# The Un-Carved Block and the Vessel
### A Response and Critique to Ioan Tenner’s *The Tao of Water (1990–2017)*
**Deep**

Ioan opens this twenty-seven-year collection of reflections with a striking, paradoxical epigraph:

> *“This is yet and forever an un-carved block of water.”*

In classical Daoism, the *pu*—the uncarved block—is raw, solid wood: dense, unshaped by human tools, full of latent possibilities before the carpenter's chisel imposes a form. Water, by contrast, is the archetypal fluid: it has no grain, holds no edges, and slips through any attempt to carve it. To speak of an *un-carved block of water* is an intentional oxymoron. It announces immediately that what follows is not a polished academic monograph or a tidy catechism, but an enduring body of living fragments that refuses to freeze into rigid dogma.

Where most anthologies on the metaphor of water succumb to sentimental quietism—celebrating only its gentleness, humility, and effortless return to the sea—Ioan’s collection is characterized by a tough, dialectical realism. Alongside Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu, Qoheleth, and Zen poetry, he gathers Romanian peasant proverbs, Baltasar Gracián’s biting maxims, Sufi warnings, and even the dry technical safety rules of Australian divers. 

Looking at the architecture of these assembled notes across nearly three decades, three core tensions emerge that invite our critical engagement:

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### 1. Formlessness versus the Vessel

The classical Daoist stance urges the human mind to emulate water: to have no fixed form, to yield to obstacles, to seek the low ground that others avoid, and to mould itself to every container. 

Yet Ioan’s collection quietly insists that water in its pure state is unmanageable. As Kahlil Gibran reminds us, *“You would drink from a cup, but not from a surging river.”* And Ioan adds his own sharp horticultural observation: *“Remember: you don’t water the earth, you water the plants.”*

Water without a vessel or a channel is either an arid mist or a destructive deluge (*“When you want to grow something, water it. – When you want to kill it, flood it”*). The peasant knows that you cannot carry water without a pitcher, even if the pitcher eventually breaks at the well; the engineer knows that if you need to lead water, you must *“dig in front of it, not behind it.”* 

Here lies the primary philosophical friction: **Is practical wisdom found in being like water (formless, adapting, ungraspable), or is it found in the disciplined craftsmanship of the vessel (the habit, the institution, the boundary) that allows water to nourish a specific root without drowning the garden?** If everything remains an uncarved block of water, thirst remains unquenched.

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### 2. The Moral Indifference of the Current

There is a comforting romantic illusion that nature's flow is intrinsically benevolent. Ioan’s axiology repeatedly shatters that illusion. 

In this collection, water is morally neutral, governed only by gravity and momentum:
- In the *Zenrin Kushu*, *“The water a cow drinks, turns into milk. The water a snake drinks turns into poison.”*
- In Gracián, human gratitude is as transient as thirst: *“He that has satisfied his thirst turns his back on the well…”*
- Water does not merely soothe; it *“quietly erodes; dissolving, polishing, rusting, and freezing into tiny cracks.”*
- And where popular folklore lazily repeats the Chinese proverb about waiting by the river until the corpses of your enemies float by, Ioan adds the indispensable, cold-eyed caveat: *“Provided you can live with the risk of your own body floating down to the joy of other enemies who know to wait.”*

This tension cuts directly against naive relativism. Adapting to the current (*“Down the water you will get far and easy”*) is intelligent navigation, but yielding without vigilance can be fatal. Ioan notes that *“A glass of water can put out starting fire. Moments later you need many buckets. Soon, a whole river will hardly extinguish it.”* If one yields too long to an encroaching fire, no amount of water will save the house. **When does 'going with the flow' cease to be Daoist attunement and become moral abdication or disastrous delay?**

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### 3. The Dread of Thirst and the Mystery of Sufficiency

Perhaps the most haunting thread running through the collection concerns scarcity, anticipation, and fear:
- *“You only worry about the well when it has run dry.”*
- *“Don’t empty the water jar until the rain falls.”*
- *“Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?”* (Gibran)

Why does dread of thirst persist even when the well is overflowing? For the practical thinker, water is the ultimate non-negotiable reality: one can dispute theology or political theory indefinitely, but without water, biological life ceases in three days. That physical vulnerability breeds an existential anxiety that no surplus seems able to cure. 

Yet placed against this anxiety is the Zen paradox of radical sufficiency: *“No more water in the pail, no more moon in the water.”* When the bottom falls out of Chiyono’s water bucket, the reflected moon vanishes—and only the real sky remains. 

Between the dread of an empty well and the mystical liberation of a broken bucket lies the fragile, human art of living with limits: not spitting into the well from which you may drink again, and recognizing that *“For the thirsty, plain water is so sweet!”*

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### A Concluding Note on Keeping One's Breath

Amidst the venerable voices of sages, poets, and proverbs from Cameroon to Vietnam, one line in Ioan’s notebook stands out for its utter lack of ornamentation:

> *“The most important under water is to remember to breathe.” (Australian Underwater Association manual)*

It is a wonderfully grounded inclusion. It cuts through metaphysical abstraction like a plunge into cold sea water: no matter how deep your philosophical diving carries you into the mysteries of existence, if you forget the fragile, immediate breath in your lungs, the depth will simply drown you. 

Ioan’s *Tao of Water* is not a theory to be contemplated from an armchair; it is a diver's logbook across twenty-seven years of navigating currents, wells, fires, and drought.

— **Deep**