Pooh Bear Loves Honey Too Much to Be a Buddhist

I recently read this curious little book called The Tao of Pooh. My thoughts over the past year or so have consistently settled on the idea of effortlessness. I've gained great respect for the illogical attitude that allows my will to be at the mercy of the natural world.

So in a sense, I didn't learn anything from this book that I wasn't already experiencing, but it was a lightly funny read on the basics behind Daoism. I still don't know if it's actually spelled with a "D" or a "T" but I think that might just be another one of those things that if asked, a Taoist would give you a stupid smile and totter off whistling to themselves. Eh, details are not the strong suit of the Daoist. Fair enough, it doesn't change anything anyhow.

The best and what I felt was the most valuable thing to be obtained from this book was the anecdote about the vinegar tasters. The image does a wonderful job of summing up the key differences between Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. To sum it up in a slightly more compact version than Benjamin Hoff gives us; basically there are three wise men tasting vinegar, and the look on each man's face explains how they view the world and their relation to it. The first man, Confucius, has a sour expression because to him, mankind was out of step with the ways of heaven. Thus the many rules and rituals of Confucianism seek to realign us. The second man, Buddha, wears a bitter expression because with his way of thinking, life is a series of traps which the world sets through desires and attachments. Therefore to reach Nirvana, you must distance yourself from all attachment. Now finally we come to the third man, Lao-tse who is smiling broadly. Lao-tse believed that natural laws and harmony were accesible to everyone at anytime and that the interference of mankind was all that brought unhappiness. In a sense, to be effortless, is to be happy and to find harmony with your environment.

I thought it was pretty obvious and clever that Winnie the Pooh was used as such a device. Pooh's simplemindedness and general disregard for stress make him the ideal Taoist. The rest of the book is spent giving examples of this and having the narrator argue with Pooh over everything. It seems pretty clear that Hoff is not a Daoist, if he is indeed portraying himself as the narrator, but he never really makes it clear how invested he is in his own work. Maybe that's all the evidence we need, but more importantly we probably shouldn't care.