Description:

For Taoists everywhere, the New York Times bestseller from the author of The Te of Piglet. Happy 90th birthday (10/14/16), to one of the world's most beloved icons of literature, Winnie-the-Pooh! The how of Pooh? The Tao of who? The Tao of Pooh!?! In which it is revealed that one of the world's great Taoist masters isn't Chinese--or a venerable philosopher--but is in fact none other than that effortlessly calm, still, reflective bear. A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh! While Eeyore frets, and Piglet hesitates, and Rabbit calculates, and Owl pontificates, Pooh just is. And that's a clue to the secret wisdom of the Taoists.

Review

Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh is one of the strangest bestsellers of the late twentieth century: a work of comparative philosophy disguised as a children’s-book annotation, a polemic against cleverness that is, in its own way, extremely clever, and an act of cultural translation that runs on a pun. The near-homophone “Pooh” and “P’u” (the Uncarved Block) gives Hoff his entire engine: Winnie-the-Pooh is the Taoist sage, not metaphorically but literally, in the sense that a particular kind of reading can make the Hundred Acre Wood into a handbook for effortless living. The book is not an academic study; it is a piece of popular allegorical criticism that succeeds best when it stops explaining and lets its chosen exemplar simply be. That it has annoyed serious Sinologists and delighted millions of readers in roughly equal measure is a sign that Hoff has done something real, if not always defensible. The argument I want to make is that the book’s real contribution is not its fidelity to the Tao Te Ching or Chuang-tse — though it draws on both — but the way it recovers a mode of practical wisdom that the West has largely ceded to self-help cliché, and that its chief weakness is an anti-intellectual pose that occasionally undermines the very tradition it means to champion.

Hoff states his thesis plainly enough. “The essence of the principle of the Uncarved Block,” he writes, “is that things in their original simplicity contain their own natural power, power that is easily spoiled and lost when that simplicity is