China and the West

Eugene O'Neill in Tao House, California.
Liu Haiping : O'Neill built a new home in California and named it 'Tao House'. It faced eastward, with black Chinese tile on the roof, bright Chinese red paint on all the windows and interior doors, and a Chinese-style brick walk twisting and winding behind, 'to ward off devils'. The naming of Tao House was the result of his long study of the intellectual and spiritual ideas of the East. The house is filled with Chinese motifs and décor.
In O'Neill's late plays written at Tao House, Taoism becomes, more than any other philosophical or religious system, an integral part of their ideas, style and structure. The Tao House was more than just a name for a home, it meant a way of life and a mansion for his soul. The eight years he spent at the isolated Tao House were very much like those of a Taoist hermit striving for full wisdom in secluded meditation. It is obvious that when O'Neill wrote his final plays, the Taoist ideas he embraced were no longer something he just copied, but something he had long pondered and even personally experienced. Taoism is now softly infused into the ideas, characterization, style and structure of these plays. The element of Taoism contained one of the basic qualities that make these works uniquely distinct from the author's earlier work and make them even 'existentially' modern today. One salient characteristic of all his late plays is the interfusion and indenticalness of contraries, which results in rich ambiguity in their style, characterization and themes. These dramas display a curious mixture of past and present, comedy and tragedy. The plays echoes a very unique notion of Taoist teaching, especially that of Zhuangzi. The notion of the relativity of all values and the identity of contraries ties in with the traditional Chinese symbolism of Yin and Yang. It sums up all of life's basic oppositions : shady-sunny, female-male, negative-positive, evil-good, death-life etc. In Taoist perspective, life and death are not in opposition but are merely two aspects of the same reality. Death is seen as the natural result, and also a new beginning of life. In his late plays, O'Neill adopted a similar attitude. Death is something natural, to be neither feared nor desired. O'Neill's rejection in his late plays of dualism, especially that of dream and reality, recalls what is probably the most famous parable about dream and wakefulness in the Taoist tradition.