zhuangzi'sfirstchapter

Zhuangzi's first chapter

Margus Ott

Tallinn University

The First Chapter of “Zhuangzi”[1]

Summary

I treat the first chapter of “Zhuangzi”[2], titled “Wandering in Complete Freedom” (逍遙遊), as an introduction to the “Zhuangzi” as a whole. It presents a programmatic and meta-textual view on Zhuangzi’s way of speaking, which is characterized as “big”, and connected to a “big” existence. Zhuangzi speaks in a highly suggestive and poetic way, but all the images and narratives have the clear function of expressing certain philosophical ideas: changing our point of view, merging with the Way and acting freely.

Résumé

Je traite le premier chapitre du « Zhuangzi » comme une introduction au livre entier, qui présente un approche bien calculé et métatextuel sur le façon de parler de Zhuangzi, décrit comme « grand », ce qui est lié à une existence « grande ». Zhuangzi le fait d’une manière suggestive et poétique, mais les images et histoires aident tous à exprimer des idées philosophiques : changer son point de vue, s’unir avec la Voie et agir librement.

Keywords:

Zhuangzi, Chinese philosophy, daoism.

Mot-clés :

Zhuangzi, philosophie chinoise, daoïsme.

1. Overlooking space and time

“Zhuangzi” begins with the description of a gigantic fish Kūn and an enormous bird Péng[3]:

In the North Ocean there is a kind of a fish, its name is Kūn. Who knows, how many thousands of li it is big[4]. The fish metamorphoses into a bird by the name of Péng. Who knows, how many thousands of li it is long. […] On its journey to the South Ocean, Péng disturbs the water for 3000 li, spirals up a whirlwind and ascends to a height of 90 000 li, resting only at the end of six months.[5]

北冥有魚，其名為鯤。鯤之大，不知其幾千里也。化而為鳥，其名為鵬。鵬之背，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 vertically, to the depths of the ocean and to the heights of the sky). Thus they open up horizontal and vertical dimensions. In the following passages they are opposed to cicada and turtle-dove, who don’t know anything about huge dimensions and distances.

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

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 subsequently compared to cicadas who don’t know even the alternation of spring and autumn.

The meaning of the story is that “Little wits cannot keep up with great, or few years with many” (Graham 1991: 44: 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 Péng-bird and the distances it covers, nor the life-span of a tortoise or a tree.[6] Zhuangzi is not simply against the language, as sometimes thought, but he is looking for “another” language (Wang 2003: 6).

2. Uselessness. To change something from a point of view vs. to change the viewpoint

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。

Similarly, Zhuangzi’s friend Hui Shi (a kind of Chinese Zenon) tells Zhuangzi:

“The ruler of Wei gifted me the seeds of big gourds. I planted them and when the fruits were ripe, they could contain five barrels[7] of liquid. If they were filled with water or other liquid, they were too heavy for me to lift them up. If they were cut into two to serve as ladles, they were too big to dip into anything. It is not that they weren’t wonderfully big, but I found 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。

Or again, a little bit later Hui Shi speaks:

“I have a great tree, people call it the tree-of-heaven. Its big trunk is too knotted and swollen to be measured with cord and inkstick; its small branches are too twisty and curvy to fit compasses and squares. Leave it standing by the roadside, and a carpenter wouldn’t give it a glance. Now this talk of yours is big but useless, dismissed by everyone alike.”

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 Hui Shi’s story of calabashes Zhuangzi answers with his own story. He tells about a man who was an expert in making ointment for chapped hands; as his family had been bleaching cocoon-silk for generations they used this ointment to heal their hands. Then a stranger came and proposed to buy the ointment recipe for a large sum of money. The family thought that they had bleached silk for generations without much profit, but now they could make a lot of money in one day, so they sold the recipe. Then the stranger went to the king of Wú (吳) state, who was in war with the kingdom of Yuè (越). It was wintertime and the oarsmen’s hands were chapped. The king put the man who knew the recipe of the ointment in charge of his fleet. They were victorious and the man got a portion of territory taken from Yuè.

“In their ability to keep hands from chapping, there was no difference between them; if one of them got a feud 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 hold 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 keep something in them, and was not able to deal with these big calabashes that were unsuitable as containers. Zhuangzi suggests a more creative thinking to use them in another way, not for containing something, but for containing “nothing” (or the air) and to use them for crossing rivers and lakes. In a more general sense it means that, when we are not able to deal with something, a change of perspective might be useful (in the context of the story, not to move calabashes filled with 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 waiting 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 1999: 13).

