China and the West

Buber, Martin. Die Lehre vom Tao [ID D11978].
Irene Eber : The taoist concepts that Buber sought to explain are the meaning of Tao and those which he considered associated with Tao : non-acting, wu-wei, the One (unity or oneness), and knowledge (understanding. In Buber's view an inherent interrelationship exists between the four concepts. He recognized philosophical taoism’s claim that at the basis of genuine existence is an unknowable of which nothing can be predicated. Tao cannot be named and it cannot be investigated for it has no attributes. The presence of Tao in the phenomenal world, stated Buber, is as oneness where it is neither recognized nor known ; Tao is lived, Tao is acting ; Tao manifests itself in the genuine existence of the sage. Knowledge consists in being, not in the knowledge of external matters or objects. But knowledge is also acting. It is the deed. Yet genuine acting is non-acting because it originates in 'a gathered unity', or oneness. To experience Tao directly means being one with Tao and means also being unified within oneself.
Tao is relationship to the human being is what interested Buber, not Tao as an abstract idea, and it is, no doubt, for this reason that he chose to discuss the interrelationship of these particular concepts. For this reason he also apparently ignored the cosmogonic implications of the One, expressed, for example, in chapter 42 of the Dao de jing.
Knowledge and non-acting were assigned an important place in the essay because it is, after all, the living person who knows and acts. Acqiring and storing knowledge is, however, not the goal, nor is it the 'emptying' stressed by the Dao de jing. Buber argued that knowledge acquired in non-acting – knowledge that is not in knowing but in being – leads to a different way of existing, the way of the 'perfected person'. Buber did not differentiate between the Dao de jing and the Chuangzi’s ideas here. Both texts give different names and attributes to this kind of person. In the former, he is the sage, who still exercises his calling toward practical ends, though he is like the newborn child, unsullied by the dross and artificiality of civilization. In the latter, he is the genuine person, to whom practical ends are a matter of indifference. He is someone who has shed all learned and acquired preconceptions, who regards his individual existence as having merged with everything there is, who is one with cosmic being.