I’ve run this post before; but, what the heck, it’s summer and internet traffic is down, so maybe you haven’t seen it before…..

    It may seem improbable but I think we can find a Taoist angle on the US Independence Day, July 4th, holiday.

   Patriotism and nationalism, which are basically what July 4th is all
about, are rather alien to the Taoist world view.  Indeed, far from
celebrating the accomplishments of the nation, the Tao Te Ching
(passage 80) urges: “Let nations grow smaller and smaller/ and people
fewer and fewer.”  The ideal is a primitive, we might even say
pre-nationalist, small-scale political community centered on common
production and close family life.  Not much of an “imagined community” there.

     But there is one element of the holiday that a Taoist might connect with: the line in the Declaration of Independence that states our unalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

      As for Life, the “Te” (or “De” in the Pinyin transliteration) of the Tao Te Ching,
denotes the integrity of each thing in the larger context of Way
(Tao).  As such, I take it to imply a recognition of the value of each
thing in itself, each life in itself, as in this passage from Chuang
Tzu:

Hence,
the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing
[beauty], the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange – in
Tao they all move as one and the same. (23)

    As for Liberty, we have this statement from Burton Watson’s introduction to Chuang Tzu:

The central theme of the Chuang Tzu may be summed up in a single word: freedom. (3)

  “Freedom” here means, for Watson, “free yourself from the world,” but
it is not incompatible with other notions of political liberty that
might be celebrated in the US today.  For Chuang Tzu, governments
should not interfere in our pursuits of freeing ourselves from the
world.

     And as for the pursuit of
Happiness, Taoism, in its philosophic form, is very much about
happiness.  It tells us that we should not reify Happiness (maybe
Chaung Tzu would have counseled Jefferson not to capitalize it in the
Declaration) nor pursue it in a purposive and directed manner; but we
might find happiness precisely in that process of detaching ourselves
from worldly worries and desires and embracing “nothing’s own doing” (wu wei).  Watson also has this to say:

Finally,
Chuang Tzu uses throughout his writings that deadliest of weapons
against all that is pompous, staid, and hold:  humor.  Most Chinese
philosophers employ humor sparingly – a wise decision, no doubt, in
view of the serious tone they seek to maintain – and some of them seem
never to have heard of it at all.  Chuang Tzu, on the contrary, makes
it the very core of his style, for he appears to have known that one
good laugh would do more than ten pages of harangue to shake the
reader’s confidence in the validity of his pat assumptions. (5)

    Sounds pretty happy to me.

    So, have fun today, and remember those Taoist principles of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness!