Chinese thought around the energy that sets the world in motion refers to tao (or, dao)—eternal, constant, and impossible to describe. Indigenous inhabitants of Polynesia believe in mana, a power bestowed on all creatures and things. It’s worth considering how many of these ancient ideas have survived to the present time, and in what form.
One is often not fully aware of what culture some concepts come from, what they were in the past, and what their meaning is today. There are a lot of books that refer to “tao” on the self-help shelves of bookshops and libraries—the tao of programming, health, sex, war, schooling, or microservices; the Tao of erotic massage, understanding and training a dog the Taoist way, and coaching according to Tao. It looks like tao is everywhere.
Chinese philosophers would certainly agree with this idea of the ubiquity of this concept, better referred to as dao as per the standardized Pinyin romanization system of Mandarin, but there’s more than just the key idea of Daoism that has survived to this day. As it was written in the Daodejing (also known as Tao Te Ching), it’s not the only example of when the force described thousands of years ago finds its place in the modern world.
The concept of mana is well known to fans of gaming—both computer games and tabletop RPGs. Players who favor magic users know that, without an adequate level of mana, they can achieve nothing. Very few people, however, are aware of its Polynesian roots and the path it traveled—from its function of divine power revered by the inhabitants of Oceania to the video game energy measured in points (and renewed through imbibing elixirs). Are the dao which permeates the whole world and the mana which accumulates in people, objects, and events the emanation of similar energy? While it’s unclear whether the Western cultural sphere has the tools to comprehend these forces, it might also be that they were discovered a long time ago but simply described differently.
To Describe the Indescribable
The most important personage of Daoism, the author of the Daodejing (or, The Book of the Way and Virtue), is still a mystery. Referred to as Laozi, which simply means “Old Master” it’s unclear what his real name was, or even whether he existed at all. According to legend, he was born in 571 BCE as Li Er and worked in the library archives at the court of Zhou. When he turned eighty years old, Laozi decided to retreat to the mountains. He climbed on an ox and set off, but when he got to a mountain pass watchtower, he was stopped by a guard called Yin Xi, who told him he wouldn’t let him through until he recorded all his wisdom in writing. That’s how the Daodejing originated, recognized as the first philosophical work in Chinese history.
The man who is today known as the Old Master could have really existed. He bore the name Lao Dan and was a teacher of Confucius (551-479 BCE), who was younger than him. Most probably, though, the Daodejing is not the work of one person but rather a compilation of texts by different authors. The mystery of Laozi, however, is just the beginning of (nomen est omen) the path. Dao is even harder to grasp.
According to the Ancient Chinese Shuowen Jiezi dictionary compiled in the second century, the written character for dao is composed of two ideograms: “head” and “walk, run.” Literally, it means “walking head” or “lead.” This is translated as “path”—both literally and metaphorically. The interpretation becomes decidedly more difficult when contemplating the path’s destination. “The Dao that can be spoken of is not the ever-constant Dao. The name that can be named is not the ever-constant name. That which is without-name is the beginning of heaven and earth. That which possesses a name is the mother of the ten thousand creatures.” These are the first words of the Daodejing—sparing, but full of meaning.
As claimed by Feng Youlan (1895-1990), the author of The Short History of Chinese Philosophy, dao is in reality nameless. Describing it in these words is a completely different situation than calling a table “a table,” for then one has concrete attributes in mind. Dao is the highest unity, a non-being, which results in existence. Its “eternity” means first of all immutability, for, although things can change, the laws that govern them are constant. If a human being understands them and acts in accordance with them, it would be beneficial, not in a material sense, but in coming close to a state of harmony with the world.
Daodejing states that, “The Way of heaven, while without favor, is always with virtuous people.” That means that dao treats everyone equally. The answer to the question of who the “virtuous people” are comes in those who strive to understand the nature of dao and cultivate wu wei—inaction. But more about this in a moment.
All things get something from dao; this is de—action, translated as “a virtue,” understood both in a moral and beyond moral sense. As Laozi emphasizes, dao is what things become; de is what makes them what they are. The foundation of the dao movement is the pursuit of one’s opposite (as in the case of the powers of yin and yang). If something reaches an extreme, it starts to change into its opposite. Laozi says, “Misfortune! is that which good fortune leans on. Good fortune! is that which misfortune lies on.”
Feng gives an example of what could be a danger of going to extremes: a wise man is aware that his knowledge is still very limited, so he’ll continue to expand it. In contrast, a student who has just read a handbook may think that he knows everything there is to know, and that it’s impossible to explore the subject any further. He’ll then start to regress. Therefore, a wise man puts himself below others, and one who wants to be strong must start from the conviction that he’s weak.
