Tao: The Watercourse Way

Watts’s last book, and the place to go if the Taoist side of his thinking is what draws you.

Why Start Here

Choose Tao: The Watercourse Way when you want less about the self and more about how to move through the world. Here Watts turns to Chinese philosophy and its central image of the Tao as flowing water: yielding, unforced, and yet capable of wearing down stone. The book is an extended meditation on wu wei, the art of acting in accord with the grain of things rather than fighting against it. For readers worn out by a culture of striving, it reads like permission to stop pushing.

He left it unfinished at his death in 1973, and his friend and collaborator Al Chung-liang Huang completed it. That history gives it a distinctive calm: it is the work of a man at ease with his material, no longer trying to convince anyone. It makes a fine third book, deepening the nature-facing thread that runs quietly through everything else Watts wrote.

What to Expect

Reflective and unhurried, closer to a series of connected essays than a single argument. Watts weaves in Chinese characters and calligraphy, and the pace is deliberately slow, meant to be sipped rather than rushed. Expect to come away with a mood and a way of seeing more than a set of takeaways.