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Concept
Wu wei
Summary
Wu wei () is an ancient Chinese concept literally meaning "inexertion", "inaction", or "effortless action". Wu wei emerged in the Spring and Autumn period. With early literary examples in Confucianism, it is an important concept in Chinese statecraft and Taoism. It was most commonly used to refer to an ideal form of government, including the behavior of the emperor. Describing a state of personal harmony, free-flowing spontaneity and laissez-faire, it generally also more properly denotes a state of spirit or mind, and in Confucianism accords with conventional morality.
Sinologist Jean François Billeter describes wu-wei as a "state of perfect knowledge of the reality of the situation, perfect efficaciousness and the realization of a perfect economy of energy", which Oxford's Edward Slingerland qualifies in practice as a "set of ('transformed') dispositions (including physical bearing)... conforming with the normative order".
As quoted by Creel, the early scholarship of Feng Youlan pointed out a difference between philosophical and religious Daoisms.
Hence, Sinologist Herrlee Creel considered wu wei, as found in the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi, to denote two different things.
An "attitude of genuine non-action, motivated by a lack of desire to participate in human affairs" and
A "technique by means of which the one who practices it may gain enhanced control of human affairs".
The first is quite in line with the contemplative Taoism of the Zhuangzi. Creel believed that "contemplative Daoism" came first, and "purposive Daoism" second .
Described as a source of serenity in Taoist thought, only rarely do Taoist texts suggest that ordinary people could gain political power through wu wei. The Zhuangzi does not seem to indicate a definitive philosophical idea, simply that the sage "does not occupy himself with the affairs of the world".
Creel believed the second sense to have been imported from the earlier governmental thought of "legalist" Shen Buhai (400 BC – c. 337 BC) as Taoists became more interested in the exercise of power by the ruler.
Official source
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