Wu Wei: The Hard Road to Effortlessness
Essay, Catherine Black, Jun 11, 2007
 Versión en castellano.
Not long ago a classmate from my kung fu school asked for my take on the relationship between wu wei and discipline. Wu wei is a key concept of Taoism roughly translated as “without action,” and can be interpreted to mean “effortless doing,” “action without action,” “not resisting,” “going with the flow,” or acting in harmony with the universe. As martial arts students, many theoretical and applied principles in our training stem from the concept of wu wei, but we also know that studying and excelling in any art requires a great deal of discipline. So the apparent tension between wu wei and discipline poses various questions in the context of our practice: Until what point is discipline useful? When does “making an effort,” or training rigorously, become counterproductive and how does one achieve the “effortless action” typified by the Taoist concept of wu wei?
Freedom
When I ask myself what makes wu wei so appealing to me, I must admit that it’s the freedom that it implies. Freedom from effort; freedom from the mind and its constant analysis and questioning; freedom from desires, from anxiety, from doubt. More than anything, it’s freedom from self consciousness. It’s this freedom, natural and effortless, that you see in babies who have not yet learned to distinguish themselves from their surroundings and are therefore completely, utterly present in them.
Ironically, our self-consciousness is the very hallmark of our humanity and at the same time what imprisons us in a mental cage that constantly disassociates us from the world around us and from each other. I suppose that freedom from the “self” is also the ultimate freedom that so many spiritual traditions, mystic practices, and philosophical schools have tried to attain and explain.
Perhaps if I spent my whole life wandering alone through the wild, empty spaces that once covered so much of this planet, I could forget my self-consciousness. In the absence of other humans, you forget your own humanity and can integrate with the whole of nature: a whole so immense that it frees you from any external or culturally-assigned identities and enables you to be nothing, no one, nowhere. Perhaps the legendary Chinese sages felt something like this and expressed it in their art, poetry, the Tao Te Ching— records that still fascinate us today and seem relevant to contemporary experiences.
I’ve felt this self-erasure at times, alone in a forest or some desolate place, but I always come face to face with my own reflection again when I return to civilization. In that reflection I see my desires and anxieties once more rise to the surface, and I go from being effortlessly united with the earth and sky to striving, struggling, and doubting within the churning sea of humanity again. To me the real challenge is not forgetting self-consciousness when we are alone, but learning how to shed it in the midst of others.
Presence and depth
I’ve seen something that comes close to this true effortlessness in action expressed by a few people, and they probably wouldn’t even know or care about the term wu wei. These people may not be monks or yogis, but they are instantly recognizable by the great degree of presence they emanate and bring to their surroundings. Maybe it’s the butcher in the marketplace; or the artist who lives his art to the point of becoming it unconsciously; or the grandmother who has survived all her children and nevertheless emits an awe-inspiring love.
Talking to or even just looking at such individuals, I immediately get a very concrete sense of who they are and the reality they create, because their presence is practically palpable. They are completely present and completely themselves in a given moment, without effort or doubt. When I ask myself what it is that gives them such clarity and solidity of presence, it usually seems to be a deeply internalized and intimate knowledge of some aspect of their life. Maybe for the butcher it’s his trade and his role in the community; for the artist, it’s his craft; for the grandmother, her limitless and proven capacity as a nurturer.
What these people have apparently done is cultivated depth. I think that there is a certain kind of comfortable wisdom, a freedom from external ideas and expectations that only comes from knowing and exploring something so deeply that it becomes uniquely yours, a singular expression of who you are. The vehicle for plumbing this depth could be anything, from chopping meat to practicing tai chi; it certainly isn’t limited to meditating on a mountaintop, though I’m sure that would be a good place to try. What it does appear to entail is a deep enough understanding of something we do that we no longer “do” it, but rather “become” it, or it becomes us. This is the essence of wu wei.
Work and discipline
So how do I cultivate such depth? Here I believe that the alternatives are either committing to a tried and-true spiritual tradition in pursuit of all-around enlightenment, or choosing a craft, a trade, or some activity and exploring it so fully that I can eventually experience wu wei through it. In this day and age the former is becoming less and less accessible and usually fraught with false gurus and dead-end promises, making the latter a more pragmatic choice for most. The beauty of wu wei is that it is attainable through an infinite array of activities, but the end result is the same: the experience of effortlessness, self-lessness, harmony with the universe in a given moment. The caveat is that it requires constant work.
In order to deepen, we must grow. Without growth there is no life, and without work there is no growth, because growth—even in the mathematical laws of physics or the organic principles of biology—implies the expenditure of energy and effort. The tool to accomplish this is discipline. Without discipline, work can become a mindless dispersal of energy with no particular aim. With the guiding focus of discipline, I develop the constancy to work through my personal barriers and grow continuously, consciously, rather than getting stuck in the existential paralysis that threatens so many people who step into the dangerous waters of self-investigation.
The value of commitment
In any case, I must go forward, and I must stay committed. Without discipline it becomes too easy to drift from one opportunity to another, one person to another, one possible road to enlightenment to another. Today we are increasingly inundated with endless options and told that more is better, but rarely taught to stick to one choice and explore it in depth.
One illustration that comes to mind is love. The first instant of love feels so absolute, so intense, that you think it will never fade in brilliance. And yet after while the person that you love begins to irritate, bore, or repel you if you don’t learn to grow together. In many couples, overconfident and blinded by the pleasure of the beginning, one person begins to grow in one direction while the other grows in another without realizing it, and before you know it the relationship is over.
It’s easier to love, leave, and love someone else than to continue loving the same person throughout your entire life. It’s easier to remain fixed in your own self than to meet the other at an intermediate point on the bridge of communication, patience, and acceptance. The second instance implies a discipline and effort that most people aren’t willing to expend. But like freedom, love holds an attraction as ancient as it is human. We all seek it— many more than those who seek freedom even. And once we truly commit ourselves to exploring it in depth, there’s no going back.
Closing thoughts
Of course none of this has to mean that we must always be working, sweating and suffering. Discipline doesn’t exist without letting go, just as work doesn’t exist without rest. We can’t stay awake if we don’t sleep, and the quality of our work plummets the moment we stop resting. One has to guard against obsessions that make us compromise our internal harmony. Knowing how to sense and respect that harmony is an important facet of discipline that many people don’t understand well enough.
So as I see it, discipline is the road and freedom a destination that perhaps I’ll never reach in the absolute sense, but one that gives me oxygen and inspiration to continue walking. If you’ve genuinely set out to learn, you can only proceed by going forward, by experiencing the pleasure and perspiration of simply continuing on. Thankfully, along the way, you experience moments of freedom, of wu wei, of total absorption, of transcendence-- of purity, of peace. And in reality, this is enough…it’s already a lot.
Authors' note: Thanks to Bruno for catalyzing these thoughts.
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