Winnie the Pooh, the Wise
In 1982, an American author Benjamin Hoff made an attempt to bring dao closer to Western readers and wrote The Tao of Pooh. He chose that affable bear, a clumsy lover of honey and a favorite of children, not only to make a difficult concept more understandable for Western audiences but because Winnie the Pooh is a fan of humble pleasures, and for that reason he represents a personality close to a Daoist ideal. A person (or here, a bear) personifies de, a being who is simple and innocent.
“Great knowledge is like ignorance,” writes Laozi. People have lost virtue precisely because they have acquired too much knowledge, which leads to many desires. When they try to satisfy them it is clear that the result they’ll achieve will be just the opposite—like the character in a famous Chinese story where some men held a snake drawing competition. The one who finished first added paws to his snake and lost. Hence the Chinese saying, “to draw paws on your snake,” meaning to do something excessive that spoils the effect. “Not to know the limits of your passion—there’s nothing more aggravating. To know how to be satisfied with what one has—there’s no more permanent satisfaction,” explains the Daodejing. Many a Western philosopher would agree with these words, where one should live by not acting. The Daoist principle of inaction, or wu, doesn’t mean total passivity but rather limiting one’s action to what is in agreement with dao (and therefore natural).
The second most important founder of Daoism, fourth century BCE philosopher Zhuangzi, also ponders this question. In the first chapter of his eponymous treatise, also known as the True Scripture of Southern Florescence (Nanhua zhenjing), there is a story of two birds—a bigger one and a smaller one. The first one can fly over thousands of miles, and the other one only hops from tree to tree. Both are happy because they do what they can and like to do. What lies in one’s nature is the best for that individual and should not be changed. Zhuangzi’s attitude toward emotions is similar—and stoic. When it rains and a child wants to play outside, they are sad. An adult knows that there’s no point in being angry, upset, or worried, because that’s the way things are. If one thinks about this problem, the mind wins over emotion. The sage also has feelings, but they don’t disturb the peace of the soul.
One should adhere to dao not only in private life but also in politics. According to Taoists, wu wei is the best a ruler could do to make their subjects live well. The more legislation, the heavier the interference into the natural order of things—this is a direct road to catastrophe. Problems occur not because too little was done but too much. It’s not people that should rule, but dao—it has established the best order. As Laozi said, “Use non-interference to take hold of the world.” Whether it’s possible to take hold of the world without leaving the house is a question of dao’s simplest possible form—“an uncarved block,” pu. There’s nothing simpler than dao, although it’s hard to believe when reading the texts of Chinese philosophers.
It’s hard to deny that Winnie the Pooh is pu. The kind-hearted, simple bear does what lies in his nature: he eats honey. He has no great desires; he doesn’t interfere with the order of things. He’s unburdened by experience and knowledge.
This state of affairs is the first of two levels of happiness that can be achieved. Absolute happiness is much harder to obtain. That means unifying with dao, blurring differences between “me” and “not me” and identifying with the universe. However, Pooh is not the only inhabitant of the Hundred Acre Wood. With Daoist flair, Hoff also wrote another book The Te of Piglet. In the words of Laozi, “What is soft and weak conquers what is hard and strong.” It doesn’t matter that Piglet is small and weak, it’s because of this that he is the embodiment of virtue te, or de.
Zhuangzi himself—who lived at the turn of the fourth and third centuries BCE—practiced what he preached. When the king of the Chu State heard of this unusual recluse, he wanted to make him a minister. Zhuangzi, however, laughed in the messenger’s face and replied, “Begone! Defile me not! I would rather disport myself to my own enjoyment in the mire than be slave to the ruler of a State.” This is undoubtedly the emanation of pu.
Around the same time, on the other end of the Eurasian continent, Zhuangzi had similar views and attitudes to rulers.
The Zhuangzi describes an episode as follows:
Master Dongguo asked Zhuangzi, “This thing called the Way—where does it exist?”
Zhuangzi said, “There’s no place it doesn’t exist.”
“Come,” said Master Dongguo, “You must be more specific!”
“It is in the ant.”
“As low a thing as that?”
“It is in the panicgrass.”
“But that’s lower still!”
“It is in the tiles and shards.”
“How can it be so low?”
“It is in the piss and shit.”
Although there appear to be tangent points between Daoism and European philosophy, Zhuangzi’s vision of the world seems particularly close to a pantheistic one. This doctrine claims that God is identical with the world. Alan Watts, a British philosopher specializing in comparative religions, called Daoism “a naturalistic pantheism,” which means that nature itself plays a causal role.
Later, when religious Daoism was born, there occurred a departure toward de—seen, for example, in the worship of Laozi—but in the original Daoist philosophy the unity of the world and dao can be observed. As Zhuangzi says, “There is no end or beginning to the Dao.” Omnipresent and omnipotent, it penetrates everything. It’s not only a source of all things, it not only makes everything what it is, but it also unifies all in itself.
