zhuangzi

ZHUANGZI

ZHUANGZI,

THE FIRST CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION

I treat the first chapter of Zhuangzi[1], with the title of “Wandering in Complete Freedom” (逍遙遊) as an introduction to the Zhuangzi as a whole, which presents a programmatic and meta-textual view on Zhuangzi’s way of speaking, which is characterized as “big”, and which is connected to a “big” existence. Zhuangzi does this in a highly suggestive and poetic way, but the images and narratives told have all a clear function of expressing certain philosophical ideas which we try to detect in the following essay.

I

“Zhuangzi” begins with the description of a gigantic fish kun1 and an enormous bird peng2[2]:

In the North Ocean there is a kind of fish, its name is kun. Who knows how many thousands of li is it big[3]. The fish metamorphoses into a bird by the name of peng. Who knows how many thousands of li is it long. […] On its journey to the South Ocean, the peng disturbs the water for 3000 li, spirals up a whirlwind and ascends to a height of 90 000 li, and rests only at the end of six months.[4]

北冥有魚，其名為鯤。鯤之大，不知其幾千里也 […]。鵬之徙於南冥也，水擊三千里，摶扶搖而上者九萬里，去以六月息者也。

These mythical creatures cover an immense stretch of space, both by their sheer size and also by their movement (from North to South, and also vertically, to the depths and to the heights). They open up vertical and horizontal dimensions. They are then opposed to cicada and turtle-dove who don’t know anything about those huge dimensions and distances.

Two other beings, a tortoise and a tree, introduce also the temporal aspect:

In the south of the state of Chu there is a [tortoise called] Obscure Spirit, whose spring is 500 years and whose autumn is 500 years; in the ancient times there was a [tree called] Big Toon [ailanthus altissima], whose spring was 8000 years and whose autumn was 8000 years.

楚之南有冥靈者，以五百歲為春，五百歲為秋；上古有大椿者，以八千歲為春，八千 歲為秋。

Again, they are then compared to cicadas who don’t know even the alternation of spring and autumn.

The meaning of the story is that “Little learning does not come up to great learning; the short-lived does not come up to the long-lived” (ZH 5, 小知不及大 知，小年不及大年), or more bluntly: “this is the difference between the small and the great” (此小大之辨也). This implies that the text of “Zhuangzi” is “big” (in the sense of “comprehensive”, “all-pervading”), compared to ordinary men’s ideas, and unfathomable to them, like a cicada is not able to grasp neither the huge dimensions of peng-bird and the distances it covers, nor the life-span of a tortoise or a tree.[5]

II

One characteristic of big things and big discourses is that they are “useless” according to the ordinary standards.

A man of Song carried some ceremonial caps to Yue for sale, but the men in Yue used to cut off their hair and tattoo their bodies, so the caps had no use for them.

宋人資章甫 適諸越，越人短髮文身，無所用之。

Zhuangzi’s friend Hui Shi (a kind of China’s Zenon) tells Zhuangzi:

“The ruler of Wei gifted me the seeds of big calabashes. I planted them and when the fruits were ripe, they could contain five barrels[6] of liquid. If I had filled it with water of some other liquid, it would have been so heavy that I couldn’t have lifted it up by myself. If I had cut it into two to serve as ladles, they would have been too unstable to contain anything. It is not that they weren’t big enough, but they were useless and so I smashed them.”

„魏王貽我大瓠之種，我樹之成而實五石，以盛水漿，其堅不能自舉也。剖之以為瓢，則瓠落無所容。非不呺然大也，吾為其無用而掊之。“

Hui Shi again speaks a little afterwards:

“I have a great tree, people call it the tree-of-heaven. Its trunk is too knobbly and bumpy to measure with the inked line, its branches are too curly and crooked to fit compasses or L-square. Stand it up in the road and a carpenter wouldn’t give it a glance. Now this talk of yours is big but useless, dismissed by everyone alike.” (Graham).

