Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh (1982) and The Te of Piglet (1992)
In college, I had a minor romantic entanglement with a hippie who changed my life by giving me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, putting me on a Green Tortoise bus (she was eager to get me the hell out of Eugene, Oregon, where I was moping about because she had a new boyfriend when I came to visit), and telling me to look into Taoism. So I took a class on Eastern religion and read the Tao Te Ching, and I went to a couple of meetings of a campus group of Korean Taoists who all wore suits and ties and instructed me to chant until I could raise water from a bowl placed in front of me, but mostly I read Benjamin Hoff like everyone else.
Rereading him now, I’m embarrassed that I ever took him seriously, though I can see what must have been appealing. College was, for me, pretty overwhelming. Going from a mediocre California high school to Columbia University, I was faced with the reality that I was not so smart or special as I had thought, and that there were a great many people who knew a great deal more than me about a great many things. The workloads were daunting, the reading difficult. And then along came a book telling me that the scholars were actually full of it, and that lying stoned on the floor was perhaps the profounder wisdom. I liked that.
The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet are, in fact, full of straw men, and as much as Hoff hopes to lighten the atmosphere with Winnie-the-Pooh quotes, he comes off as cranky and aggrieved in ways that have become far more familiar in the last couple of decades. His anger about the modern world, about capitalism, about environmental damage, seemed back then to put him on the political left. But he’s also angry at scholars who act as gatekeepers of knowledge, and at feminists who question the neutrality of masculine pronouns and just don’t seem very feminine, positions that have been taken up by the right in today’s culture wars, and that anyway never seemed to have much to do with Taoism.
Indeed, The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet are long on complaints but short on solutions, other than a rather cavalier conclusion that we are facing a “cleansing” crisis that will lead to a new Eden. “Many will find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Hoff says, “because they did not pay enough attention to what the natural world was telling them.” I suppose the Syrians and Ukranians and Chinese Uyghurs should have listened to the trees more.
In spirituality, it’s wise to look to the preacher to assess what’s being preached. Benjamin Hoff seems bitter and acerbic, which is maybe not the best possible recommendation for the spirituality he espouses. It’s also disappointing to discover that your old guru was a fraud, but I guess that puts me in closer touch with the Indian experience of many Westerners.
As for where my own head was at, it seems fittingly nineties to have formulated a spirituality out of slacking, childishness, and despair.
Kill the headlights and put it in neutral.