Where did I first read that in Zen Buddhist thought you are exactly as you should be, at this moment, without any need to change—and that meditation is not a method of self-awareness or self-improvement but rather a means of reminding oneself of one’s sufficiency as an expression of the Tao?  I suspect it was in Alan Watts, but I haven’t encountered the idea in a long time.  It appeals hugely, of course: I am just as I should be; no more effort or will or concentration is needed; I can rest in my present state of being.  At the same time, it repels: I can think of no human being who deserves to be told, you are exactly as you should be.  And I can think of many who need badly to consider their being, their actions, their desires—their hatreds.

What brought the idea back to mind was surely the fact that my meditation has fallen off badly in recent months, and in recent weeks the amount I have been able to gather in my thoughts and write down in this journal has dropped off dramatically too.  This experience—tied to our adoption of a badly needy and needily bad husky pup in early February—has left me thinking of a way to “correct” or “improve” my meditation and of subjects and strategies for journal writing.  It has left me feeling inadequate, wrong, misguided, fraudulent.  If years of meditation practice have helped me so little to calm my mind in this time of struggle, have I understood anything at all, practised anything well?

I will quote again one of my favourite passages of the Tao Te Ching, from Medhurst’s Victorian and Christianizing translation:

Man’s standard is the earth. Earth’s standard is the Heaven. Heaven’s standard is the Tao. The Tao’s standard is spontaneity.

His word “spontaneity” as the standard definitive of the Tao has always been powerful for me in my own efforts to understand, but I find no other translator who adopts it at this moment in chapter 25.  A more recent translator, David Hinton, has the final clause thus:

Way abides by occurrence appearing of itself.

He explains the chosen phrase and the idea behind it in his introduction:

Tzu-jan’s literal meaning is “self-so” or “the of-itself,” which as a philosophical concept becomes “being such of itself,” hence “spontaneous” or “natural.”  But a more revealing translation of tzu-jan might be “occurrence appearing of itself,” for it is meant to describe the ten thousand things burgeoning forth spontaneously from the generative source, each according to its own nature, independent and self-sufficient, each dying and returning to the process of change, only to reappear in another self-generating form.*

Hinton does not say, but I imagine this means, that tzu-jan is the concept and character that closes chapter 25 and gives a standard to the Tao itself.  His remarks also justify Medhurst’s eccentric translation, since Hinton refers twice to spontaneity in his efforts to clarify the state of being called tzu-jan.

“Man’s standard is the earth,” not spontaneity.  Perhaps we can’t be spontaneously ourselves in our real natures.  But the Tao’s gift of spontaneous creation is that which makes me now at this moment exactly as I am and as I ought to be.  And every conscious, willed effort to alter myself, to create myself, even to be myself, is the antithesis of Taoist non-action, wu-wei.  Non-action is always spontaneous—against plans, strategies, concepts, forecasts.  Any creature among the ten thousand things expressed in every instant by the Tao is precisely as the Tao has made him, her, it.  The idea is so appealing.  It gives rest.  I linger on that sentiment.  It gives rest.

But how, I have always wondered, can we possibly say to the serial sex offender, or the butchering dictator, or the terrorist dipping his hands in his victim’s blood, or the indifferent prime minister scoffing away the casualty numbers of his indiscriminate bombing campaign, you are exactly as you should be? 

The answer must lie in just what spontaneity might mean within the being of the human being.  Spontaneity isn’t the same as complacency, indifference, spiritual or ethical inertia.  Perhaps our spontaneity is only measurable as the inverse of the distance we have chosen to travel from our original creation within the Tao.  The paradox is that there is nothing that is not Tao, not even human viciousness; and at the same time, human viciousness is one index of our steady, relentless distancing of ourselves from the spontaneous Way in which we were at the moment of our joining the ten thousand things.

“Before your father and mother were born, what was your original face?”  So asks an unnamed Zen patriarch in Thomas Cleary’s introduction to his compendium of sayings The Original Face.**  If we are exactly as we should be, it must mean that that original face is always within us, is always who we are.  Meditation then is the means by which we seek to recover who we really are.  And all our actions compassionate and vicious are the steps we have taken away from that original, spontaneous, tzu-jan (self-so) state of being.

If we are precisely as we should be, it is because in this vision who we are is wholly different from who we have been made into or made ourselves into from the moment of our births.  In the image of the Uncarved Block, we may say that all our actions, all our effortful strivings, all our efforts to be selves, whether efforts of hate or of love, are carvings.  And the Tao that gives us to the world does not carve. It breathes us, and leaves us, as we should be.

* David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics, p. 23

**Classics of Buddhism and Zen: The Collected Translations of Thomas Cleary, vol. 4, p. 411

24 May, 2024.