Alan Watts – Tao: The watercourse way (notes)
The Chinese call this kind of beauty the following of li, an ideogram which referred originally to the grain in jain and wood, and which Needham translates as “organic pattern”, although it is more generally understood as the “reason” or “principle” of things. Li is the pattern of behaviour which comes about when one is in accord with the Tao, the watercourse of nature (p.15)
To note, Jeremy Lent’s stuff about Li in the Web of Meaning and his Li-ology Institute http://www.liology.org/
At the very roots of Chinese thinking and feeling, there lies the principle of polarity, which is not to be confused with the idea of opposition or conflict. In the metaphors of other cultures, light is at war with darkness, life with death, good with evil, and the positive with the negative, and thus an idealism to cultivate the former and be rid of the latter flourishes throughout much of the world. To the traditional way of Chinese thinking, this is as incomprehensible as an electric current without both positive and negative poles, for polarity is the principle that positive and negative, north and south, are different aspects of one and the same system, and that the disappearance of either one of them would be disappearance of the system. (pp.19-20)
The key to the relationship between yang and yin is called hsiang sheng, mutual arising or inseparability [aka dialectics] (p.22)
What we are beginning to get at here is a view of the universe which is organic and relational – not a mechanism, artifact, or creation, and by no means analogous to a political or military hierarchy in which there is a supreme commander (p.35)
Organizations in this sense are based on the following of linear rules and laws imposed from above – that is, of strung out, serial, one-thing-at-a-time sequences of words and signs, which can never grasp the complexity of nature, although nature is only “complex” in relation to the impossible task of translating it into these linear signs. Outside the human world, the order of nature goes along without consulting books, but our human fear is that the Tao, which cannot be described, the order which cannot be put into books, is chaos (p.44).
In studying organisms by the analytic way of breaking them down into parts, we are simply using a mechanical image of their structure. Such analysis is the linear, bit-by-bit method of conscious attention, whereas in the living organism the so-called “parts” are exfoliated simultaneously throughout its body. Nature has no “parts”, except those which are distinguished by human systems of classification, and it is only by elaborate surgery that any part of a body can be replaced. The body is not a surgical construct put together with scalpels, clamps, and sutures. We must make a distinction between an organism which is differentiated and a machine which is partitive (pp.50-51)
This is, again, the principle of “mutual arising” (hsiang sheng). As the universe produces our consciousness, our consciousness evokes the universe; and this realization transcends and closes the debate between materialists and idealists (or mentalists), determinists and free-willers, who represent the yin and the yang of philosophical opinion (p.53)
Given living organisms, lack of rain = death.The notion of causality is simply a lame way of connecting the various stages in an event, which we have distinguished and separated for purposes of description; so that, beguiled by our own words, we come to think of these stages as different events, which must be stuck together again by the glue of causality. In fact, the only single event is the universe itself. Li, not causality, is the rationale of the world. (p.54)
