TEACHING THE WAY
TEACHING THE WAY There is a story in the Zhuangzi that ought to serve as the starting point for any discussion of teaching. A wheelwright is working at the foot of the steps while the Duke sits reading in his hall. He stops his work and tells the Duke that the books he is reading are nothing but the dregs left behind by the ancients. He explains this through his own craft: when he cuts a wheel hub, if he works too slowly, the result is loose; if he works too quickly, the tool will not take. Neither too slowly nor too quickly: the hand finds it, and the heart responds. Then he adds the sentence that truly matters: “I cannot make my son understand it, and my son cannot receive it from me; that is why, at seventy years of age, I am still cutting wheels.” The logical conclusion would seem to be that teaching is impossible, and that there are only self-taught practitioners. And yet, of all the currents of Chinese thought and practice, Taoism is perhaps the one that most carefully organised lineages, ordinations, vows, and entire generations of transmission. Elsewhere, the same Zhuangzi describes how a woman named Nüyu received the Way: she received it from the son of Writing, who had received it from the grandson of Recitation, who had received it from Clear Vision, then from Necessary Practice, from Profound Obscurity, and finally from Doubtful Beginning. This is not a joke; it is an answer. Writing comes last. Effective practice, and even the initial state of doubt, are themselves full links in the chain. Transmission does indeed exist, but it does not pass through the channels we imagine. It does not consist in transferring content from one mind into another, but in establishing the conditions under which something may occur in another person, without the one who establishes those conditions being able either to cause the event or to verify it. It is from this impossibility that the entire economy of Taoist teaching follows, including its most disconcerting rule: the master gives, and expects nothing in return. Before going further, three things must be distinguished which the word “teaching” tends to confuse. First, there is the text—that is, written information. It can be transmitted perfectly well without a master, and by itself it is almost useless. Ge Hong says so without hesitation in the Baopuzi: one may possess the book, but without the oral formula one can do nothing with it. Taoist technical treatises are, moreover, deliberately incomplete. Their omissions are not failures of exposition; they are structural. They compel the student to seek out a living practitioner. Then there is the method, with its sequence, thresholds, and corrections. This can be transmitted, but only through demonstration and repeated correction of both body and conduct. This is the level of the oral formula, of what the tradition calls “transmitting through the mouth and receiving through the heart.” The great manuals associated with the lineage of Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin show just how seriously this ordering was taken: the material is divided into Three Vehicles and Ten Gates, and this order is not merely an editorial arrangement; it is a constraint imposed by practice itself. Giving the Sixth Gate to someone who has not stabilised the Third is not an advance. It is a loss. Finally, there is something that is neither content nor method: the quality of presence, the measure, the rightness of the moment. This is what the wheelwright cannot put into words. This level can pass only through prolonged proximity and unconscious imitation—what the Daodejing calls “teaching without words.” Liezi served his master for nine years, and in his account the master scarcely speaks at all. After three years, Liezi says, he no longer dared to think in terms of right and wrong, gain and loss, and for the first time his master granted him a glance. After five years, those thoughts had returned, but in another form, and the master smiled. After seven years, and then nine, the boundary between inside and outside had ceased to exist. The rest was shared time. From this distinction follows the sensitive point immediately. If the third level passes through presence rather than speech, then what the master truly transmits is his inner state at the moment he teaches. A master made tense by expectation transmits tension. He may teach relaxation for twenty years using impeccable words; it is his contraction that his students will embody, because that is what they actually see. The foundation of the rule lies in Chapter 51 of the Daodejing: to bring forth without possessing, to act without claiming, to foster without ruling. Three distinct prohibitions. The student does not belong to the master—neither the student’s time, nor his path, nor his loyalty. What the student accomplishes does not enter into the master’s credit, does not become a title, and is not something to be cited as evidence of his worth. Nor does the master direct the student’s development as one manages a project, with objectives and deadlines. Chapter 79 provides the most exact image. In ancient times, a contract was inscribed upon a tablet and broken into two pieces, with the creditor retaining the left half. The sage, the text says, holds the left half of the contract and demands nothing. The person of virtue attends to the contract; the person without virtue attends to collecting what is owed. The sage is therefore indeed a creditor: something has been given, and he knows it. Yet he never presents the tablet. He never says, “After all that I have transmitted to you…” The verb used means both to demand what is owed and to reproach someone for failing to repay it, and both meanings describe exactly what a teacher must refrain from doing. One might object that the master loses by this arrangement. Chapter 81 answers that he does not: the more he gives to others, the more he possesses. This is not moral consolation but