In the words of Zhuangzi, “They may in the light of the Dao all be reduced to the same category.”
The Power of Mana
Far from the shores of ancient China—where its sailors would never venture—there was born an idea which is now mainly known to devotees of video games: mana. Although the inhabitants of islands scattered across the Pacific Ocean were separated by hundreds of miles, due to their superior seafaring skills, the water felt to them more like a bridge than a barrier. Mana accompanied them on these routes, spreading all around Oceania. Although beliefs in Melanesia and Polynesia differ, the concept is found on almost every island. In twenty-seven Austronesian languages, mana means supernatural force. Its origin is unclear, although linguist Robert Blust believes that originally the word meant strong wind, thunder, and storm. He seems to be on track, since weather conditions are also a manifestation of mana, but more on that later.
Although the very idea of mana had appeared in Europe earlier, the most important work of Western thought is The Melanesians (1891) by a missionary by the name of Robert Henry Codrington. Its definition—in an abridged version—was, “This is what works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature.” As for what this means in practice, Andrzej Szyjewski, a scholar and anthropologist of religion at the Institute of Religious Studies at Jagiellonian University explains to me,
We can talk here about energy, or rather power, connected to the possibility of influencing reality, efficiency, and success in all activities. A similar term in the Polish language is szczęście [luck/joy], which means that one succeeds in achieving what they planned. It can be lost or gained; identified with material objects. It is itself able to abandon one person and move to another (as in fairy tales when luck abandons a protagonist and starts to favor his brother or a neighbor). Mana is ambivalent; it realizes itself in different ways and it is not tied to ethical values. One can compare it to electricity, which on one hand is used to light up spaces, and on the other to operate an electric chair.
Poles also look for a way to achieve luck. They are joyful when they find a horseshoe; sometimes they carry amulets and talismans. In the past, they used to tie red ribbons on children’s wrists for good fortune. The inhabitants of New Guinea collected the skulls of their enemies. They contained mana, which could help their village to prosper.
Besides luck, this power provides authority. If a leader has the respect of his subjects, and everyone submits to him, that means that he has plenty. The same expectations also apply to his children. “Children who belong to ariki, the leaders’ class, are expected to possess a lot of power,” says Szyjewski. “However, it may happen that mana would soar in another direction. This is a similar situation to the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ in China. If the ruler is always successful, it means that he has the mandate. If he is defeated in a military battle, it means that he has lost that mandate.”
Mana is important not only to leaders but also artists and craftsmen. Objects produced by someone with a lot of mana are considered better. What’s more, it can also transfer to the object. For example, a boat builder passes his mana to a boat he has built. Boats, as often happens in island cultures, play an important role in Polynesia. In the past, the people possessed such strong magic that the vessels floated in the air and instantly covered distances between lands. That power has, unfortunately, vanished, and the spells became weaker and weaker. Nowadays a boat is not able to fly. But it’s still worth throwing a spell at it—at least it will sail faster than an ordinary, unaided craft.
Don’t Let the Ruler into the Garden
Mana is certainly not a particular power only passed by the chosen. It’s everywhere, but in varying intensity. “Every object exists because it’s bound by a particular amount of energy,” explains Szyjewski. “A stone has enough of it to exist, but too little to move. Animals, due to a larger amount of power, are capable of doing so. People can think and speak. However, spirits have the most power because they’re not burdened by corporeality.” Miscarried fetuses may become the most powerful spirits because they’re equipped with enough mana to last a human lifetime. According to Robert Andrzej Dul and Katarzyna Liwak-Rybak in their 2007 book Mitologie Świata: Ludy Oceanii [Mythologies of the World: The Peoples of Oceania], this is what happened to the greatest Polynesian hero, Maui. As a newborn he was thrown into the sea, where he was looked after by the supreme god of creation. When he returned to Earth, he had so much power that he fished islands from the ocean, brought fire to the world, and caused the sun to regularly wander across the sky. Only one task exceeded his capabilities: the elimination of death from the world.
Although mana is unevenly distributed—it transfers from person to person, or from an object to a person, and vice versa—its amount in the world is always the same. It can, however, cumulate, which inevitably leads to discharge. The outer signs of this situation are violent weather phenomena; storms, floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes. In such moments mana becomes destructive. This is cratophany—the revealing of supernatural power, which was described, among others, by the philosopher Mircea Eliade.
Mana can be dangerous not only through violent weather phenomena. Accumulation of power in one person can lead to the difference of potential between them and the environment, which will act destructively. This is why the islanders created a number of regulations called tapu (tabu in Fiji, kapu in Hawaii). Most of them apply to the ruler. In some places, they’re not allowed to stand on land because they could adversely affect crops. For example, on the Marquesas Islands, the leader can move on their own feet, but they shouldn’t enter an ordinary subject’s garden, because their power can destroy the vegetation. On the other hand, the ruler’s garden is covered by tapu (in this case equal to a ban) to their subjects.
