Wei Wu Wei (Terence Gray)

“Wei Wu Wei” was the pen name of Terence James Stannus Gray (14 September 1895 – 5 January 1986), an Anglo-Irish writer born in Felixstowe, Suffolk, and raised on a family estate in the Gog Magog Hills outside Cambridge.

His early life was strikingly varied: he published two books on ancient Egyptian history in the 1920s, then became a noted avant-garde theatre producer, running the experimental Cambridge Festival Theatre and staging over a hundred plays between 1926 and 1933.

Only later, after travels in Asia turned his attention to Taoist and Buddhist thought, did he take up the contemplative writing for which he is now remembered. Beginning in 1958, at the age of sixty-three, and writing under the name Wei Wu Wei (a Taoist phrase often rendered “action without action”), Gray published a series of eight compact, paradoxical books, including Ask the Awakened, Why Lazarus Laughed, All Else Is Bondage, Open Secret, and The Tenth Man.

Drawing together Taoism, Chan and Zen Buddhism, and Advaita, his essays return relentlessly to a single point: that the separate “I” who imagines itself to act and to seek is precisely the illusion to be seen through, and that what is sought is what one already is.

In his later years he lived in Monaco with his second wife, the Georgian princess Natalie Imeretinsky, and died in 1986.