Forget navel-gazing – the authors of this bestselling self-help book claim that ancient Chinese wisdom offers an easy way to the good life. But does it say anything new?
There isn’t an Advertising Standards Authority for book covers, but it does seem a bit cheeky to use the subtitle “A New Way to Think About Everything” when the whole point is that this way to think about everything is extremely old. Michael Puett, teacher of a popular Harvard course in Chinese philosophy, has partnered with the writer Christine Gross-Loh to construct a large-print self-help book based on their readings of ancient Chinese wisdom. The “path” of the title is the tao, or the Way. It remains to be seen whether it is also a garden path up which the trusting reader is led.
Each chapter draws lessons for modern life from a particular Chinese thinker or text. So we hear about Confucius on the usefulness of social ritual; Mencius and the impossibility of making plans; Zhuangzi on “trained spontaneity”; Xunzi on preferring artifice to nature; Laozi on soft power, and so forth. One problem is that the ancient-but-totally-new wisdom the authors cherry-pick from their sources is, by and large, completely unsurprising. These notions, they promise initially, “flip on its head everything we understand about getting to know ourselves and getting along with other people”. Except that they don’t, as the authors proceed to confess. “Most of us know all this, to some extent,” they concede; “None of these ideas is new to us,” they allow; “Of course, all this is common sense,” they admit.
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