Wu wei

Wu wei is literally "non-action," but the phrase is misleading, and the concept is not passivity. It names action that does not force, action so attuned to the situation that it seems to require no effort, arising from the natural course of things (ziran, "self-so") rather than from the striving, calculating ego. The sage governs the state and the adept lives a life by wu wei, and the paradox the texts delight in is that this "not-doing" is supremely effective: as the Daodejing puts it, the Way "does nothing, yet nothing is left undone."

The classic images are drawn from skill and from nature. Water is the favoured emblem, it yields, takes the lowest place, and yet wears away rock and finds every gap. In the Zhuangzi, the cook Ding carves an ox for years without dulling his blade because he no longer hacks at it but lets the knife follow the joints and cavities already there; his mastery looks like effortlessness because he has stopped imposing himself on the material. Wu wei is that quality generalised: efficacy without coercion, the removal of the interfering self so that action can flow from the grain of the world.

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.