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 one can notice several things. 1) Firstly, 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 are. But the ox[8] is big and has a higher vantage point. 2) This perspective is related to Heaven, 天 (or more particularly Heaven’s clouds) – and this is extremely important in the context of the whole of “Zhuangzi”, because Heaven (in distinction with Human) is the element of a creature who is in harmony with the Way (Billeter 2002: 43-57, Mollgaard 2007: 17-22). 3) The big one is not capable of the same thing as the little one. One cannot expect from the “big discourse” of Zhuangzi the same useful application as from an ordinary discourse. Actually, all those practically useful discourses catch only small things (“mice and rats”), while the big discourse is 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 in a place where there is nothing; in a wide and empty wilderness? There you may roam idly (wuwei, 無為) around it and sleep without a care beneath it.”

今子有大樹，患其無 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？

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, which implies changing our “point of view”.

This existential possibility is connected to two important notions of Zhuangzi, the “non-doing” (wuwei, 無為) and “wandering” (you, 遊)[9] equivalent of the “carefree being” (逍遙). Non-doing does not mean doing absolutely nothing, because this is impossible. It indicates a certain way of doing and acting, where the person is not attached to the thing (s)he does, is not entangled like Hui Shi with his calabashes. And “wandering” (which literally means “swimming”) means an existence characterized by non-attachment, which is thus in accordance with the Way – as if the person “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 from our perspective 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 (“heaven”), the second is limited and inhibited (“human”) (Billeter 2002: 43-44, 55-57).

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 completely change the attitude of the disciple (for linguistic techniques in Zhuangzi and Chan-buddhism, see Wang 2003). The idea is not to change one conviction for another, but a more radical change is envisioned, where all convictions are as if uprooted, or to put it in Zhuangzi’s words, they are planted in the land of Nothingness. This way we can discover the Void (需, another Zhuangzi’s central concepts, developed elsewhere in „Zhuangzi“), the pure virtuality that creates all the actualities.

This logic of “don’t change ideas but change the one who has the 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): one stops and gazes with wonder, refusing to understand according to the habitual logic in order to find a “bigger” logic.

3. To merge with the axis of Heaven and Earth

Until now we have talked about the beginning and the end of the introductory chapter of “Zhuangzi”. However, in the central part of the chapter, Zhuangzi gives even more precise information about non-doing and wandering.

Zhuangzi describes three possibilities, using three different “conceptual persons” (cf Deleuze, Guattari 1991: 60-81):

1) First, there is a person called Song Rongzi (宋榮子)[10] 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 („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[11]

As for the man who rides the axis[12] of Heaven and Earth and harnesses the six breaths[13] to wander in the infinite[14], 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 by various names in “Zhuangzi”; here we have three terms, “sage” (shèngrén), “holy or spiritual man” (shénrén) and “utmost man” (zhìrén). He doesn’t care neither for fame, accomplishments (this was the tumbling stone for Liezi), nor his ego.

Certain practices help to attain this.[15] A certain Jian Wu relates 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[16] 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 rejuvenating influence upon his/her body.

“This spiritual man with all his inner power (dé,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 heat 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), (s)he 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 – are treated extensively). The passage describes the magical properties of the spiritual man, who is affected neither by the flood, nor by the drought. But perhaps in the final account, the whole thing is not so magical after all (cf. Jullien 2005: 53-55): 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 cannot be harmed by its products. They cannot even be compared.

4. Conclusion

The two characteristics of Zhuangzi’s speech are “big” and “useless”. The greatness of his discourse is revealed through mythological stories that involve creatures of supernatural dimensions, who 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 and complaints to Zhuangzi. In his answers, Zhuangzi hints that there is another level of usefulness, which we could name “big use” and which basically means taking a step back from the usual way of using things and words, and instead utilising them to change our whole viewpoint. Not so much to change something in our world, but rather to change our world, our 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 glance has nothing at all to do with Hui Shi’s question. By doing this, he steps out of the question’s logic, tells something completely different, demonstrating thus the partial character of the question itself, or of the viewpoint which has generated this kind of a question. This approach can be related to the gongan practice of chan-buddhism, which was born several centuries later, but has exactly the same attitude (cf. Wang 2003: 175-180).

The task is to open up the “axis of Heaven and Earth”, which gives man the ability to wander about in the world in complete freedom. The notions of Heaven and of wandering are characterized in several passages throughout the “Zhuangzi”. To attain this, certain psychophysical exercises are necessary. In the first chapter, Zhuangzi hints briefly to some kind of a 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” – 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 still continue to charm us today.

Bibliography:

BILLETER, Jean-François 2002. Leçons sur Tchouang-Tseu. Paris : Allia.

