The pieces which the compilers of Chuang-tzŭ assembled in ‘Going rambling without a destination’ are all on the theme of soaring above the restricted viewpoints of the worldly. Escape the fixed routes to worldly success and fame, defy all reproaches that you are useless, selfish, indifferent to the good of the Empire, and a perspective opens from which all ordinary ambitions are seen as negligible, the journey of life becomes an effortless ramble.
In the North Ocean there is a fish, its name is the K’un; the K’un’s girth measures who knows how many thousand miles. It changes into a bird, its name is the P’eng; the P’eng’s back measures who knows how many thousand miles. When it puffs out its chest and flies off, its wings are like clouds hanging from the sky. This bird when the seas are heaving has a mind to travel to the South Ocean. (The South Ocean is the Lake of Heaven.) In the words of the Tall stories, ‘When the P’eng travels to the South Ocean, the wake it thrashes on the water is three thousand miles long, it mounts spiralling on the whirlwind ninety thousand miles high, and is gone six months before it is out of breath.’ (The Tall stories of Ch’i is a record of marvels.) Is the azure of the sky its true colour? Or is it that the distance into which we are looking is infinite? It never stops flying higher till everything below looks the same as above (heat-hazes, dust-storms, the breath which living things blow at each other).
If a mass of water is not bulky enough it lacks the strength to carry a big boat. When you upset a bowl of water over a dip in the floor, a seed will make a boat for it, but if you put the bowl there it jams, because your boat is too big for such shallow water. If the mass of the wind is not bulky enough it lacks the strength to carry the great wings. So it is only when the bird is ninety thousand miles high, with the wind underneath it, that it rests its weight on the wind; and it must have the blue sky on its back and a clear view ahead before it will set its course for the South.
A cicada and a turtle-dove laughed at it, saying, ‘We keep flying till we’re bursting, stop when we get to an elm or sandalwood, and sometimes are dragged back to the ground before we’re there. What’s all this about being ninety thousand miles up when he travels south?’
Someone off to the green of the woods, with enough for three meals will be home with his belly still full; someone going thirty miles pounds grain for the days he will be away; someone going three hundred miles lays in grain to last three months. What do these two creatures know? Little wits cannot keep up with great, or few years with many. How would we know that this is so? The mushroom of a morning does not know old and new moon, the cricket does not know spring and autumn; their time is too short. South of Ch’u there is the tree Ming-ling, which grows through a spring of five hundred years, declines through an autumn of five hundred years; in the remotest past there was the great tree Ch’un, with eight thousand years for its spring and eight thousand for its autumn; it is only nowadays that P’eng-tsu is uniquely famous for living long, and is it not sad that common men should think him insurpassable?
(T’ang’s questions to Chi were about this. ‘In the North where nothing grows there is a vast sea, which is the Lake of Heaven. There is a fish there, several thousand miles broad, no one knows how long; its name is the K’un. There is a bird there, its name is the P’eng, its back is as big as Mount T’ai, its wings are like clouds hanging from the sky. It mounts the whirlwind in a ram’s horn spiral ninety thousand miles high, and only when it is clear of the clouds, with the blue sky on its back, does it set its course southward to journey to the South Ocean. A quail laughed at it, saying “Where does he think he’s going? I do a hop and a skip and up I go, and before I’ve gone more than a few dozen yards come fluttering down among the bushes. That is the highest one can fly, where does he think he’s going?” ’ This was in disputation about the small and the great.)
Those, then, who are clever enough to do well in one office or efficient enough to protect one district, whose powers suit one prince and are put to the test in one state, are seeing themselves as the little birds did, and Sung Jung smiled at them in disdain. Not only that, he refused to be encouraged though the whole world praised him, or deterred though the whole world blamed him, he was unwavering about the division between inward and outward, discriminating about the boundary between honour and disgrace – but then he soared no higher. (He was too concerned about the world to break clean away.) Or that Lieh-tzŭ now, he journeyed with the winds for his chariot, a fine sight it must have been, and did not come back for fifteen days. (Even so, there was something he failed to plant in his own soil.) The former of them, in the hope of bringing blessings to the world, failed to break clean away; the latter, even if he did save himself the trouble of going on foot, still depended on something to carry his weight. As for the man who rides a true course between heaven and earth, with the changes of the Six Energies for his chariot, to travel into the infinite, is there anything that he depends on? As the saying goes,
The utmost man is selfless,
The daemonic man takes no credit for his deeds,
The sage is nameless.
NOTE The passages we have bracketed look like afterthoughts of Chuang-tzŭ or later annotations, and in the Chinese text three of them seem out of place; in the translation they have been pushed forward a little.
