One of the most famous stories in the text is that of Ding the Butcher, who learned what it means to wu wei through the perfection of his craft. When asked about his great skill, Ding says,

“What I care about is dao, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint. A good cook changes his knife once a year—because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month—because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness….[I] move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until—flop! The whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground.” (Ch. 3, The Secret of Caring for Life)

The recurring point of all of the stories in Zhuangzi about wu-wei is that such spontaneous and effortless conduct as displayed by these many examples has the same feel as acting in wu-wei. The point is not that wu-wei results from skill development. Wu-wei is not a cultivated skill. It is a gift of oneness with dao. The Zhuangzi’s teachings on wu-wei are closely related to the text’s consistent rejection of the use of reason and argument as means to dao (chs. 2; 12, 17, 19).

Read more:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/