Wu-Wei in a Pile of Osaka Castle Leaves I Never Finished Sweeping

Wu-Wei in a Pile of Osaka Castle Leaves I Never Finished Sweeping

I sat with Lao Tzu’s hardest idea for years. It reached me over a broom

Once a month, I help clean Osaka Castle Park. A few of us meet in the morning with brooms and plastic bags and work our way along the paths. No one pays us. No one inspects the work when it is done. When a stretch of gravel is still flecked with leaves, and my back has started to complain, I leave the leaves and tell myself they will keep until next time.

This is not unusual here. In Japan, you will see people sweeping the pavement outside their own front doors, and neighborhood groups clearing gutters and verges that belong to no one in particular. Most of us were trained in it from a young age. For nine years, through elementary and junior high school, we cleaned our own classrooms and corridors after lessons. It was compulsory. I disliked it. I am still not fond of it. There is nothing serene about a twelve-year-old pushing a rag across a cold floor because the timetable says so, and the habit carries, somewhere in it, the pressure of a group that expects you to fall in.

So cleaning, for me, is not a spiritual discipline. It is a habit whose original reason has worn away. I mention this early because the rest of what I want to say will make no sense if you imagine me sweeping in a state of grace. I am usually thinking about lunch.

I have written elsewhere about sweeping as an act of attention, the path treated as if it deserved care, and I still hold to that. It is not what was happening on the morning I want to describe. My attention was on lunch. Where it was, and where it was not, turns out to be the whole of the matter.

There is a thought I keep returning to about those nine years. Long before any of us could read a line of Lao Tzu (老子), the schedule had already trained a particular way of acting into us: work no one pays for, no one grades, that you are free to do badly and expected to do anyway. Whatever else that regime was, and it was partly just control, it installed the form of an act before the meaning of it. The behavior came first. The understanding, if it comes at all, can arrive forty years later, holding a broom.

I have read Lao Tzu since I was a university student, and for most of that time I could have given you a serviceable definition of wu-wei (無為). The textbook gloss is not hard: non-action, non-forcing, not straining against the grain of things. I could recite it. What I could not do was reach the thing the word points at underneath the definition. For years, I sat with the question in meditation. Zazen (坐禅) is very good at showing you your own effort, and effort was all I found. I faced the question directly, on the cushion, and it gave me nothing.

Then one morning in the park, mid-sweep, under a plain blue sky, it arrived. I was not thinking about Lao Tzu. I was thinking about what I would eat when we finished. And something I had never been able to reach at my desk or on my cushion was simply present, off to the side, as ordinary as the broom in my hands.

What I had been reaching for had been standing next to my distracting thoughts the whole time.

The word for those thoughts is zatsunen (雑念), the mental noise every meditator is told to clear away. I had spent years treating them as the obstacle. That morning, the thing I wanted seemed to have been leaning against them, close enough to touch, the entire time I was trying to sweep them out of the way.

It came in the park and not on the cushion for a simple reason. In the park, I was not reaching for it. On the cushion, I had been trying to attain wu-wei, and trying is the one posture that puts it out of range. I do not think the years of sitting were wasted. They may be the reason I could recognize the thing when it came. But recognition and arrival happened in different places, and the second one happened where I had stopped looking.

Edward Slingerland, who has written on this at length, compares it to a rainbow: walk toward it to lay a hand on it, and it withdraws by exactly the distance you advance. He calls this the paradox of wu-wei, and he observes that much of what makes a life worth living — spontaneity and ease among these things — seems to come only when approached from the side, never head-on. I offer his work as a company rather than proof. The brain research he draws on is suggestive, not settled, and a Chinese idea does not become true because a Canadian laboratory found a correlate for it. Still, the shape he describes matched the morning exactly.

The park has something the cushion does not. No one pays me.

If someone paid me, I would perfect the work. Because no one does, I am free to leave the leaves.

A paid cleaner cannot tell himself the corner will keep until next time. His attention is bought, and a bought attention is governed by the result. Mine is not. I sweep imperfectly, I stop when I am tired, I compromise without guilt. The aim has been removed, and its removal is the whole condition. I had been trying, for decades, to reach wu-wei by aiming at it more precisely. The park works because there is nothing to aim at.

Lao Tzu seems to have known which direction this runs. In the forty-eighth chapter of the Tao Te Ching (道徳経), he sets two motions against each other. In the pursuit of learning, he says, every day something is acquired; in the pursuit of the Tao, every day something is dropped. Dropped, and dropped again, until you arrive at non-doing (為學日益 / 為道日損). And then the line that used to sound to me like a riddle: “Do nothing, and nothing is left undone” (無為而無不為).

I had been adding for most of my life. A decade in the dojo, years on the cushion, a long shelf of books, all of it effort aimed at the target. None of that was wasted, and I would not give any of it back. But addition was only ever the first motion. The chapter points to a second one, toward subtraction, toward letting the aim itself fall away until what remains can act on its own. The years of acquiring may be what made the dropping possible. You cannot let go of something you never picked up.

I should be careful here, because this is exactly where the idea gets sold. Sometimes, sweeping, an idea comes to me that would not come at the desk. I do not want to oversell it. The ideas are not brilliant. I have never once finished sweeping and thought I had received something remarkable. But they tend to be better than whatever I had been grinding out by force an hour earlier, and now and then one is good enough that I set the broom down and go straight to my desk before it fades.

That is the whole of it. Not a technique, not a productivity method, nothing I can hand you.

The moment I sweep to receive an idea, the idea stops coming. I have tested this without meaning to. On mornings when I arrive at the park half-hoping the desk problem will solve itself, the park stays silent, and I go home with clean paths and nothing else. The aim comes back, and with it the closed door.

This is why I cannot turn any of it into advice, and why I distrust the versions of wu-wei that arrive as four easy steps to effortless success. There is an older reading of Lao Tzu in which wu-wei is a ruler’s method, a way of governing people by appearing to do nothing, and I have never liked it. It dresses up ambition as surrender and leaves the aim fully intact behind the robe. The reading I have described is the quieter one, and I should say plainly that it is my reading, drawn from a park and a broom, not a claim about what the text finally means. Scholars disagree about that, and I am not one of them.

I do not trust this reading either. I have believed I understood before, and each time a later understanding arrived and showed me the earlier one was wrong. I have no reason to think this one is the last. Some months from now, an idea may come to me while I am sitting still, and I will decide that sitting was the answer all along. I have reversed myself this way many times. The Lao Tzu I read at twenty-five is not the Lao Tzu I read now, and the one I read now will not survive my reading him at seventy. This unsettled me for years. I have stopped expecting it to settle. If subtraction is really the direction he points, then what I found in the park is not the floor. It is only the most recent thing I have not yet let go of.

Next month, I will go back with my brooms and my bags, and I will think about lunch, and most likely nothing will happen. The path will be a little cleaner. That has always been reason enough to go, which may be the only part of this I am sure of. Whatever else arrives, arrives because I stopped waiting for it.

About the Author

Takeshi Kitagawa was born in Kobe in 1965 and now lives in Osaka. He practiced kendo for nearly a decade at a police dojo in Kobe, and studied Zen and Buddhist philosophy at temples in Kyoto, where he had the opportunity to listen directly to Sōtō and Rinzai priests over many years. His writing explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and the dō traditions — not as cultural artifacts to be admired from a distance, but as living orientations toward how to be in the world.