Chuang-tzŭ writes sometimes of the withdrawal from the many into the one as a detachment from the entire world of change and multiplicity, one’s own body included, into a solitude beyond the reach of life and death; at others he sees it rather as a bursting out of the limits of the single body, to be born and die with every new generation. It would be pointless to ask which is his true position, since in trying to put it into words he is caught up in another dichotomy which he can transcend only by moving freely between the alternatives. The liberation from selfhood is seen above all as a triumph over death. His position is not that personal consciousness will survive death, but rather than in grasping the Way one’s viewpoint shifts from ‘I shall no longer exist’ to something like ‘In losing selfhood I shall remain what at bottom I always was, identical with everything conscious or unconscious in the universe’. In the exaltation with which Chuang-tzŭ confronts death he seems to foresee the end of his individuality as an event which is both an obliteration and an opening out of consciousness. To come to feel that extinction of self does not matter since at bottom I am everything and have neither beginning nor end is (together with acceptance of annihilation and faith in individual survival) one of the three classic solutions of the problem of death; no thinker in Chinese literature, nor for all I know in the literature of the world, has experienced it as deeply and expressed it as eloquently as Chuang-tzŭ.
Nothing in Chuang-tzŭ’s unusual sensibility is more striking than the ecstatic, rhapsodic tone in which he writes of death. This does not reflect a disgust with life; like most Chinese thinkers he is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, and thinks of joy and sorrow as alternating and inseparable like day and night or birth and death. Nor is it a matter of treating death as a beautiful abstraction. In ‘The teacher who is the ultimate ancestor’ we read of a dying man dragging himself to a well to look at his disfigured body and wonder what it will turn into, of a sage who lolls carelessly against the doorpost talking to his dying friend after shooing away his weeping family, of others who appal a disciple of Confucius by playing the zither and doing odd jobs by the corpse. In the stories about Chuang-tzŭ later in the book he goes to sleep pillowed on a skull, is found thumping a pot (the most vulgar kind of music-making) on the death of his wife, and on his deathbed laughs at his disciples for preferring to have him decently buried and eaten by the worms rather than left in the open to be eaten by the birds. This physical confrontation with death, and mockery of the rites of mourning, for Chinese the most sacred of all, is characteristic of the Inner chapters and of stories about Chuang-tzŭ himself, but is very rare elsewhere in Taoist literature, even in the rest of Chuang-tzŭ. It is quite without the morbidity of the stress on corruption in the late Medieval art of Europe, which reminds us of the horrors of our mortality for the good of our souls. It seems rather that for Chuang-tzŭ the ultimate test is to be able to look directly at the facts of one’s own physical decomposition without horror, to accept one’s dissolution as part of the universal process of transformation. ‘The test that one holds fast to the Beginning is the fact that one is not afraid.’91
Unlike death, suffering does not much preoccupy Chuang-tzŭ. The disaster which he ranks as second only to death is deformity or mutilation of the body (not its pain, surprising as this may seem to us moderns, persuaded by the medical progress of the last century or so to think of pain as exceptional and avoidable). The ancient Chinese imputed not only a practical but a moral value to wholeness of body; for a Confucian, it was a duty when he died to return his body to his ancestors intact as when he received it from them. The school of Yang Chu, to which Chuang-tzŭ may once have belonged, laid down the principle that one should not sacrifice any part of the body, even a hair, for any external benefit, even the throne of the empire. How to reconcile oneself to disaster to the body is therefore a crux for Chuang-tzŭ. The Inner chapters show a remarkable interest, not shared by later Taoists even in Chuang-tzŭ itself, in cripples, freaks, mutilated criminals, who are able to accept and remain inwardly unaltered by their condition. The criminal with a chopped foot carries about with him the visible proof of his crime and betrayal of his ancestors. For conventional opinion, he is of all men farthest from the Way. On the contrary, says Chuang-tzŭ, if he can accept the catastrophe as his destiny, care nothing for the demeaning judgement of others, remain inwardly unbound by the rules while recognising that it will be safer to conform to them in future, he is nearer to the Way than Confucius was. To quote the title of the chapter in which these stories are collected, he possesses the ‘Signs of fullness of Power’.