Pu

Pu is the uncarved block or unworked wood, a Daoist image for the original condition of simplicity, before it is shaped, named, valued and divided. The Daodejing uses it repeatedly and it is among the text's most economical images: the block has no name; it is small, yet nothing under heaven can subdue it; and when it is cut up it becomes vessels, which the sage then uses as officials.

The image carries an argument. Cutting produces useful and specific things and destroys the wholeness of what was cut, and the same is true of naming, classifying and valuing, each gain in definition is a loss of the undifferentiated condition that made it possible. The Daodejing's line that when the block is dispersed the sage makes use of the pieces concedes that specialisation is necessary and useful; its counsel to return to the uncarved block holds that the source is what matters and is exactly what gets forgotten.

Pu therefore belongs with a family of related Daoist terms, ziran, self-so-ness; wu wei, action without forcing, and with the text's recurring images of the infant, the valley, the female, and water, all of which locate potency in what is undifferentiated, receptive or low rather than in what is prominent, sharp and defined. The infant is the standard partner image: soft, unfocused, without agenda, and yet full of life.

The practical counsel is subtraction rather than addition. "In the pursuit of learning one gains daily; in the pursuit of the Dao one loses daily", the text says, until one arrives at non-action. This is among the sharpest points of contrast with the Confucian programme of cultivation through study, ritual and accumulated learning, and it is offered as a criticism of it rather than merely as an alternative.

In later Daoism the term keeps its place in inner-alchemical and meditative vocabulary as the recovery of an original condition. The English rendering "uncarved block" has become standard and has carried the image very widely into Western popular writing on Daoism, often detached from the political and philosophical argument that the Daodejing attaches to it, the text's interest in pu is substantially an interest in how to govern.

The uncarved block's political application, only briefly noted in the main entry's observation that the text's interest in pu is substantially an interest in governing, receives its fullest statement in chapter eighty of the Daodejing, which sketches a small state deliberately kept in something like the block's own undivided condition.

The chapter describes a small country with few people, possessing tools and weapons it does not use, whose inhabitants value their lives too much to travel far, who have boats and carriages but no occasion to ride them, and who return to knotted cords for record-keeping rather than writing, living in simple contentment, near enough to a neighboring state to hear its roosters and dogs yet never travelling there. The passage is not a program for literal implementation so much as a thought experiment: a community that has not been carved into specialized offices and refined culture retains something the text values, the undivided wholeness that specialization, however useful, dissolves piece by piece.

Commentators differ on how to take this. Some read it as genuine primitivism. Others read it as hyperbole making a narrower point, that a ruler should govern with a light hand and resist multiplying laws, since Chapter 57's warning that more prohibitions produce poorer people uses the same logic without recommending the abandonment of writing. Either reading keeps pu's basic argument intact: each act of dividing and specializing has a cost the text insists on naming.