While all the others fret, hesitate, or calculate,
Pooh just is how he is. This “way of the Pooh” guide is how Benjamin Hoff, winner
of an American Book Award, teaches the general audience—who may also be Winnie-the-Pooh
fans—the basics of Taoism. To many, the concept seems simple until you try to
think about it, and so Hoff goes about showing his audience the way of Taoism
without attempting to explain every detail of it, for that would just be
confusing, of course.
“When you work with Wu Wei [‘Taoism in action’], you put the
round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress,
no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square
hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise
craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to
figure out why round pegs fit round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think
about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of
anything. But Things Get Done.
Through analogies such as these, using both this simple
peg-hole scenario as well as various scenarios with Pooh, Hoff show how Taoism
is neither something that can simply be explained nor something that should be explained because, as Hoff
mentioned, it would only jumble the idea and make it more confusing than it has
to be when we attempt to completely wrap our minds around it. He is able to
define the way of Taoism without directly stating it, and the point is to simply get the gist of it, so others
can apply it to their lives as well. Pooh represents a symbol for Taoism, a
physical entity for readers to visualize more clearly while simultaneously providing
many examples, and with this Benjamin Hoff can effectively convey what Taoism
is as well as argue how Pooh is indeed Taoist.
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