Taoism

Around the fourth century BCE, according to a story in the Zhuangzi, the philosopher Zhuangzi's wife died. His friend Huizi came to offer condolences and found him sitting on the ground, drumming on a basin and singing. Huizi was shocked. This woman had lived with him, raised his children and grown old at his side. Not weeping would be bad enough. Singing seemed outrageous.

Zhuangzi's answer was not that he felt nothing. When she first died, he said, how could he not have been affected? But then he thought back to before she was born, before she had a body or even breath. Out of a vague and formless mixing came change, then breath, then form, then life. Now another change had taken her to death, the way the seasons follow each other. To wail at that, he said, would show that he did not understand how things are, so he stopped. ^[9]

The story is strange, and it was meant to be. It raises the question at the centre of this article. Can you love someone completely without clinging to them? Daoist texts suggest that you can, and that clinging may even get in the way of love. To see why, we first need to know what Daoism is, where its texts came from and what its central ideas mean.

Two Things Called "Daoism"

The English word Daoism (older spelling Taoism) covers two Chinese terms that are related but not identical: ^[1]

• Daojia ("the school of the Dao") is a label invented by Han dynasty historians in the second century BCE. Sima Tan and his son Sima Qian used it to group earlier thinkers, above all the texts attributed to Laozi and Zhuangzi. Western scholars have often called this "philosophical Daoism."
• Daojiao ("the teaching of the Dao") refers to organised religious movements that began in the late Han dynasty. A key founding event is the revelation said to have been received from a deified Laozi by Zhang Daoling in 142 CE, which started the Celestial Masters lineage. Daojiao developed priests, rituals, scriptures, temples, and practices aimed at health and long life, and it is still practised today. ^[1]

The clean division between "philosophy" and "religion" is partly a modern Western habit. Many practising Daoists see continuity between the classical texts and later religious traditions, and many scholars now treat the split with caution. ^[1,2] This article concentrates on the classical texts, because that is where the ideas about attachment are developed. That focus should not be taken to mean the religious tradition is secondary.

Note also that "Daoism" was a retroactive category. When the Laozi and Zhuangzi were composed, there was no school with that name. Han scholars grouped the writings one to two centuries later. ^[1]

The Texts and Their Uncertain Authors

Laozi and the Daodejing

Tradition names Laozi ("Old Master") as the author of the Daodejing ("Classic of the Way and Virtue"). The historian Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE, recorded him as an archivist at the Zhou court who met Confucius. However, Sima Qian himself hedged his account, and by his time Laozi was already surrounded by legend. Modern scholars range from treating Laozi as a real person whose sayings were collected by followers to treating him as a wholly legendary figure. ^[3,4]

Most scholars now see the Daodejing as a text that grew in layers. Collections of sayings probably circulated from the fifth or fourth century BCE and were combined and edited into roughly their present shape by the mid-third century BCE. ^[3] The received text has 81 short chapters in two parts: the Daojing (chapters 1–37) and the Dejing (chapters 38–81).

What the tombs revealed

Archaeology has changed this debate twice. ^[3,4,7]

• In 1973, silk manuscripts of the text were found in tombs at Mawangdui, in Hunan. Copied before about 195 BCE, they contain nearly the whole work, but with the two halves in reverse order.
• In 1993, a tomb at Guodian, in Hubei, yielded about 800 bamboo slips dated to around 300 BCE. About 2,000 characters on them match the Daodejing, roughly two-fifths of the received text, arranged in three groups and in a different order.

The Guodian slips are the oldest known version of the text. They show that parts of it existed by about 300 BCE. They also show that the text was still fluid. One famous difference concerns chapter 19. In the received version it seems to attack Confucian virtues directly: cut off benevolence, discard rightness. The Guodian version tells the reader instead to cut off artifice and deceit. Some scholars concluded that the anti-Confucian tone was added later. Others point out that another Guodian passage still treats Confucian virtues as signs of decline, so the question remains open. ^[3]

Scholars also still debate whether the three Guodian groups are extracts from an already complete book or evidence of separate collections that had not yet been merged. ^[3,7]

Zhuangzi

The Zhuangzi is named after Zhuang Zhou, who probably lived in the late fourth century BCE. The version we have comes from the scholar Guo Xiang (fourth century CE), who cut an earlier 52-chapter text down to 33 chapters and divided them into three sections. ^[5]

• Inner Chapters (1–7): generally regarded as closest to Zhuangzi himself.
• Outer Chapters (8–22) and Miscellaneous Chapters (23–33): widely thought to include later writings by various followers and related schools.