“吾有大樹，人謂之樗。其大本擁腫而不中繩墨，其小枝卷曲而不中規矩，立之塗，匠者不顧。今子之言，大而無用，眾所同去也。”

Zhuangzi answers that Hui Shi is not good at using big things (夫子固拙於用大矣). So, upon the story of calabashes Zhuangzi answers with another story. He tells of a man who was expert in making an ointment for chapped hands, as his family had been working on bleaching cocoon-silk for generations and with this ointment they healed their hands. Then a stranger came and proposed to buy the recipe of the ointment for a huge amount of money. The family thought that they had bleached silk for generations, but gained only a few pieces of money, but now they can get in one day a hundred pieces. So they sold the recipe. Then the stranger went to the king of Wu (2吳) state, who was in war with the kingdom of Yue (4越). It was wintertime and the oarsmen’s hands were chapped. The king put the man who knew the recipe of the ointment for chapped hands in charge of his fleet, and they won a great victory and the general got a portion of territory taken from Yue.

“In their ability to keep hands form chapping, there was nothing different between them; if one of them got a fief for it while the other stayed a silk-bleacher, it’s that they put it to different uses. Now that you had five-barrel calabashes, why didn’t it occur to you to make them into those big bottles swimmers tie to their waists, and go floating away over the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying that they are too unstable to contain anything? It seems that your mind is still entangled!”

“能不龜手一也，或以封，或不免於洴澼絖，則所用之異也。今 子有五石之瓠，何不慮以為大樽而浮於江湖，而憂其瓠落無所容？則夫子猶有蓬之心也夫！”

Hui Shi wanted to use the calabashes in the ordinary way to contain something, and he is not able to deal with big calabashes that are unsuitable for containing. Zhuangzi suggests him to think in a creative manner and to use them in another way, to cross rivers and lakes. In a more general sense this means also that in cases when we are not able to deal with something we ought perhaps to change our whole viewpoint (not to move calabashes containing water, but to move ourselves on water by the means of empty calabashes).

To the second complaint of Hui Shi, Zhuangzi again replies with a story:

“Haven’t you ever seen a wild cat or a weasel? It crouches on the ground and lies wait for its prey. Right and left it pounces, up and down it leaps until it happens to be caught by the snare and dies in the trap. Then there is the ox, as big as the clouds hanging from the sky. Big as it is, it cannot catch rats or mice” (Zhuangzi I).

子 獨不見狸狌乎？卑身而伏，以候敖者；東西跳梁，不辟高下；中於機辟，死於網罟。今夫斄牛，其大若垂天之雲。此能為大矣，而不能執鼠。

Here we can notice several things. 1) In the first place there is again the distinction of small and big. With all their cunning and ability cat and weasel are not able to see the trap, because it is of the same dimension as they themselves are. But the ox[7] is big and has a higher viewpoint. 2) This viewpoint is related to the Heaven, 天 (or more particularly Heaven’s clouds) – and this is extremely important in reference to the whole of Zhuangzi, because Heaven (in distinction with Human) is the element of a man who is in harmony with the Way. 3) The big is not capable of the same thing as the little. One cannot wait from the “big discourse” of Zhuangzi the same useful application as from ordinary discourse. Actually all those practically useful discourses can catch only small things (“mice and rats”), while the big discourse if for something much bigger – its aim is to change the whole viewpoint of perceiving the world.

And Zhuangzi continues:

“Now, Sir, you have a big tree and are worried about its uselessness. Why don’t you plant it realm of Nothingwhatever, a wide and empty wilderness. There you may roam idly (無為) around it and sleep carefreely beneath it.”

„今子有大樹，患[sic!]其無 用，何不樹之於無何有之鄉，廣莫之野，彷徨乎無為其側，逍遙乎寢臥其下？

不夭斤斧，物無害者，無所可用，安所困苦哉！“

Again there is a concrete image with similar logic: instead of using the tree to carve something from it, you can move yourself under it, or sleep beneath it. Instead of moving something we can move ourselves, we can change our whole viewpoint.

This existential possibility is connected to two important notions of Zhuangzi, the “non-doing” (wuwei, 無為) and “wandering” (you, 遊)[8] equivalent of the “carefree being” (逍遙). Non-doing does not mean doing absolutely nothing, because it is impossible, but a certain way of doing and acting, where the person is not attached to the thing (s)he does, is not entangled as Hui Shi with his calabashes. And “wandering” (which literally means “swimming”) means an existence which is characterized by such kind of non-attachment and which is thus in accordance with the Way – as if he “swam” in the Way (watery metaphors are common for the Way).

