Go to any really bad bookstore, one indifferent to quality and subservient to last week’s fad, and you’ll see many books with the word “Tao” in the titles. Examples in recent years have included The Tao of the Jump Shot: An Eastern Approach to Life and Basketball and The Tao of Bow Wow: Understanding and Training Your Dog the Taoist Way. The reference is to the Tao te Ching, one of the textual cornerstones of Chinese thought, written in the sixth century BC by, tradition says, a sage named Lao-tzu. It is a work from which many have sought to gain genuine understanding while some others, clearly, have sought to make a buck.

I’m happy to report that Stephen Legault’s book, Carry Tiger to Mountain: The Tao of Activism and Leadership (Arsenal Pulp Press, $24.95), is in the former camp. No one would call it a scholarly or even a tightly organized affair. But it is the work of an honest and dedicated layman who’s looking for guidance in his vocation.

Legault is a former park naturalist with the federal government who now works with various B.C. environmental groups. In a conversational style laced with bits of autobiography, he summarizes his years of study and his desire to show himself and others how “to apply the teachings of the Tao te Ching to our work as activists, whatever your cause or mode of activism might be.” The book’s title, of course, is the name of one of the movements in tai chi. Throughout the text, his discourse spills over into Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian writers. But if this gives his book a hodgepodge quality, it is only reflecting a similar quality in Taoism as practised today.

The Tao te Ching is a series of 80-some verses addressed to a prince or ruler but it has little in common with the handbooks for exercising authority written in the West so many centuries later by Thomas More or Machiavelli. Lao-tzu wasn’t counselling the use of power; he was eschewing power. It is a mystical and heterodox work of philosophy that, after Lao-tzu’s death, got turned into a religion, with a later sage, Chuang-tzu, playing the role of Saul/Paul to Lao-tzu’s Jesus, creating an organization and keeping the message alive but changing it profoundly in the process.

Lao-tzu was a contemporary of Confucius, his ideological opposite, and if China were like the Middle East, the heterodoxy of Taoism would have been marginalized until it had the same relationship to Confucianism that Gnosticism has to Christianity, the Kabbalah has to Judaism and Sufism has to Islam. China, however, wasn’t monotheistic, and Taoism got absorbed into both Confucianism and Buddhism until it was largely indistinguishable from them. In broad terms, this diffusiveness is a large part of its appeal to the West. It’s also leavened with environmentalism, the heart of Legault’s approach.

“In our daily lives, we often try to obliterate this relationship,” Legault writes. “We want health without sickness. We want riches without being poor. But harmony is found in the tension between the two. They arise out of one another. They define one another. The polarity is natural.” He goes on to say: “Accepting this intellectually is easier than being on the front lines of various 21st-century causes, such as the fight against climate change or the astounding loss of biodiversity—the very fabric of life—that is occurring worldwide.”

The Tao te Ching (to quote the hybrid translation Legault uses) counsels this: “Do not force action, / instead allow action to arise on its own / and to follow its course.” This is an idea bound up with wu wei, the practice of keeping enough distance from artificial busy-ness to be able to interpret the flow. But he confesses that he finds it “really tough to apply wu wei to my own activism.” He adds that eschewing conflict “has been a particularly difficult lesson for me to learn.” The Tao te Ching “tells us to let joy and anger arise of their own accord, to embrace them and then let them go. So, too, must we allow ourselves to be reflective and exuberant, lazy and energetic, melancholy and ecstatic, if we are to find balance in our work, our family, and our lives.” There is, however, another and opposing interpretation of the Tao te Ching: the anarchist or libertarian one.

The type of philosophical anarchist or libertarian who acknowledges the influence of the Tao te Ching today differs from the Legault variety in two ways: by not having much faith in the power of government to do good and by not being activists in the sense that Legault is using the term. In fact, the anarcho-Taoist could be called an inactivist. He or she is someone who looms small and is self-unimportant, with an under-bearing manner and an under-reaching personality.

That is to say, in this interpretation of Taoism, the practitioner treads and speaks softly by ignoring authority in order to deny its power over us. This type of avoidance is quite different from squaring off against power armed only with non-violence, in the tradition of Gandhi. It’s equally different from what Freud called passive-aggressive behaviour.

Most critics feel that the Tao te Ching becomes most anarchistic towards the end. By contrast, Legault seems to find the greatest relevance to his own views in verses located near the middle. For what it’s worth, the verse that speaks most cogently to me is No. 24, especially in the translation by Red Pine. It goes like this: “Who tiptoes doesn’t stand / who strides doesn’t walk / who watches himself doesn’t appear / who displays himself doesn’t flourish / who flatters himself achieves nothing / who parades himself doesn’t lead / on the road they say / too much food and a tiring pace / some things are simply bad / thus the Taoist shuns them.”