CHAN, Alan 1998. „A Tale of Two Commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu“, in L. Kohn and M. LaFargue, Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, New York : Albany, pp 89-117.

DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix 1991. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris : Minuit.

ELIADE, Mircea. 1968. Le chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase. Paris : Payot.

GRAHAM, Angus C. 1991. Chuang-Tzu. The inner chapters. London : Mandala.

IVANHOE, Philip J., NORDEN, Brian W. Van, 2001 Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, New York-London : Seven Bridges Press.

JULLIEN, François 2005. Nourrir sa vie. À l’écart du Bonheur. Paris : Seuil.

MOLLGAARD, Eske 2007. An Introduction to Daoist Thought. Action, language and ethics in Zhuangzi. New York : Routledge.

WANG, Youru 2003. Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism. The other way of speaking. London : Routledge.

ZHUANGZI 1999. 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.

ZHUANGZI 2008. Translated by Nina Correa, http://www.daoisopen.com/ZZ1.html.

《庄子浅注》， 北京，中华书局，1982 年。

《庄子》， 郭象注， 上海， 上海古籍出版时， 1989年。

《庄子》 马恒君 译注， 北京，华夏出版社，2007 年。

《庄子》，孙勇海 译注，北京，中华书局，2007年。

http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=2713&if=en

[1] I thank Kristi Pääsuke for correcting my English.

[2] In the following, “Zhuangzi” refers to the book, and Zhuangzi both to the supposed author of “Zhuangzi” and a person described in the same book.

[3] This is the very beginning of Zhuangzi; a similar account is given a few paragraphs later in the first chapter.

[4] 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.

[5] The English translations are based on Graham 1991, Zhuangzi 1999, Ivanhoe and Norden 2001, Zhuangzi 2008 and the translation of James Legge (The Writing of Chuang Tzu, 1891), retrieved from the website of Chinese Text Project, http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=2713&if=en, as well as Chinese sources listed in the Bibliography. The electronic Chinese text is also from the same website of Chinese Text Project. All the citations of “Zhuangzi” come from the first chapter. The translations given here are my own responsibility; if I take the translation of a passage from one of the sources, I refer to it at the end of the passage.

[6] Perhaps we could interpret even further. We quoted the passage, where the Péng-bird „rests“ after 6 months. The word for resting is 息 (xī) 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” or “when the living beings breathe, they each blow up mist and dust”. The interesting word here is the word “to breathe”, 息 (xī), which was translated in the previous phrase as “to rest”. It seems that the resting/breathing of the cosmic Péng-bird could be 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 that 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 (that characterize the Chinese thought as a whole as well).

[7] 石, here pronounced as dàn. According to commentaries one dàn contained ten dŏu (斗) and one dŏu was about 10 litres. According to this calculation Hui Shi’s hyperbolic gourds 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 gourds are really extremely large and it is possible that their volume is enormously exaggerated as was the case of Kūn-fish and Péng-bird. This creates a certain tension, inside this dialogue, between this mythological dimension on the one hand and the realistic setting of the dialogue between Hui Shi and Zhuangzi (there are several of them in the “Zhuangzi”) on the other. We should also note that since there is no distinction between singular and plural in Chinese, it is not clear whether Hui Shi speaks about one gourd or several.

[8] 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 (Huì) has an old form of the ox (nowadays found in the upper part of the character 專zhuān) 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. Could Zhuangzi be hinting that Hui Shi is worrying too much and that instead of this he could be like the calm and immense ox?

[9] These two notions are linked with Heaven, which is one of the central notions in “Zhuangzi”, as we noted, but in this opening chapter Heaven is not discussed in detail.

[10] The philosopher Song Xing, treated also at the end of “Zhuangzi”, chapter “Under the heaven”, one of whose doctrines was that ‘To be insulted is not disgraceful’ (Graham 1991: 45).

[11] And again it corresponds to the content of the phrase, since we learn soon afterwards, that this 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” and notably there is the practice of “sitting and forgetting” (坐忘)).

[12] 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 along 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) (cf. Eliade 1968: 211-222).

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

[14] The character 窮, „limit“, has a cave or a hole or an acupuncture point (semantic part) on top of the 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.

[15] There is a certain tension between “mystic” and “philosophical” interpretations of “daoist” texts, emblematically characterised by two eminent classical commentators of Daodejing, Heshang Gong (traditionally 2. c. BC) who refers constantly to yogic practices and Wang Bi (3. c. AD) who interprets Daodejing as a coherent and self-sufficient philosophical system (cf. Chan 1889: 89-117). The same tendencies can be seen in the case of “Zhuangzi”.

[16] 凝 (níng2), “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.