‘Daoist Phytopedagogy’: Toward a Vegetal Theory of Literary Learning through Mamang Dai's River Poems

Abstract

This article proposes ‘Daoist Phytopedagogy’ as a new theoretical framework for literary studies by bringing Daoist philosophy into dialogue with Indigenous ecological consciousness as articulated in River Poems by Mamang Dai. Rather than treating plants as symbolic extensions of human emotion, Daoist Phytopedagogy argues that vegetal life constitutes a mode of ecological instruction through which literature cultivates relational, ethical, and epistemological modes of learning. Drawing upon the philosophical concepts of the Dao, wu wei (effortless action), ziran (natural spontaneity), and the dynamic interdependence of the ten thousand beings as articulated in the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, the paper demonstrates that Mamang Dai's poetic landscapes are not passive settings but pedagogical communities in which rivers, forests, mountains, trees, grasses, and seasonal rhythms function as active participants in the formation of ecological consciousness. While Daoism and the Indigenous cosmologies of Arunachal Pradesh emerge from distinct historical and cultural traditions, the article argues that they converge in their rejection of anthropocentrism, their affirmation of relational existence, and their understanding of nature as a living process rather than an inert object. Through close textual readings of selected poems from River Poems (2004), the study examines how vegetal presence reshapes literary learning by encouraging attentiveness, reciprocity, humility, and ecological coexistence instead of mastery and domination. The article further contends that literary pedagogy can move beyond human-centred interpretive paradigms by recognising plants as epistemic companions whose silent vitality reconfigures ethical relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. In doing so, Daoist Phytopedagogy contributes an original conceptual model to environmental humanities, plant humanities, comparative philosophy, and ecocriticism while extending current debates on vegetal agency into the domain of literary education. By establishing a comparative conversation between Daoist philosophy and Indigenous ecological poetics, the paper demonstrates that literature itself can become a site of ecological learning where vegetal life teaches modes of coexistence, relational ethics, and planetary responsibility without reducing either tradition to the other.