The ancient Chinese Taoists originated a singular form of non-communal life. As noted in the Encyclopedia of Taoism, “eremitism was rarely a permanent way of life for practicing Taoists, and that after completing a period of eremitic self-cultivation and descending from the mountaintop many Taoist men and women travelled the land, performed rituals, and converted others to Taoism.”
The closest analogy in the West is that of the Christian hermits of early Syria who after pursuing eremitism, spiritual practice, and training, lingered among the villages preaching, performing works of mercy, helping with harvesting, with village building projects, and joining in collective labor before moving on to resettle themselves in mountains and deserts.
This “moving on” is what the Taoists understood as “travel.” Travel is not pleasure, curiousity, or novelty-seeking. Travel is a project of self-awareness constantly testing and correcting itself as it observes nature and people.
Taoism in China was specifically opposed to Confucianism, the traditional social and political system of authority and morals. Confucians represented a classical authority for social behavior and conformity. The king or emperor was so ordained by the “mandate of heaven,” not unlike the notion of “divine right” of kings in the West, intending no challenge to the authority of the institution, which supposedly embodied the “Way.” Taoism challenged these assumptions, effectively dismissing them. The Way was not mandated by heaven, which was itself subordinate to the Way, and thus all of nature was the source of instruction. The Confucians acknowledged the shortcomings of their authorities, admitting that when the emperoris good, one must serve, but when evil, one could recluse — though not rebel or disturb the order of heaven but quit, withdraw, walk away, in short “travel.” Thus, those intelligent men who disliked service in a corrupt court reclused, disappearing into forest, mountain, or far-away farmland.
Taoism calls for abstention, withdrawal, renunciation, by extension not for the construction of ego, self, or success, not even as successful articulation and persuasiveness. In Taoism, this sense of withdrawal is called non-action. The distance between the court is equated with the difference between the corrup ethics of power and the shaking off of the red dust of the world, that is, of the wordly. This distancing is “travel,” in one sense physical but in the true sense psychological and spiritual. This is not the travel understood by moderns but the travel understood by Taoists.
In Section 47 of the traditional Tao the ching attributed to Lao-tzu is articulated the correct sense of travel. From the translation of Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English:
Without going outside, you may know the whole world.
Without looking through your window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.
Thus the sage knows without traveling;
He sees without looking;
He works without doing.
Red Pine (Bill Porter) translates the last lines slightly differently:,
“therefore the sage knows without moving,
names without seeing
succeeds without trying.”
Movement of any kind — towards a conclusion, away from evidence or reflection, arising from prejudice, delusion, greed, or lack of virtue and insight — becomes a form of travel, precisely what the sage (and potentially ourselves!) does not pursue.
In Chinese tradition, Taoism challenges Confucian conformity with society, with its institutions and inherent authority. The epistemology (criteria for knowledge) is profoundly overthrown, but further, the empowerment of the individual is emphasized, not as individual persona but as part of nature, both discrete and indivisible from nature. It is the Way, the Tao, that both Buddhism strives for when freed of the traditions of institutions. The structures of eremitism carry over as alternative to society (whether China or Japan) and yield deep thought about the perceiving self. China’s Taoism came to influence Zen Buddhism in Japan, the structures of eremitism and its social manifestations.
The notion of “travel” in the Taoism sense is copmplemented by the notion of self in Zen Buddhism. The hermits of Japan, most of whom are poets and not monks, freed of institutional attachment but not scornful of people and of social necessities, are a unique product of this conjoining of ideas. What is intriguing here is not only the emergence of the historical hermit standing distinct from institutions but the emergence of the hermit as wanderer — who travels in the spiritual sense without traveling in the worldly sense.