This matters for the opening story. The episode of Zhuangzi drumming after his wife's death is in chapter 18, an Outer Chapter. It is a story told about Zhuangzi within the tradition, not a verified biographical event, and it may have been written after his death. ^[5,9]

Where the Daodejing is compressed and poetic, the Zhuangzi is playful, full of stories, jokes, talking animals and arguments that turn back on themselves. It is also more interested in the individual person than in how to govern. ^[5,6]

The Core Ideas

Dao: the Way

Dao literally means "way" or "path." It can also mean "to speak" or "to guide." In the Daodejing it becomes the name for the source and pattern of everything, something that cannot be fully captured in words. The text opens by saying so. In James Legge's 1891 translation: "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao." ^[8]

A modern reader might think of the difference between a map and the land. Every description of the Dao is a map, and the text warns against mistaking the map for the terrain.

De: virtue, or power

De is often translated "virtue," but in the sense of an inner power or potency, as when we speak of the "virtue" of a medicine. It is what a thing has when it is working in accord with the Dao. ^[3]

Wu wei: effortless action

Wu wei literally means "not doing" or "non-action." It does not mean doing nothing. It means acting without forcing, without self-serving strain, the way a skilled person moves without thinking through every step. ^[1,10]

The Zhuangzi gives the classic example: a cook who has cut up oxen for nineteen years without dulling his knife, because his blade follows the natural gaps between the joints instead of hacking through bone. ^[6] The sinologist Edward Slingerland describes wu wei as "effortless action," a state of ease that early Chinese thinkers of several schools, not only Daoists, treated as an ideal. ^[10]

Ziran: naturalness

Ziran literally means "self-so," what happens of itself. The Daodejing says that even the Dao takes ziran as its model. ^[3,8] The idea is that things have their own spontaneous tendencies, and much human trouble comes from trying to override them.

Pu: the uncarved block

Pu is raw, uncarved wood. It is the image of simplicity before cutting and polishing turn wood into specialised objects. The text urges people to show plainness, hold to simplicity, and have few selfish desires. ^[3,8]

Yin and yang

Yin and yang are the paired forces of shade and light, receptive and active, soft and hard, that alternate and depend on each other. These ideas were part of shared Chinese cosmology, not a Daoist invention. A separate yin-yang school is recorded in the Han histories, and the terms appear across Chinese thought. ^[11] The Daodejing mentions them explicitly only once, in chapter 42, where all things are said to carry yin and embrace yang. ^[8] The pattern is everywhere in the text, though: the soft overcomes the hard, the low supports the high, and water, which yields to everything, wears down stone.

Why Letting Go Is So Hard

The Daoist texts do not use a single word matching the English "attachment." They speak instead about desire (yu), about excessive fondness or hoarding (ai, which can mean both "love" and "to begrudge"), and about knowing when one has enough.

Chapter 44 of the Daodejing, which also appears in the Guodian slips, asks which is closer to you, your reputation or your self, and which matters more, your self or your possessions. It warns that great fondness leads to great expense and that hoarding leads to heavy loss, while knowing contentment keeps you safe. ^[3,8] Chapter 9 adds that holding a vessel full to the brim is worse than stopping in time, and that withdrawing once the work is done is the way of heaven. ^[8]

The texts assume, rather than explain, why this advice is so hard to follow. Modern research offers some possible reasons. The following points are modern readings, not Daoist doctrine.