So, we can conclude that there are different levels of “use”: what is useless in the ordinary sense can be useful in a higher sense; what is useless according to our point of view can be useful namely to change the point of view, because it stops the ordinary functioning of things in our human world. The same dialectic of big and small is developed later in Zhuangzi through the notions of Heaven and Human, which according to J.-F. Billeter refer to two different kinds of acting: the first is free and unhampered, the second is limited and inhibited.

We can find a similar technique in the later practice of chan-buddhism, where the aim of masters, who often act very weirdly, is to change the whole attitude of the disciple. The idea is not to change one conviction for another, but a more radical change where all convictions are as if uprooted, or to put it in Zhuangzi’s words, they are planted in the land of Nothinwhatever. In such a way we can discover the Void (需, one of Zhuangzi’s central concepts, developed elsewhere in „Zhuangzi“), the pure virtuality which creates all actualities.

This logic of “don’t change ideas but change the one who has ideas”, has a more universal bent, and can be linked for instance with the philosophical tradition of the West, and first of all with the Socratic “wonder” (thaumazein): you stop and gaze with wonder, you refuse to understand according to the habitual logic, in order to find a “bigger” logic.

III

Until now we have talked about the beginning and the end of the first chapter of Zhuangzi. But in the central part of the chapter Zhuangzi gives actually more precise information on the non-doing and wandering.

Zhuangzi describes three possibilities, using three different “conceptual persons”:

1) First there is a person called Song Rongzi (宋榮子)[9] who doesn’t seek for any worldly achievement: if everybody praises him, he is not encouraged and if everybody blames him, he is not depressed. The attitude of not caring for fame and social recognition (for the „name”, 名) is central in Zhuangzi. But, Zhuangzi says, Song Rongzi has not “planted” himself (猶有未樹也). If we take into account the end of the chapter, we could say that he has not yet planted himself in the “land of nothingness”, has not yet discovered the Void.

2) The famous daoist saint Liezi could “ride the wind, he floated elegantly and came back after fifteen days. […] He escaped the trouble of walking, but still depended on something to carry him” (夫列子御風而行，泠然善也，旬有五日而後反。… 此雖免乎行，猶有所待者也。). So, Liezi has “planted the tree”, has opened up the vertical dimension, but although he makes miracles travelling by wind, he is not altogether free in his movement.

3) The third position is not connected to a proper name[10]

As for the man who rides the axis[11] of Heaven and Earth and harnesses the six breaths[12] to wander in the infinite[13], then what is there for him to be dependent on?

若夫乘天地之正，而御六氣之辯，以遊無窮者，彼且惡乎待哉！

And the conclusion:

As the saying goes, “The utmost man cares for no self, / The spiritual man cares for no merit, / The sage cares for no fame”

故曰：至人無己，神人無功，聖人無名。

So, here we have some indications about the accomplished state. First of all, it means to discard the worldly fame and perhaps it demands also some kind of solitude. Then it implies certain daoist psychophysical practices: to “ride the axis of heaven and earth” and to “harness the six breaths” or energies (qi). The saint who has accomplished this is called with various names in Zhuangzi; here we have three terms, “utmost man” (zhi4ren), “holy or spiritual man” (shenren) and the “sage” (sheng4ren). He doesn’t care for fame, accomplishments (this was the tumbling stone of Liezi) and his ego.

Certain practices help to attain this. A certain Jian Wu tells a story of Jie Yu, a spiritual man, who tells “big words” and whose flesh and skin are smooth as ice and white as snow, whose body is soft like that of a virgin, who doesn’t eat the five grains, but inhales instead the wind and drinks the dew. He rides on the clouds, harnesses the flying dragons and wanders beyond the four seas. By spiritual concentration[14] he can save the creatures from calamities and ensures a plentiful annual harvest. (肌膚若冰雪，淖約若處子，不食五穀，吸風飲露。乘雲氣，御飛龍，而遊乎四海之外。其神凝，使物不疵癘而年穀熟。). So, the spiritual man has a special diet and (s)he does some kind of breathing exercises, which have a juvenating influence upon his/her body.

“This spiritual man with all his inner power (德) can merge everything under heaven into one. When the people expect him to rule over the world, how can he busy himself in doing anything about it? Nothing can harm this spiritual man. He will neither be drowned in a great flood that rises to the sky nor feel the head in a drought that melts the metal and the rocks and scorches the earth and the hills.”

