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The Tao of Who?
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Tao of Pooh, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Taoism, Nature, and Happiness
Knowledge vs. Wisdom
Self-Acceptance and Personal Growth
Western Culture and Eastern Wisdom
Summary
Analysis
In another excerpt from the Winnie-the-Pooh books, Pooh goes to the Hundred Acre Wood to visit Owl, who he hopes will be able to answer his questions. Owl represents the busy, distinguished Confucianist scholars who Taoists like Lao-tse and Chuang-tse thought couldn’t understand the basic truths of Tao. In the West today, academics are still the main people who study Taoism. Rather than living whole, balanced lives, they spend their time thinking about abstract categories. They learn about Taoism through books, not through life. Like Confucianist scholars (and Owl), they want “Knowledge for the sake of Knowledge,” instead of knowledge as a means to enlightenment.
Confucianist scholars, Western academics, and Owl all try to understand the world by describing it through words and concepts, instead of observing it and understanding it intuitively through experience. In other words, they are more interested in accumulating knowledge than achieving wisdom: they spend a lot of time talking about how to live well, but don’t actually do it. Hoff warns his readers against falling into this trap—especially because they’re learning about Taoism from a book. After all, Pooh’s simplemindedness shows that people don’t need to know very much or read very many books in order to be wise.
Themes
In Winnie-the-Pooh, Rabbit respects Owl because he knows how to spell “Tuesday.” But in an imagined conversation with Hoff, Owl tells Pooh that “Tuesday” starts with “Two” because “it’s the second day of the week.” He thinks the next day is “Thirdsday.” But Piglet says that it’s today, and Pooh says that today is his favorite day of all. Like Owl, Hoff quips, most scholars are too busy thinking about the other days to appreciate today. Scholars also use big words when they don’t need to. For instance, Owl confuses Pooh by saying “customary procedure,” when he really just means “the Thing to Do.” Sometimes, these words are designed to just make scholars look like they know everything.
Time after time, Owl’s intelligence makes him less wise, not more. First, he spells “Tuesday” wrong because he overcomplicates the problem and assumes that the days of the week have something to do with numbers. While Owl is thinking about “Thirdsday,” Pooh and Piglet are actually enjoying it. Then, by using fancy words like “customary procedure,” he confuses Pooh and Piglet rather than communicating to them. In both cases, Owl gets lost in his head, and this prevents him from engaging with the world around him. And according to Taoism, it’s impossible for people to embody P’u or achieve happiness without engaging with the world.
Themes
Scholars’ knowledge often doesn’t match up with real-world experience, which Hoff considers more valuable. “Lots of people talk to animals,” Pooh points out, but “not very many listen.” Being correct isn’t enough for someone to have true wisdom. The Taoist poet Han-shan wrote that, while a scholar laughed at his poor wording and meter, he laughed at the scholar’s writing, which was like “a blind man / Describing the sun.” In a poem from his books, Pooh captured the scholarly mindset: he spends a whole week in nature, asking things like “if those are these or these are those” and “[if] who is what and what is who.” Hoff comments that scholars are too obsessed with naming and defining things to actually interact with them or truly live life.
Pooh again points out the difference between people who try to define the world and those who truly try to understand it. Anyone who thinks they know the truth can tell animals (or other people) about it. But to listen to animals (or other people), someone has to recognize that those others actually know and embody the truth. Similarly, Han-shan’s argument with the poet suggests that academics care too much about how words look, without paying attention to whether or not they’re true. It’s pointless to name and define if “those are these” and “who is what,” because people’s definitions of things don’t change the true inner nature of things. Taoists think that everything plays a special role in the natural order of things (Tao), so they pay attention to things in order to grasp their inner nature and understand their role in the natural order.
Themes
Pooh points out that Owl has been using Hoff’s pencil to write about “Aardvarks and Their Aberrations.” Hoff notes that scholars tend to blame their own problems on ignorance (which is really just P’u). For instance, the wind blows Owl’s house down while he was distracted trying to spell “Marmalade.” But his first instinct is to blame it on Pooh. In another scene from The House at Pooh Corner, Eeyore spells the letter “A” with sticks and declares that he’s better than Pooh and Piglet because he’s capital-E “Educated.” But he’s surprised when Rabbit knows “A,” and he bitterly kicks around his sticks because he’s no longer special. Piglet tells Hoff that he knows something Rabbit doesn’t—which is the subject of the next chapter.
Owl’s “Aardvarks and Their Aberrations” represents the way that scholars accumulate useless knowledge in order to win status and power, instead of actually searching after the truth. Eeyore values being “Educated” for the same reason: status, not truth. He’s only interested in knowing things if it makes him better than other people. For both Owl and Eeyore, knowledge takes them further from the truth about the world, not closer. So while scholars say that their problem is ignorance, Hoff suggests that it's actually the other way around: they have too much information clouding their judgment, not too little informing it.
Themes
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