• We overvalue what we already have. In classic experiments, people asked to sell a mug they had just been given demanded far more than buyers were willing to pay for the same mug. ^[14] Simply owning something makes it feel more valuable.
• Losses hurt more than equal gains please. Decision research has shown that people weigh losses more heavily than equivalent gains. ^[15] Letting go feels like a loss even when it is sensible.
• Attachment is biological. Human infants survive by bonding with caregivers. Adult psychology has inherited this system. Clinging is not a moral failing. It is part of how humans are built.

So the difficulty is not a lack of willpower. It pushes against some of the deepest tendencies of the human mind.

Attachment Versus Love

This section is interpretive. The Daoist classics do not set out a theory of "love versus attachment" in modern terms. What follows draws on their images and arguments to describe a distinction that many readers, ancient and modern, have found in them.

Producing without possessing

Two chapters of the Daodejing describe the deepest kind of virtue in the same words: it produces but does not possess, acts but does not presume on the result, and raises but does not dominate. ^[8] The image is of a parent, gardener or ruler who fully supports something's growth without treating it as property.

In the same text, one of the "three treasures" is ci, a word covering compassion and a parent's deep, protective love. The text claims that it is from this love that real courage comes. ^[8] Daoism therefore does not recommend coldness. It recommends a love that does not grab.

The mirror

The Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi offer an image of what this looks like. The perfected person uses the mind like a mirror. A mirror does not chase after things or send them off. It responds fully to whatever stands before it and keeps nothing once it has gone. ^[6]

A mirror reflects a face completely. That is full attention. It does not try to keep the face. That is non-clinging.

Feelings without self-harm

In another Inner Chapter, Huizi challenges Zhuangzi: can a human being really be without feelings (qing)? Zhuangzi's reply is careful. By "without feelings" he does not mean without emotion. He means not letting likes and dislikes cause inner harm, and simply going along with what happens of itself instead of trying to add to life. ^[6]

This helps explain the wife story. Zhuangzi says he was affected when she died. What he gave up was not grief but the added insistence that her death should not have happened, which he treated as a failure to understand the natural cycle.

Fish in the lakes

A third image, again from the Inner Chapters: when springs dry up, fish stranded together on dry ground keep each other alive by spraying each other with their breath and moisture. It would be better, the text says, for them to forget each other in the rivers and lakes. ^[6]

On one reading this is a picture of two kinds of closeness. One is tender but born of scarcity and fear, with each needing the other to survive. The other is freedom in abundant water, where there is no need to cling at all. This reading is interpretive, and the passage has also been read in other ways.

Putting it together

A careful summary of the distinction, as it emerges from these texts, might be:

The core claim is that love is directed at the other person, while clinging is directed at one's own need for the other person to stay the same. The two often come mixed together, and Daoist practice is, on this reading, the slow work of separating them.

Modern Comparisons, Clearly Labeled

Several comparisons are commonly made. All of them are modern readings, and each has limits.

Buddhism

Buddhist teaching also identifies clinging and craving as sources of suffering and uses a similar image of grief. In one early discourse a grieving father rejects the Buddha's claim that those who are dear bring sorrow. ^[12] See Suffering for that framework.

The two traditions arose independently. Buddhism reached China centuries after the classical Daoist texts were written. Afterward the two traditions borrowed heavily from each other: early translators used Daoist vocabulary to render Indian Buddhist ideas, and some Daoist scriptures were modelled on Buddhist sutras. ^[1] The differences are real, though. Buddhism aims at release from a cycle of rebirth. Classical Daoism is more interested in harmony with nature, and the Zhuangzi in particular treats life and death as equally acceptable phases, not as something to escape.

Attachment theory

In psychology, "attachment" has a specific and positive meaning. Attachment theory describes the bonds people form with caregivers and partners. Secure attachment is associated with better emotion regulation, while insecure patterns come in two broad forms: anxious (clinging, fearing abandonment) and avoidant (suppressing need and keeping distance). ^[13]

This creates an important warning. Daoist "non-attachment" should not be confused with avoidant detachment, which is a defensive shutting-down of closeness. If anything, the Daoist ideal of full, responsive, non-clinging care looks more like secure attachment than like the absence of attachment. The comparison is suggestive, but the two frameworks use the same word for different things.

