To Have or Have Not: Ego for Taoists and Buddhists

Let's face it: neither Buddhists nor Taoists seem intent on emphasizing the importance of the self or the importance of one's so-called personal accomplishments. However, though Taoists have influenced Buddhist teachings and vice-versa, we distinguish between the two bodies of thought and practice for good reason; and one of those reasons has to do with the approach to ego.

We could cite a vast corpus of Buddhist teachings that tell us that you can't find this ego. Those teachings analyze, often in minute detail, the ways that we delude ourselves as regards who and what we think we are. We find these teachings in all Buddhist traditions, ranging from Tibet to Southeast Asia and from Japan to the shores of mighty Maine. We see it when a Zen master gives a student a gentle (or, perhaps, not entirely gentle) thwack with his stick. We see it in the teachings of Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti, two main figures in the Madyamika "school" of Buddhist thought. And we find it in the quiet sitting of monks in one monastery after another in both Southeast Asia and Barre, Massachusetts. Buddhists have, we might say, worked out the details. They have given us very precise road-maps of what we might call our "psychological territory."

What of the Taoists? Certainly they wouldn't say, "Three cheers for ego!" (Actually, some of them might, for some Taoists have a reputation for irony!) But they don't seem to work out the details. They give us poetry. They speak of the empty space in the middle of a wheel or a house; they speak of the Valley Spirit, and they say that "the Way is like an empty vessel" that you can draw upon as much as you want without ever having to refill it. But we seen considerable differences between these Taoist verses and Buddhist teachings on the skandhas, or on emptiness, or on anatman (no atman; no self-identity). And we find that world of difference even if the Buddhists, like the Taoists, write in verse (as they often, but not always, do).

So, Buddhists often give us explicit statements: You think you exist, but you err in the following specific ways. Taoists generally inspire us in non-explicit ways to give up our delusions.