Wu Wei means in Chinese “non-doing or ‘doing nothing”. It sounds like a pleasant invitation to relax or worse, fall into laziness or apathy. Yet this concept is key to the noblest kind of action according to the philosophy of Dao and is at the heart of what it means to follow Dao or The Way. According to the central text of Dao, the Dao De Jing: ‘The Dao never acts yet nothing is left undone’.

This is the paradox of Wu Wei Wu. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or ‘actionless action’. It means being at peace while engaged in the most frenetic tasks so that one can carry these out with maximum skill and efficiency.

Wu Wei is closely connected to the Dao reverence for the natural world, for it means striving to make our behavior as spontaneous and inevitable as certain natural processes, and to ensure that we are swimming with rather than against currents. We are to be like the bamboo that bends in the wind.

Wu Wei involves letting go of ideas that we may otherwise try to force too violently onto things; it invites us instead to respond to the true demands of situations, which tend only to be noticed when we put our own ego-driven plans aside. What can follow is a loss of self-consciousness, a new unity between the self and its environment, which releases energy that is normally held back by an overly aggressive, willful style of thinking.