Zhuangzi

Little is known of Zhuang Zhou’s life except what the book named after him tells us, and its stories are not reliable history. He lived in the fourth century BCE in Meng, in the state of Song, held a minor post in a lacquer garden, was poor, and was a friend and sparring partner of the logician Huizi. The Zhuangzi is a book of thirty-three chapters; scholars regard the first seven, the “Inner Chapters”, as closest to Zhuangzi himself, and the rest as the work of followers and other Daoists.

Where the Tao Te Ching is terse and oracular, the Zhuangzi is exuberant, comic, full of stories, dialogues, talking animals, cripples and madmen, giant birds and tiny cicadas — and Confucius himself, often made to speak Daoist wisdom. It is one of the great works of world literature as well as philosophy.

The great bird and the little quail

The book opens with Peng, a fish thousands of miles long that turns into a bird whose wings are like clouds and flies ninety thousand miles south. A cicada and a little dove laugh at it: “We flutter up to the elm tree and sometimes don’t make it, and drop to the ground — what’s the point of going ninety thousand miles?” Small knowledge cannot comprehend great knowledge; the short-lived cannot comprehend the long-lived. Every being judges from where it stands.

Perspectivism and scepticism

Chapter 2, “On Making All Things Equal” (Qíwù lùn), is one of the most philosophically radical texts of the ancient world. The Confucians and Mohists argue endlessly, each affirming what the other denies. But “this” and “that” (shì and fēi) are relative to perspective: “There is nothing that is not ‘that’, and nothing that is not ‘this’.” The sage does not take sides but “illumines all in the light of Heaven”, standing at the “pivot of the Way”, from which he can respond to endless changes.

Zhuangzi’s scepticism extends to himself: “How do I know that what I call knowing is not really not-knowing? How do I know that what I call not-knowing is not really knowing?” People sleep in damp places and get sick — but do eels? Who knows the correct place to live? Monkeys, deer and humans each have their own standard of beauty; fish dive deep at the sight of the famous beauties Maoqiang and Lady Li.

The butterfly dream

The chapter ends with the most famous passage in Chinese philosophy:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly fluttering about happily, doing as he pleased. He did not know he was Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solidly Zhou. But he did not know whether he was Zhou who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou. Between Zhou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the transformation of things.

Compare the dream argument of René Descartes — but where Descartes uses the dream to doubt and then seeks certainty, Zhuangzi uses it to dissolve the fixed boundaries of the self into the endless transformation of things.

The happiness of fish

Zhuangzi and Huizi are strolling on a bridge over the Hao river. Zhuangzi says: “The minnows swim about so freely — that is the happiness of fish.” Huizi: “You are not a fish; how do you know what makes fish happy?” Zhuangzi: “You are not me; how do you know I don’t know what makes fish happy?” Huizi: “I’m not you, so I certainly don’t know what you know; you’re not a fish, so you don’t know what makes fish happy.” Zhuangzi: “Let’s go back to the beginning. When you asked ‘how do you know what makes fish happy’, you already knew that I knew it when you asked. I know it from up here on the bridge.” It is still debated whether this is a joke, a sophism, or a deep point about knowledge as situated.

Cook Ding

In chapter 3, Cook Ding carves an ox for Lord Wenhui with such grace that every movement is like a dance. The lord marvels at his skill. The cook replies that what he cares about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. At first he saw only the whole ox; after three years he no longer saw the ox as a whole; now he meets it with his spirit, not his eyes, following the natural patterns, slipping his blade through the hollows between the joints. A good cook changes his knife once a year, because he cuts; an ordinary cook once a month, because he hacks. “I have had this knife for nineteen years and cut up thousands of oxen, and the blade is as good as if it had just come from the grindstone.” Lord Wenhui: “From the words of Cook Ding I have learned how to nurture life.”

This parable of effortless mastery — the ancestor of what psychologists now call “flow” — became the model for Chinese aesthetics and the martial arts.

The useless tree

A carpenter passes a huge oak at a shrine and does not give it a second look: its wood is useless — boats would sink, coffins rot, doors leak. That night the tree appears to him in a dream: “What are you comparing me with? With useful trees — the fruit trees that are stripped and broken because of their usefulness? I have been trying for a long time to be useless… If I had been of some use, would I have grown this large?” The theme of the “usefulness of the useless” recurs throughout the book — a critique of a society that values people only for their utility.

Death

When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi came to offer condolences and found him sitting with his legs sprawled, drumming on a basin and singing. Huizi was shocked. Zhuangzi replied that at first he grieved; but then he reflected that in the beginning she had no life, no form, no breath; in the confusion of the Way there was a change and she had breath, then form, then life; now there was another change and she was dead. “It’s just like the progression of the four seasons.” To weep would show he did not understand fate. When Zhuangzi himself was dying, his disciples wanted to give him a lavish burial; he said heaven and earth would be his coffin, the sun and moon his jade, the stars his pearls. “Above ground I’ll be eaten by crows and kites, below by ants. You’d rob one to feed the other — why so partial?”

Zhuangzi and the turtle

The king of Chu sent two officials to offer Zhuangzi the post of prime minister. Fishing on the river, Zhuangzi did not turn his head. “I hear Chu has a sacred turtle, dead three thousand years, which the king keeps wrapped in a box in his ancestral temple. Would this turtle rather be dead and have its bones honoured, or alive and dragging its tail in the mud?” “Alive and dragging its tail in the mud.” “Go away. I’ll drag my tail in the mud.”

Influence

Zhuangzi is the second founder of philosophical Daoism (see Daoism), and his blend of scepticism, humour and mysticism profoundly shaped Chan (Zen) Buddhism, Chinese landscape painting and poetry, and the ideal of the free-spirited recluse. In the West, Martin Buber, Heidegger, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (The Way of Chuang Tzu), and philosophers of comparative scepticism have engaged him. Borges loved the butterfly dream.

Using Zhuangzi in conversation

• On perspective: the frog in the well cannot talk of the sea.
• On dreams and reality: am I Zhou dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of Zhou?
• On mastery: Cook Ding’s knife — work with the grain, not against it.
• On careers and utility: the useless tree lives longest.