The Tao of Pooh is a novel written by Benjamin Hoff.
Hoff explains Taoism through Winne-the-Pooh tales in this book. Here are 33 of the best verses from The Tao of Pooh:
1 “That’s when I began to get an idea: to write a book that explained the principles of Taoism through Winnie-the-Pooh, and explained Winnie-the-Pooh through the principles of Taoism.”
2 “What’s that?” The Unbeliever asked.
“Wisdom from a Western Taoist,” I said.
“It sounds like something from Winnie-the-Pooh,” he said.
“It is,” I said.
“That’t not about Taoism,” he said.
“Oh, yes it is,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he said.
“What do you think it’s about?” I said.
“It’s about this dumpy litter bear that wanders around asking silly questions, making up songs, and going though all kinds of adventures, without ever accumulating any amount of intellectual knowledge or losing his simpleminded sort of happiness. That’s what it’s about,” he said.
“Same thing,” I said.
3 “As any old Taoist walking out of the woods can tell you, simpleminded does not mean stupid. It’s rather significant that the Taoist ideal is that of the still, calm, reflecting ‘mirror-mind’ of the Uncarved Block.”
4 “The essence of the principle of the Uncarved Block is that things in their original simplicity contain their own natural power, power that it easily spoiled and lost when that simplicity is changed.”
5 “When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover the simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the uncarved block: Life is Fun.”
6 “From the state of the uncarved block comes the ability to enjoy the simple and the quiet, the natural and the plain. Along with that comes the ability to do things spontaneously and have them work, odd as that may appear to others at times.”
7 “In the final section of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tse wrote, ‘the wise are not learned; the learned are not wise’ – an attitude shared by countless Taoists before and since.”
8 “The Taoist writer Chuang-tse worded it this way: ‘A well-frog cannot imagine the ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar understand the Tao? He is restricted by his own learning.’”
9 “You might say that while Rabbit’s little routine is that of knowledge for the sake of being clever, and while Owl’s is that of knowledge for the sake of appearing wise, Eeyore’s is knowledge for the sake of complaining about something. As anything who doesn’t have it can see, the eeyore attitude gets in the way of things like wisdom and happiness, and pretty much prevents any sort of real accomplishment in life.”
10 “It’s today,” said piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.
Ours, too. We wonder why the scholars don’t think much of it. Perhaps it’s because they confuse themselves thinking about other days so much.”
11 “To the dedicated scholars, putting names on things is the most vital activity in the world. Tree. Flower. Dog. But don’t ask them to prune the tree, plant the flower, or take care of the dog, unless you enjoy unpleasant surprises. Living, growing things are beyond them, it seems.”
12 “Now, scholars can be very useful and necessary, in their own dull and unamusing way. They provide a lot of information. It’s just that there is something more, and that something more is what life is really all about.”
13 “The thing that makes someone truly different – unique, in fact – is something that cleverness cannot really understand. We will refer to that special something here as Inner Nature. Since it’s pretty much beyond the power of the intellect to measure or understand.”
14 “When you know and respect your own Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don’t belong…One man’s food is often another man’s poison, and what is glamorous and exciting to some can be a dangerous trap to others. An incident in the life os Chuang-tse can serve as an example:
‘While sitting on the banks of the P’u River, Chuang-tse was approached by two representatives of the Prince of Ch’u, who offered him a position at court. Chuang-tse watched the water flowing by as if he had not heard. Finally, he remarked, ‘I am told that the Prince has a sacred tortoise, over two thousand years old, which is kept in a box, wrapped in silk and brocade.’ ‘That is true,’ the officials replied. ‘If the tortoise had been given a choice,’ Chuang-tse continued, ‘which do you think he would have like better – to have been alive in the mud, or dead within the palace?’ ‘To have been alive in the mud, of course,’ the men answered. ‘I too prefer the mud,’ said Chuang-tse. ‘Good-bye.’”
15 “Why does a chicken do what it does? You don’t know? Neither do we. Neither does anyone else. Science likes to strut around and act smart by putting its labels on everything, but if you look at them closely, you’ll see that they don’t really say much. ‘Genes?’ ‘DNA?’ Just scratching the surface. ‘Instinct?’ You know what that means:
Curious: ‘Why do birds fly south for the winter?’
Science: ‘Instinct.’
It means, ‘we don’t know.’
The important thing is, we don’t really need to know. We don’t need to imitate nearsighted science, which peers at the world through an electron microscope, looking for answers it will never find and coming up with more questions instead. We don’t need to play abstract philosopher, asking unnecessary questions and coming up with meaningless answers. What we need to do is recognize Inner Nature & work with things as they are. When we don’t, we get into trouble.”
16 “Everything has its own Inner Nature. Unlike other forms of life, though, people are easily led away from what’s right for them, because people have brain, and brain can be fooled. But many people do not look at it or listen to it, and consequently do not understand themselves very much. Having little understanding of themselves, they have little respect for themselves, and are therefore easily influenced by others.
But, rather than be carried along by circumstances and manipulated by those who can see the weakness and behavior tendencies that we ignore, we can work with our own characteristics and be in control of our lives. The way of self-reliance starts with recognizing who we are, what we’ve got to work with, and what works best for us.”
