the Tao of Pooh & the Te of Piglet

This book (or rather pair of books, their having originally been published separately but are nowadays generally distributed as a two-in-one compendium, just like their  founding inspirational scriptures of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), by Benjamin Hoff, is a delightfully accessible and remarkably profound introduction to the general kind of shape and texture and colour of the principles of Taoism.

   Replete with extracts from A. A. Milne's beloved original classics (as well as illustrations from these) as well as from the writings of Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Zhu, and a number of other ancient Chinese sages, Hoff adroitly demonstrates how Pooh lives in harmony with the Tao of the Hundred-Acre-Wood and its various inhabitants in ways that we could learn a great deal from in our crowded rushed modern world; while Piglet's very smallness and oft-fearful-but-never-insincere eagerness to help or reassure insofar as he can encapsulates much of the Taoist virtuosity of Te... all this in ways I would be doing both the philosophy and Hoff's wonderful children's-fictional exposition of it a grand injustice to try to give a pat summary of. But I must say it was quite wonderful to have characters like Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, Kanga, Tigger and Roo, in their deceptive charming simplicity, be shown to quite perfectly embody the positive or negative or fluid aspects of un-Taoist living or un-Tefull being that pervade and restrict so much of the natural mystery of living and being, particularly in our over-intellectualized over-systematized technological mess of what we consider passes for contemporary civilisation.

   Pardon my rant. I kind of gonzo'd this post in an attempt to avoid falling into the very same kind of Heffalump trap that I'm trying to gently warn about, and which Hoff, through Christopher Robin's assortment of imaginary friends and various evasive apothegmic koans or jokey anecdotes about Confucius, will kindly and accurately help you to see wherever they may pop up in the footsteps in the snow you're following round and round the copse. Anyway, this is a fantastic entertaining enlightening book and probably the best introduction to Taoism I could, in my inexperience, recommend to a Western reader.