The ruler is not the only person whose mana can bring misfortune. “Polynesians believed that a sailor who discovers a new land enters the realm of the beyond,” says Szyjewski. “He then acquires such a great charge of power that he becomes a demigod. After returning to their island, the discoverers are treated as a threat until suitable rituals are conducted to secure their mana. Before the sailors can go back to dry land, they have to wait until there appears a person equipped with mana of the opposite sign, for example, a woman during menstruation. After she embraces them, they can enter secular, noa, reality. The sailor is again an ordinary man, but his renown remains.”
The Universal Faith
Mana appeared in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century through Codrington and was revived again in the fifties of the following century due to the writing of Mircea Eliade. The Americans, while looking for “something new,” were absorbing texts devoted to the religions of Oceania. In 1961, there appeared a short story “The Moon Moth” by fantasy writer Jack Vance, where the word mana was used in the context of the possession of magical power as a synonym of strakh coined by the author. But this is only briefly mentioned.
Science-fiction writer Larry Niven made mana a key element of the world presented in the short story “Not Long Before the End” (1969). Many readers also noticed the ecological message—Niven’s mana is a non-renewable resource which wizards exploit to the extent that it completely disappears. In effect, the surrounding reality is totally bereft of the magical layer. Apparently the Americans were craving it, because in the sixties Tolkien mania started to bloom, and later there appeared computer games and RPGs where mana had significant importance.
Codrington was intrigued by the questions of whether mana was an original form of religion, and if the word contains the universal belief in supernatural power, which applies to cults all over the world. The answers vary.
An anthropologist from Hawaii University, Alex Golub, thinks not. To him, mana is a concept that applies only to the Pacific Islands, and which was borrowed by Westerners. Some scholars, however, see in it the universal phenomenon. Ivy G. Campbell, the author of the text Manaism: A Study in the Psychology of Religion, claimed as early as 1918 that mananism—the manifestation of life in every object—was the first method humans used to explain the phenomena around them. She recalled, among other things, the concepts from languages of Indigenous North American peoples—orenda in Iroquoian and wak in Dakotan. Their meaning is a non-material power, possessed by every person, object, and phenomenon.
Szyjewski agrees with this concept. “Traditional cultures, which the West tends to call ‘tribal,’ are conservative, based on maintaining constant values,” he says. “So, when they encounter something that is strange, or different, the concept of symbolic value zero, like mana, saves their reality from disintegrating.” Coming into contact with the unknown, then, would mean that either the world is ill-described and will soon fall apart or something from the sacral sphere has infiltrated it.
As French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss describes it, this is an attribute of human thinking on a universal scale—it’s simply a good way to deal with a complicated world. It cannot be claimed that this idea appeared in only one particular part of the world—they simply came across it for the first time in Melanesia.
Codrington, while talking to the locals, noticed that they often use the word “mana,” so he attempted to to describe it, but this concept is encountered all over the world.
Chinese Yin and Polynesian Yang
Chinese dao and Polynesian mana are only two examples from a long list of concepts with which one can become familiarized in three ways: in their original form, as derived from particular cultures; as a local name of something that is a universal human experience; as a concept used in contemporary culture, not necessarily in agreement with the original meaning. Dao and mana are opposed to each other, but they also share a lot of similarities. Dao permeates the whole world, everything that exists, and represents the natural order, while mana is something else, not quite from this world. On the other hand mana, just like dao, is present in everything—in a stone, the air, animals, and human beings—although with varying intensity. As dao does, it circulates, it is in constant motion, but on different grounds.
The handbooks offering the use of dao in every walk of life are mainly based on the concept of harmony and the return to the natural order of things. But this is only a small part of Daoism. Mana has moved even further from the original. Polynesians would probably be glad to find that its level could be increased by drinking an elixir. The bad news, though, is that it can only be acquired in a game. But when one looks closer at these two concepts, finding in them familiar ideas and visions of the world, it becomes clear that ways of thinking in different cultures have more in common than not, just like the sea surrounding Polynesian islands.
Notes:
- Laozi, The Book of Dao and De (Jagiellonian University Publishing, 2006).
- Alex Golub and Jon Peterson, “How Mana Left the Pacific and Became a Video Game Mechanic,” in In New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures, ed. Matt Tomlinson and Kāwika Tengan Ty P, (ANU Press, 2016), 308-38.
- Zhuangzi, vol 12,6, 2009 p.233, in Lech Ostasz “Odmiany Panteizmu w Świetle Historii Tego Pojęcia,” in Humanistyka i Przyrodoznawstwo, (Olsztyn, 2020), 26.
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