Grief research

Research on bereavement has found that many people are resilient after the death of someone close, showing fairly stable functioning rather than long-term breakdown. The same work argued that such resilience should not automatically be read as denial or as a hidden disorder. ^[16] That finding sits interestingly beside the Zhuangzi story. It does not show that Zhuangzi was right, and nothing in psychology recommends singing at funerals, but it does suggest that grief without prolonged collapse is a normal human possibility.

Limitations and Open Questions

• Authorship: Laozi's historicity is unresolved, and much of the Zhuangzi was probably written by later authors. Attributing an idea to "Laozi" or "Zhuangzi" usually means attributing it to the text.
• Textual change: the Guodian and Mawangdui finds show that the Daodejing changed during transmission. The "original" text may never have existed as a single fixed work.
• Translation: terms such as dao, de, wu wei and ziran resist English. Translators disagree substantially, and some readings in this article depend on specific translation choices.
• Interpretation: the texts are deliberately paradoxical. Readers have found in them mysticism, political advice, naturalism, and scepticism. The distinction between love and attachment presented here is one reasonable reading, not the only one.
• Religious practice: by focusing on the classical texts, this article says little about the living religious tradition of Daojiao, which has its own understanding of these ideas.

Care Without Gripping

Daoism asks a question that most people face sooner or later: how do you care deeply about things that will not last? Its answer, drawn from images of water, uncarved wood, a mirror and fish in a lake, is not to care less. It is to care without gripping.

These texts were assembled in China between roughly the fourth and third centuries BCE by authors whose identities remain uncertain, and they have shaped Chinese thought, religion, art and medicine for over two thousand years. They propose a way of living in which forced effort gives way to ease and possession to support. Whether anyone can fully live that way is another question. Even in the tradition's own telling, Zhuangzi's release began with grief.

References

[1] Littlejohn, R. "Daoist Philosophy." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://iep.utm.edu/daoismdaoist-philosophy/

[2] Hansen, C. (2025). "Daoism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/daoism/

[3] Chan, A. (2001, rev. 2025). "Laozi." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laozi/

[4] Littlejohn, R. "Laozi (Lao-tzu)." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://iep.utm.edu/laozi/

[5] Hansen, C. (2014, rev. 2024). "Zhuangzi." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/

[6] Zhuangzi; Legge, J. (trans.). (1891). Zhuangzi (Inner Chapters 1–7, including "Nourishing the Lord of Life," "The Seal of Virtue Complete," "The Great and Most Honoured Master," and "The Normal Course for Rulers and Kings"). Chinese Text Project.
https://ctext.org/zhuangzi

[7] Chan, S. (2019). "Introduction: The Excavated Guodian 郭店 Bamboo Manuscripts." In Dao Companion to the Excavated Guodian Bamboo Manuscripts, 1–17. Springer.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04633-0_1

[8] Laozi; Legge, J. (trans.). (1891). Dao De Jing. Chinese Text Project.
https://ctext.org/dao-de-jing

[9] Zhuangzi; Legge, J. (trans.). (1891). "Perfect Enjoyment" (Zhuangzi, chapter 18, Zhi Le). Chinese Text Project.
https://ctext.org/text.pl?if=en&node=42174

[10] Slingerland, E. (2003). Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195138993.001.0001

[11] Wang, R. R. "Yinyang (Yin-yang)." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
https://iep.utm.edu/yinyang/

[12] Sujato, B. (trans.). (2018). "Born From the Beloved" (Majjhima Nikāya 87). SuttaCentral.
https://suttacentral.net/mn87/en/sujato

[13] Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2019). "Attachment Orientations and Emotion Regulation." Current Opinion in Psychology, 25, 6–10.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.02.006

[14] Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1990). "Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem." Journal of Political Economy, 98(6), 1325–1348.
https://doi.org/10.1086/261737

[15] Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk." Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185

[16] Bonanno, G. A. (2004). "Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?" American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.
https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20