous knockoff sunglasses perched on their porcine faces. Chinese tourists have a reputation for being monstrous abroad, but it turns out that even domestically, all it takes is a selfie stick to turn a kindly aunt into hellspawn. And as I traveled, I had more than a few deeply unpleasant encounters.
Lacking the time to climb the sacred mountain of Huashan, I made my way to the Huaqing Pool, where the love of Emperor Xuanzong and his consort Yang Guifei was not to be, as told in the saga The Song of Everlasting Regret. Where, as the only Westerner, I was surrounded by more gawking locals who didn’t even have the courtesy ask if they could take a picture with me. More jewel tones. More knockoff sunglasses.
The structures are largely hideous contemporary recreations, complete with plastic lotuses in the pond and mist machines.
“Other people are joyous, like on the feast of the ox,
Like on the way up to the terrace in the spring.
I alone am inert, giving no sign,
Like a newborn baby who has not learned to smile.
I am wearied, as if I lacked a home to go to.”
- Ch. 20, Tao Te Ching
“All my joys besides are folly,
None so sweet as melancholy.”
- Robert Burton in his overture to the Anatomy
But then I saw the path lead up the mountain of Lishan. Surely, this must be the way.
And I climb to the top, to the little Taoist temple where the monks and nuns smiled and greeted me, merrily attempting to speak to me in Chinese, clucking through missing teeth. I simply smiled back and shrugged. They offered melon and steamed buns. And looking at the statues of the deities, I learned who my Taoist protector god was.
General Zhang Geng was an official of the decadent late Ming Dynasty who defended his family against unjust persecution, who defended the common folk against tyranny and oppression, who devoted his life to what he believed to be the honorable and honest way of doing things. This went as well as it normally does – of course the emperor offed him. And now, so they say, he keeps watch over all those born when the year of the tiger occurs in conjunction with the elemental sign of fire.
I bought a cinnabar amulet there. I keep it in my messenger bag still.
And as I stared out at the turmeric-colored river, down towards the spot where the Qin Emperor’s mysterious necropolis supposedly lays undisturbed, I knew that I should be there, amid the lilacs and the cedars.
In the distance lurked concrete towers.
As to those, I’ll see you in part 2.