17 “By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a rivers, and, being grown-up, it did not run and hump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, ‘There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.’”
18 “Wu Wei means, ‘without doing, causing, or making.’ But practically speaking, it means without meddlesome, combative, or egotistical effort.”
19 “When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But things get done.”
20 “…then relax and try it again…Try doing something with a tense mind. The surest way to become tense, awkward, confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard – one that thinks too much. The animals in the forest don’t think too much; they just are. But with an overwhelming number of people, to misquote an old western philosopher, it’s a case of ‘I think, therefore I am confused.’ If you compare the City with the Forest, you may begin to wonder why it’s man who goes around classifying himself as the superior animal…
… ‘If people were superior to animals, they’d take better care of the world,’ said Pooh.”
21 “Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least they do when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, ‘this isn’t supposed to be happening this way,’ and trying hard to make it happen some other way… Later on, you can look back and say, ‘Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…’ Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing.”
22 “In the words of Chuang-tse, the mind of Wu Wei ‘flows like water, reflects like a mirror, and responds like an echo.’”
23 “Our bisy backson religions, sciences, and business ethics have tried their hardest to convince us that there is a great reward waiting for us somewhere, and that what we have to do is spend our lives working like lunatics to catch up with it. Whether it’s up in the sky, behind the next molecule, or in the executive suite, it’s somehow always further along than we are — just down the road, on the other side of the world, past the moon, beyond the stars…”
24 “…A way of life that keeps saying, ‘around the next corner, above the next step,’ works against the natural order of things and makes it so difficult to be happy and good that only a few get to where they would naturally have been in the first place — happy and good — and the rest give up and fall by the side of the road, cursing the world, which is not to blame but which is there to help show the way…those who think that the rewarding things in life are somehow beyond the rainbow…”
25 “The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can’t save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly. The Bisy Backson has practically no time at all, because he’s too busy wasting it by trying to save it. And by trying to save every bit of it, he ends up wasting the whole thing. Henry David Thoreau put it this way, in Walden:
‘Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow.’”
26 “…Each time the goal is reached, it becomes not so much fun, and we’re off to reach the next one, then the next one, then the next…if we do things in the wrong sort of way, it makes us miserable, angry, confused, and things like that. The goal has to be right for us, and it has to be beneficial, in order to ensure a beneficial process. But aside from that, it’s really the process that’s important. Enjoyment of the process is the secret that erases the myths of the great reward and saving time. Perhaps this can help to explain the everyday significance of the word Tao, the Way.”
27 “When we take the time to enjoy our surroundings and appreciate being alive, we find that we have no time to be Bisy Backsons anymore.”
28 “The poet Lu Yu wrote:
The clouds above us join and separate,
The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can stop us from celebrating?”
29 “In order to take control of our lives and accomplish something of lasting value, sooner or later we need to learn to Believe. We don’t need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified Spiritual Superman, or sit around and wait for Fate to come knocking at the door. We simply need to believe in the power that’s within us, and use it. When we do that, and stop imitating others and competing against them, things begin to work for us.”
30 “Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy.”
31 “Why do the enlightened seem filled with light and happiness, like children? Because they are. The wise are children who know. Their minds have been emptied of the countless minute something of small learning, and filled with the wisdom of the Great Nothing, the Way of the Universe.”
32 “The masters of life know the Way, for they listen to the voice within them, the voice of wisdom and simplicity, the voice that reasons beyond cleverness and knows beyond knowledge.”
33 Confucius, Buddha, & Lao-tse
“ …the theme of the painting is well known: We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and tasted it. The expression on each man’s face shows his individual reaction. Since the painting is allegorical, we are to understand that these are no ordinary vinegar tasters, but are instead representatives of the “Three Teachings” of China, and that the vinegar they are camping represents the Essence of Life. The three masters are Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-tse, author of the oldest existing book of Taoism. The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling.
To Confucius, life seemed rather sour. He believed that the present was out of step with the past, and that the government of man on earth was out of harmony with the Way of Heaven, the government of the universe…A saying was recorded about Confucius: “If the mat was not straight, the Master would not sit.” This ought to give an individual of the extent to which things were carried out under Confucianism.
To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. The world was seen as a setter of traps, a generator of illusions, a revolving wheel of pain for all creatures. In order to find peace, the Buddhist considered it necessary to transcend “the world of dust” and reach Nirvana, literally a state of “no wind.”
To Lao-tse, the harmony that naturally existed between heaven and earth from the very beginning could be found by anyone at any time, but not by following the rules of the Confucianists. According to Lao-tse, the more man interfered with the natural balance produced and governed by the universal laws, the further away harmony retreated into the distance. The more forcing, the more trouble. Whether heavy or light, wet or dry, fast or slow, everything had its own nature already within it, which could not be violated without causing difficulties. When abstract and arbitrary rules were imposed from the outside, struggle was inevitable. Only then did life become sour. To Lao-tse, the world was not a setter of traps but a teacher of valuable lessons…A basic principle of Lao-tse’s teaching was that this way of the universe could not be adequately described in words, and that it would be insulting both to its unlimited power and to the intelligent human mind to attempt to do so. Still, its nature could be understood, and those who cared most about it, and the life from which it was inseparable, understood it best.”
With Ken Thompson 