What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionActing without forcing — moving with the grain of things, the way water does.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Taoism and The Attention Order are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfThe practices
Travels across2 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderTaoism · c. 500 BCE
Newest holderThe Attention Order · 2026 CE
Turns up as5 tenets · 3 storys · 2 codes · 2 scriptures
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 3 of 171 faithsTaoism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Act without forcing — wu wei.
Water defeats stone without striking it. The sage accomplishes by moving with the grain of things, not against it.
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De — what accumulates when you stop grabbing.
Usually translated virtue, which imports a moral tone the word does not have. It is nearer to potency or standing: the effectiveness a thing has by being fully what it is. The Daodejing's point is that it grows in the person who is not accumulating it.
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Attention is the only offering anyone makes.
It is spent whether or not you choose where. Everything else you might give costs something you can replace.
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The hour of one object.
One hour, one object, no notes. Members report that the first forty minutes are wasted and say so cheerfully.
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Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
Taking it easy is a moral position.
Not laziness and not resignation. Dudeism holds that most striving makes its object worse, that the demand to be productive is a recent and local superstition, and that refusing it takes more nerve than complying.
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Abiding.
The daily practice, such as it is: catching yourself mid-effort and stopping. Dudeism prescribes no sitting, no schedule and no place, on the grounds that a practice with requirements would contradict its own content.
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