The Paradox of Trying Not to Try

The concept carries a difficulty the early Chinese thinkers themselves felt, which the sinologist Edward Slingerland has named the "paradox of wu wei": one cannot straightforwardly try to be effortless and spontaneous, because the trying is itself the forcing that wu wei is supposed to be free of. How does one make an effort to stop making an effort? This tension runs, on Slingerland's reading, through the whole of early Chinese philosophy and is not the property of Daoism alone.

Different schools resolve it differently, which is why wu wei is much argued over as to what exactly it excludes. The Confucian tradition seeks a spontaneity earned through long cultivation, Confucius could at seventy "follow what his heart desired without transgressing," a wu wei arrived at by decades of effortful learning. The Daoist texts are more inclined to distrust deliberate cultivation and to seek a return to an original naturalness that effort only obstructs. In its political register, wu wei became an ideal of rulership, the sovereign who governs best by interfering least, associated with the Huang-Lao statecraft of early imperial China, and in the inner-alchemical and meditative traditions it names the non-forcing stance of the practitioner. What it consistently excludes is not activity but coercive, ego-driven striving against the way things are.