The Tao is not to be found in books.

I remember a lesson I learned one sunny afternoon many years ago...

It was unusually hot so I sat myself down on the riverbank in the shade of a willow tree - to shelter from the sun and to catch up on some reading. There was a small weir in the river no more than a metre or two away from me and the sound of running water filled my ears. I took out my copy of the Lieh Tzu and started to read. It didn’t take long for me to encounter a phrase that I found particularly puzzling at the time, namely that “...the Tao is not to be found in books”. Although I was familiar with the oftentimes obscure, mysterious and perplexing style of Taoist writings, I was struck by the profundity of this idea.

I closed the book and took a look around at my surroundings as I contemplated Lieh Tzu’s statement and its meaning.

Glancing at the river, I noticed a mother duck with 8 or 9 little ducklings in tow swimming upstream towards the weir. As I watched, the mother duck swam effortlessly up the weir closely followed by several of the stronger ducklings. More followed and met with varying degrees of difficulty and success - some needing several determined attempts to scale the torrent of water and others seemingly reaching the higher level through the sheer desperation of needing to be reunited with their mother who was waiting a short distance upstream.

Until only one duckling, the last in line, was left struggling to surmount the weir.

Separated from its mother and the rest of its siblings, this little duckling grew increasingly frantic - throwing itself into the oncoming rushing water time after time and growing increasingly weaker with each failed attempt. Eventually, mother duck and her brood began to swim away leaving the straggler behind.

Seeing its mother getting further and further away the exhausted little duckling did something none of the others had done - it swam to the riverbank, walked around the weir and rejoined its family in the calmer water upstream.

I consider myself very fortunate to have witnessed this event and I’m still learning from it.

Initially, this little duckling helped me to grasp what Lieh Tzu was driving at - that the Tao was to be found through quiet contemplation, interaction with nature and engaging with the world at large. It also demonstrated the efficacy of non-contention - of moving around insurmountable obstacles rather than trying to tackle them head on (or “wu wei” – not going against nature).

This much was fairly obvious to me at the time but it happened before I’d started my study of Tai Chi Chuan. Now, about 20 years later, I realise that there are a great many more lessons to be learned from this occurrence and I’d like to share some of them with you. They relate to focus and context and will hopefully help to illustrate how we can all benefit from taking a more comprehensive view of some of Tai Chi Chuan’s training methods .