Learning Principles From Taoism

By Taru Taylor

Robert Frost said that he would just as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

For poetry, to the great Anglo-American, meant disciplined divination. How to finesse the ball over the net and past the opponent, all the while striking ground within the lines, challenges the racket-wielding tennis player. The structure of the sonnet likewise challenged Frost. How to speak truth within 14 ten-syllable lines of varying rhyme scheme determined the game he so often played. A 14th-century Italian poet named Petrarch had invented the sonnet and had thus written the rules that occasionally disciplined Frost.

``Tao" names the great game of Eastern civilization. It parallels the 914-mm high net, and the 23.77m x 8.23m rectangle within which the tennis ball stays in play. Yin and yang, Tao's modes of operation, are what victory and defeat are to tennis. Tao defines the cosmos. Yin and yang limit it. As the Taegeukgi, South Korea's flag, suggests, to be Korean and to live without the Tao is to play tennis without the net.

Confucius and Mencius, although important, are sufficient conditions of Confucianism. The ancient Chinese emperor Fu Hsi is its necessary condition. For, some 5,000 years ago, he wrote ``I Ching," that is, he analyzed Tao into its binary expression of yin and yang; into its eight trigrams, four of which are on the Taegeukgi; into its 64 hexagrams, which map human destiny into a 64-chapter encyclopedia.

Confucianism is the Tao ethically interpreted. Taoism is its metaphysic. Every Confucian classic and every Taoist classic is an exegesis of ``I Ching." Just as the sometime sonneteer Frost and, more famously, Shakespeare, stood on the shoulders of Petrarch, every Confucian and every Taoist stands on the shoulders of Fu Hsi.

Man suffers a haphazard fate in the state of nature, a life ``solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." So he aspires to the calculated destiny that is civilization. In order to solve the basic problems of the human condition, to wit food, shelter, clothing and common civility, he lives by rules arbitrarily constructed. Civilized man is artificial man. He plays tennis with the net.

To the ancient Egyptians that meant following the precepts formalized by ``The Book of the Dead." Jews live by ``The Five Books of Moses": Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The consent of the governed and protection of life, liberty and property define American democracy. ``The Declaration of Independence," ``The Federalist Papers," and the U.S. Constitution thereby limit government. These sets of rules some have tried to follow and limit themselves to. As disciples of Osiris, Moses and Benjamin Franklin, they have tried to achieve civilization.

The Taegeukgi denotes Korea as a nation of Fu Hsi disciples. It determines a nation defined by the Tao, limited by ``I Ching." It downgrades the communism of the North and the capitalism of the South to geographic accidents. For if ethics trumps politics and if metaphysics trumps economics, then Koreans are one Confucian people despite the 38th parallel. The larger perspective of the Tao regards Kim Jong-il and Lee Myung-bak as misleaders insofar as their communist propaganda and capitalist PR obscure the Confucian moral imperative.

Confucius, having lived before the invention of tennis, had a slightly different metaphor for the moral imperative of the Tao, namely, archery. For him civilized man achieving the Tao is like the archer hitting the bull's-eye. It is a show of skill, not show-off of strength. It commands finesse, not force. To hit the target is enough. One should not hit it with violence. As Confucius put it, ``In archery it is not going through the leather, which is the principal thing because people's strength is not equal. This was the old way." By ``old" he meant barbaric, indeed savage.

Frost's tennis player and Confucius's archer, as models of restraint, show us the way to civilization. Frost's net and Confucian deep focus, on hitting the target not violating it, typify that respect for limitation, which characterizes civilization. Discipline is key, but civilized man is first of all docile. Remember: ``docile" does not mean ``servile and obedient." It means ``teachable." ``Disciplined," in turn, means ``taught." American social critic David Brooks's baseball pitcher also shows us the way. His recent New York Times article, ``Pitching with Purpose," says that it takes some 10,000 hours, or three hours of practice every day for ten years, to master any craft.

Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, might have had some such number in mind when he told Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy I, who had been complaining about the difficulty of learning geometry, ``There is no royal road to geometry." There is no bourgeois, nor proletarian, road to civilization either. That road is the Tao. South Korea's signification thereof, on the Taegeukgi, is a nice start. But if Korea would be truly Confucian, they must humbly submit to the Confucian classics: ``The Great Learning," ``The Doctrine of the Mean," ``The Analects of Confucius," and ``The Works of Mencius." If they would find discipline, they must docilely submit to ``I Ching." Submission means interpreting Fu Hsi, and the Confucian and Taoist philosophers, for their modern purpose. That is, using Confucianism to comprehend modern democracy and capitalism. Koreans must disdain living without the Tao even as Frost disdained poetry without rules. They must play tennis with the net.

The writer teaches English at Semyung University in Jecheon, North Chungcheong Province. He can be reached at tarutaylor@gmail.com.