Innocence in Spirit

Wu Wang is "without falsehood": thunder under heaven, spring's signal, everything answering spontaneously — and everything that answers spontaneously is right. Innocence means a pure heart and a blank mental screen, receptive to the guidance of the higher power, free of preconceptions and mistrust — the return to childlike wonder without childishness. It will not buy a good end with a bad method, stays free of flattery's pull and desire's, and takes every step in order. Its severest test is the unexpected itself: undeserved misfortune, accepted without abandoning your principles or your goals — flexible toward events, immovable in essence, moving with the flow while remaining entirely yourself. Line 2 gives the discipline plainly: plough without counting the harvest — do the work for the work, and let the outcome belong to the future.

Line 1 confirms that the original impulse of the heart, before second-guessing embroiders it, is trustworthy — it is the calculations added afterward that spoil things. Line 3 concerns loss that follows no fault, which happens in every life; the whole teaching is in the response — accept the undeserved with equanimity, for anger and bitterness compound the misfortune and cost the one thing the event itself could not take, your innocence. Line 5 counsels that trouble arrived from outside needs no cure of yours: the urge to intervene, to administer remedies to a disturbance that came unbidden, only feeds it, and some situations resolve only when left alone. And line 6 holds the final subtlety — even action from the purest motive fails when the time is against it; innocence includes knowing when to do nothing at all.