Bu Er (不二) — Beyond Subject and Object

Beyond the practical cultivation of qi, the balancing of yin and yang, and even the recovery of one's original xing, the deepest strand of Taoist mystical teaching points toward a realization that dissolves the most basic structural feature of ordinary experience: the felt distinction between a perceiving subject and a perceived object, between "self" and "world."

The Zhuangzi's Anticipation

Though the specific term bu er (borrowed partly from Buddhist vocabulary as the tradition developed in dialogue with Indian Buddhism) postdates Zhuangzi, the concept it names is arguably already present in his butterfly dream and in his broader teaching on the equalization of things (Qiwulun, the title of one of the Inner Chapters) — the recognition that the categories through which we ordinarily divide experience into separate, bounded things (including the boundary between "self" and "other") are conventional and constructed rather than reflecting some ultimate, mind-independent division actually present in reality itself.

What Non-Duality Does Not Mean

This is frequently misunderstood as claiming that nothing really exists, or that all apparent distinctions are simply false and should be ignored in practice — this is not the traditional teaching. Water is still usefully distinguished from fire for practical purposes; a person still needs to eat, sleep, and navigate relationships with other distinct beings. The teaching concerns the ultimate, most fundamental level of reality, not the conventional, practically useful level at which ordinary distinctions remain entirely valid and necessary for functioning in the world.

Non-Duality in Advanced Meditation

Practically, advanced meditative states described in Taoist literature (and closely paralleled in Buddhist meditation literature) involve a progressive loosening of the ordinarily rigid boundary between the meditator as observing subject and the contents of experience as observed object — culminating, in the most advanced accounts, in states where this subject-object structure itself is recognized as constructed rather than fundamental, opening onto an experience of undivided, seamless awareness in which the previous felt sense of a separate self observing a separate world simply does not arise, without this constituting unconsciousness or the cessation of clear perception (traditional accounts insist perception and clarity, if anything, become sharper rather than diminished in this state).

Return to the Tao

This non-dual realization is closely connected to and arguably represents the fullest actualization of what the Daodejing calls returning to or merging with the Tao — since the Tao, as the single undivided source of all phenomena, cannot itself be adequately characterized through the subject-object duality that structures ordinary experience of the differentiated "ten thousand things" it gives rise to. Recognizing non-duality directly, rather than merely understanding it as an abstract philosophical proposition, is treated across the tradition's more mystically oriented literature as the deepest and most complete form of spiritual attainment available to a practitioner.