之人也，之德也，將磅礡萬物以為一，世蘄乎 亂，孰弊弊焉以天下為事！之人也，物莫之傷，大浸稽天而不溺，大旱、金石流、土山焦而不熱。

As the spiritual man has no ego, (s)he identifies him/herself with all the beings (萬物), becomes one with them. But this should not be confused with the political ideal of unifying the universe (天下), that is, unifying China (the apolitical view is stressed throughout the Zhuangzi, and is one of its major differences from the Daodejing, where government problems – so common in the whole of ancient Chinese thought as a whole – are treated extensively). The passage describes the magical properties of the spiritual man, who is not affected neither by the flood, nor by the drought. But perhaps in the final account the whole thing is not so magical after all: if the spiritual man identifies him/herself with the Way (or with Being, as we would say in the West), then what can harm the Way? Nothing, of course, since everything that happens is produced by the Way. The Way is the productive force and can not be harmed its products. They cannot even be compared.

IV

CONCLUSION

The two characteristics of Zhuangzi’s speech are “big” and “useless”. The greatness of his discourse is revealed through mythological stories which involve creatures of supernatural dimensions, which are compared to the ordinary small creatures of nature. Those small creatures are not able to grasp the world of the big creatures; and similarly, ordinary men are incapable of understanding the “big words” of Zhuangzi or other accomplished men. So it seems that their speech is “useless”, it doesn’t have any immediate practical use.

The uselessness is the purport of Hui Shi’s questions or complaints to Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi hints in his answers that there is another level of usefulness which we could name “big use” and which means basically taking a distance from the usual way of using things and words, and to use them to change your whole viewpoint. Not to change something in your world, but to change your world, your way of being in the world.

One very important thing to note here is that the form of Zhuangzi’s speech is in accordance with its contents. He doesn’t reply to Hui Shi immediately, he doesn’t present a discursive theory (as I do here), but first of all tells a story which at the first view has nothing at all to do with Hui Shi’s question. By doing this, he steps out of question’s logic, tells something completely different, showing in this way the partial character of the question itself, or of the viewpoint which has generated such kind of a question. This kind of attitude can be related to the gong-an practice of chan-buddhism, which was born several centuries later but has exactly the same attitude.

The task is to open up the axis of Heaven and Earth, which gives to a man the ability to wander about in the world in complete freedom. The notions of Heaven and of wandering are later characterized in several passages of the whole of Zhuangzi. To attain this, certain psychophysical exercises are necessary. In the first chapter Zhuangzi hints briefly to some kind of diet, breathing exercises and mental concentration; these themes recur elsewhere in the book. This is a way to the “big existence”, as we might call it, corresponding to the “big speech” and “big knowledge”, and which means merging with the Way. And the way to the Way is in itself the Way.

The vivid imagination, sharp logic, social freedom and spiritual depth of Zhuangzi…

[1] I refer in the following to Zhuangzi indiscriminately as the book and as the person.

[2] From the very beginning of Zhuangzi; a similar account is given a few paragraphs later in the text.

[3] One li is about half of a kilometre. We can notice at once that it is no ordinary fish, but a mythological cosmic being. Zhuangzi links the story to a “book of marvels” Qi Xie, which has not been preserved. It is not impossible that this story was originally about the creation of the world or in general about the “beginning”, but Zhuangzi places the story in a totally different context to serve his own purpose here.

[4] The translations are based on the following sources: (1) A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu. The Inner Chapters, Mandala, 1991; (2) Zhuangzi I. Library of Chinese Classics. Chinese-English, tr. into English by Wang Rongpei, tr. into Modern Chinese by Qin Xuqing and Sun Yongchang, Hunan People’s Publishing House, Foreign Languages Press, 1999: (3) The website of Chinese Text Project, http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=2713&if=en, which contains a translation of James Legge, The Writings of Chuang Tzu, 1891, and a text in unsimplified Chinese, taken from 《莊子譯注》曹礎基，中華書局，2002年, (4)《庄子》 马恒君， 北京，华夏出版社，2007 年；(4)《庄子浅注》， 北京，中华书局，1982 年；(5)《庄子》，孙勇海 译注，北京，中华书局，2007。The Chinese text is taken from the website of Chinese Text Project. The translations given here are mixed from these different sources; sometimes I propose my own version; if I take the translation of a passage from one source only, I refer to it at the end of the passage.

