USELESS TREE

"The supreme righteousness is non-action"

TAO TE CHING, 38

"Non-action" is not in any way inertia, but, on the contrary, the fullness of the action of activity, although it is a transcendent and completely interior activity, unmanifested, in union with the Principle, beyond all distinctions and all appearances that the vulgar mistakenly take for reality itself, whereas they are nothing more than its more or less distant reflection."

RENÉ GUÉNON, Aperçus sur l'Ésotérisme Islamique et le Taoïsme, p.114 (my translation directly from the French)

Chuang Tzu (4th century B.C.) is considered one of the three sages of Taoism, along with Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.) and Lieh Tzu (5th century B.C.). Several writings are attributed to him, in which Taoist principles are presented in exemplary stories. In one of these stories, Chuang Tzu discusses the apparent uselessness of a tree.

A carpenter and his apprentice were passing by a village shrine where there was an oak tree so tall and wide that thousands of oxen could rest under its shade. The people of the village visited the shrine to gaze at the great tree. The apprentice told his master that he had never seen a tree so full of potential and that he did not understand why the carpenter did not stop to even look at the tree.

The carpenter replied that the wood of that oak was useless and that boats made from it would sink, coffins would quickly rot, tools would deteriorate and pillars would be full of termites. The tree was completely useless, the carpenter claimed. That night, however, the oak tree from the shrine appeared to the carpenter in a dream and asked him what trees he was comparing it to. Beautiful and useful trees are quickly harvested, cut down, dismembered, destroyed and used for the most diverse purposes. The oak tree said that it had practiced uselessness until it reached perfection in those times, shortly before its death. If it had not done so, it would not have lasted so long. And who was the carpenter, after all, to criticize the oak tree in the sanctuary? The man woke up from his dream and his apprentice asked him why the great tree was in the sanctuary, since it wanted to be useless. The carpenter replied that it was there to remain useless, because if it were anywhere else, it would immediately be cut down and used for the purposes of men.

As the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade has shown in many of his books, the tree is a traditional symbol of the "axis of the world", Axis Mundi. That is, the vertical axis that connects and sustains the various horizontal levels of reality. For this reason, the tree is usually located in a garden or sacred land. The oak tree in the Chuang Tzu story is in a sanctuary, a sacred place where everyone converges to contemplate the greatness of the tree. Its magnificent dimensions symbolically represent the abundance of Reality without measure.

The carpenter and his apprentice were walking on a path (Tao, 道) and, when faced with the tree, they had different reactions. The apprentice, inexperienced and with a mind free of knowledge, was enchanted by the infinite possibilities contained in the wood of the shrine's oak. In Japanese martial arts, the beginner is called shoshinsha (初心者), something like "person who is initiating". The initiate has an open mind or spirit (心) and no resistance, as he knows nothing or almost nothing about the Way. This is why the apprentice only sees indefinite riches and potentialities in the oak.

The carpenter, on the other hand, is experienced and saturated with knowledge. He is well aware of the possibilities that the different types of wood offer and looks at the shrine's tree with disdain. It is useless, its wood is bad, and everything produced from it will be unsatisfactory. In short, the shrine's tree is useless for the purposes of carpentry. It turns out that both the apprentice and the carpenter know no other use for wood than carpentry. The apprentice sees countless possibilities because he knows nothing or almost nothing about carpentry, and the carpenter sees only uselessness because he knows well what wood can offer. One has an empty and ignorant mind, and the other has a mind filled with knowledge. But all they see is usefulness; they have a utilitarian and dual mentality.

The apprentice only sees what can be made of the tree, and the carpenter only sees what cannot be made of the tree. Neither of them sees the tree as itself. Their interests cloud their vision of what that tree really is. In another story attributed to Chuang Tzu, it is said that when preferences appear, the Way (Tao) is stained.

Lieh-Tzu, another of the three sages of Taoism, taught that Confucius said that if a man is playing a game worth pieces of glass, he will play skillfully. If the prize is his valuable and expensive belt buckle, he will start to play badly. If the prize is money, he will fall apart. This does not mean that the man has lost his talent. It means that he is so disturbed by things happening outside the game that he has lost his inner calm. He who loses his stillness will fail in everything he does precisely because he cannot see what he is doing.

The carpenter and the apprentice represent the poles of negation and affirmation, respectively. However, there is a higher plane that transcends and grounds these oppositions. The carpenter's dream about the sanctuary tree reveals this fundamental dimension. The oak rebukes the carpenter for his judgment based on practical utility, on preferences based on the perspective of human desires and yearnings.

The tree had practiced uselessness throughout its life and now, at the end of its existence, it had achieved perfection. If the oak had not been useless, it would have fallen victim to the practical interests of men. What is seen only from the perspective of human use and preferences is destroyed, it does not reach its natural end. By being useless, the tree realized its true nature. The sanctuary was the only proper place to be useless, for the sacred is not found in the sphere of human preferences and judgments. On the "axis of the world" there are no preferences or inclinations, but perfect equanimity and non-action.

The sanctuary tree also symbolizes the wise man who diligently follows the Tao. The action of the Tao (道) is "wu wei" (無為), "non-action". Its presence is enough to make the ten thousand things what they are. The wise man does not act out of self-interest, and that is why he truly acts. His action is born of the Tao, ontologically prior to the division of Heaven (天) and Earth (地), the primordial duality. In the eyes of other men, immersed in the discriminative thought of preferences, the wise man is useless like the sanctuary tree.

Equanimous, the wise man sees all things from the "axis of the Tao", the point where oppositions and preferences cease. He lets things be as they are, and does not intervene in phenomena with thoughts of utility or preference. If the presence of beings is only an occasion for the desire to possess or use, nothing will satisfy man, for beings are fleeting, succeeding one another incessantly. To see all things from their most fundamental community is to see things in absolute equanimity.

The non-action of the wise, however, does not mean inaction. As the Japanese Zen thinker Kitaro Nishida taught in his Essay on the Good, "It is only when we attain the one activity of heaven and earth by extinguishing subject and object and forgetting self and things that we can reach the supreme point of good action."