[5] Perhaps we could interpret even further. We quoted the passage where the peng-bird „rests“ after 6 months. The word for resting is 息 (xi1) which literally means „to breathe“ (the character has „self“ on top of the “heart/mind”, as if the breathing constituted both the mind of a person and his whole selfhood). After the quoted passage comes an obscure phrase “野馬也，塵埃也，生物之以息相吹也”. The commentators explain that the “wild horses” signify a mist which is like the breath of a galloping horse. The link to the “dust” and “living beings” is not very clear and different authors propose different interpretations. Just to propose a translation, we could translate it as “mist and dust are blown up by living beings’ breathing”, “when the living beings breath, they each blow up mist and dust”. The interesting word here is “to breath”, 息 (xi1), which was translated in the previous phrase as “to rest”. Although the full meaning is not clear to me, it seems that in any case the resting/breating of the cosmic peng-bird is somehow related to the breathing/resting of all the living beings – perhaps animating them? If we place the passage in the context of Zhuangzi, we could draw the conclusion that although ordinary men don’t understand the speech of Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi’s words nevertheless animate their speech; that the “big knowledge” of Zhuangzi is the foundation of the “small knowledge” which characterizes the ordinary speech. The ordinary speech moves unconsciously in a space which is kept open by such texts as the “Zhuangzi”. This interpretation is perhaps far-fetched, but the strong poetic character of Zhuangzi obliges one to pay attention to all sorts of parallelisms and repetitions (which characterize also the Chinese thought as a whole).

[6] 石, here pronounced as dan4. According to commentaries one dan contained ten dou3 (斗) and one dou3 was 10 litres. According to this calculation Hui Shi’s calabashes would have contained 500 litres. Of course the exact amount of ancient measures remains very often vague or unknown, but in any case it is clear that the calabashes are really extremely large and it is possible that their volume is enormously exaggerated as was the case of kun-fish and peng-bird. And we should note that since there is no distinction between singular and plural in Chinese, it is not clear whether Hui Shi speaks about one calabash or several.

[7] It is interesting to note that there is an “ox” in Hui Shi’s own name (called in this opening chapter simply Master Hui): the 惠 (Hui4) has an old form of the ox (nowadays found in the upper part of the character 專zhuan1) upon the heart. And the word for “worry” 患, which appears in the next sentence, is in its general outlook quite similar to the character for Hui.

[8] These two notions are linked with the Heaven, which is a very important notion, as we noted, but in this opening chapter the Heaven is not discussed in detail.

[9] The philosopher Song Xing, treated also in the end of Zhuangzi, chapter “Under the heaven”, one of whose doctrines was that ‘To be insulted is not disgraceful’ (Graham 45).

[10] And again it is corresponds with the content of the phrase, since we learn a little afterwards, that such kind of a man “cares for no fame”, which literally means “has no name”. This man is literally nameless or has “forgotten” his name (forgetting is one of the central themes in Zhuangzi, particularly there is the practice of “sitting and forgetting” (坐忘).

[11] 正means literally “straight”, “truth” etc. It has a line upon the word “to stop” (止). I take it here for “the vertical dimension“ and translate it by “axis” as the “axis mundi”, an extremely widespread element in different mythologies, which is embodied by a tree (which is strongly present in this part of Zhuangzi), a mountain, or any vertical movement – for example in modern days the elevator can have a similar function. In the shamanist worldview this “world-tree” enables the communication between the worlds, and the shaman is the one whose task is to move up and down, into the upper and lower worlds, on this tree (in Zhuangzi we have only two realms, Earth and Heaven, with no Underworld; the Chinese conception of Heaven – Man – Earth somehow re-establishes the tripartite distinction).

[12] Yin, yang, wind, rain, darkness, brightness.

[13] The character 窮, „limit“, has a cave or a hole or a acupuncture point (semantic part) on top of body and bow (phonetic part). To interpret it poetically, we could say that the saint described here bends his body like a bow and shoots it through a hole in the cosmos into the region of the Void or Nothingness, which grants him absolute liberty. The hole would be situated on the axis of Heaven and Earth.

[14] 凝 (ning2), “concentration”, is composed of „ice“ on the left and „doubt“ 疑 on the right. The latter character again contains the word „to stop“, 止 (nowadays it appears as “straight”, 正). So, “to concentrate” etymologically could mean something like “to freeze the doubt”, which is again related to stopping.