Sung Jung is the philosopher Sung Hsing of ‘Below in the empire’ (pp. 278f below), one of whose doctrines was that ‘To be insulted is not disgraceful’. Chuang-tzŭ sees his refusal to feel devalued by other men’s judgements as a first step to escape from the world, but regrets that he still thought it his duty to get involved in politics for the good of the empire. Lieh-tzŭ, later ranked among the greatest Taoist sages, is apparently seen by Chuang-tzŭ as a man who missed the final liberation by mistakenly seeking the Way through magic; in the single story about him in the Inner chapters (pp. 96–8 below) he is misled by a sorcerer before he attains the true Way. Neither of them quite achieves a selflessness indifferent to winning credit for deeds and having an honoured name.
The ‘Six Energies’ which activate the cyclic motions of heaven and earth are traditionally enumerated as Yin and Yang, wind and rain, dark and light.
Yao resigned the Empire to Hsü Yu, saying
‘When the sun or the moon is up, if the torch fires are not put out, aren’t we taking too much trouble to light the world? When the timely rains fall, if we go on flooding the channels, aren’t we working too hard to water the fields? While you, sir, are in your place the Empire is in order, yet here I still am in the seat of honour. In my own eyes I do not deserve it; let me make you a present of the Empire.’
‘If you order things as Emperor, it’s that already the Empire is in order; and if I were to see any point in taking your place, would it be for the sake of the name? The name is the guest of the substance. Would it be for the sake of the substance? The tit that nests in the deep forest wants no more than one branch, the mole that drinks in the Yellow River no more than a bellyful. Go back where you belong, my lord, the Empire is no use to me. Even when the chief cook does run a disorderly kitchen, the priest and the medium will not step over the jars and dishes to take his place.’
NOTE In Confucian legend the pre-dynastic emperor Yao is a sage who when his time is over abdicates to the man best fitted to rule in his place, Shun. Yangists and Taoists delighted in imagining a recluse Hsü Yu who disdained the offer of Yao’s throne. In this and the next episode Chuang-tzŭ introduces a further refinement: Yao himself understood that the good order of his reign came not from his own policies but from individuals cultivating the Power in them in private, Hsü Yu and the nameless man on Mount Ku-yi. In ancient Chinese thought political order results directly from the mysterious influence of the Power in the ruler, and his political acts are merely its by-products. For a modern reader, this is a strange conceptualisation, but we may express Chuang-tzŭ’s insight in more familiar terms—the social fabric coheres or dissolves by the action of influences which have little to do with the deliberate policies of rulers, and which may be emanating from humble, publicly unnoticed individuals.
Chien Wu put a question to Lien Shu,
‘I heard Chieh Yü say something, he talked big but there was no sense in it, he left the firm ground and never came back. I was amazed and frightened by his words, which streamed on into the infinite like the Milky Way, wild extravagances, nothing to do with man as he really is.’
‘What did he say?’
‘In the mountains of far-off Ku-yi there lives a daemonic man, whose skin and flesh are like ice and snow, who is gentle as a virgin. He does not eat the five grains but sucks in the wind and drinks the dew; he rides the vapour of the clouds, yokes flying dragons to his chariot, and roams beyond the four seas. When the daemonic in him concentrates it keeps creatures free from plagues and makes the grain ripen every year.
‘I thought him mad and wouldn’t believe him.’
‘Yes, the blind can never share in the spectacle of emblems and ornaments, nor the deaf in the music of drums and bells. Is it only in flesh-and-bone that there is blindness and deafness? The wits have them too. When he spoke these words he was like a girl who waits for a suitor to come. This man, this Power that is in him, would merge the myriad things and make them one. The age has an incessant urge towards misrule, who are these people so eager to make the business of the empire theirs? This man no other thing will wound; though the great floods rise to the sky he will not drown, though metal and stone fuse in the great droughts and moors and mountains char he will not burn. From this man’s very dust and siftings you could smelt and mould a Yao or Shun. Who are these people so determined to make other things their business?
‘A man of Sung who traded in ceremonial caps travelled to the Yüeh tribes, but the men of Yüeh who cut their hair short and tattoo their bodies had no use for them. Yao who reduced the people of the Empire to order, and imposed regular government on all within the seas, went off to see the Four in the mountains of far-off Ku-yi, on the north bank of Fen River, and in a daze forgot his empire there.’
NOTE Chieh Yü, the madman of Ch’u who mocked Confucius, is Chuang-tzŭ’s favourite character in the Confucius story (pp. 74, 95 below). The ‘Four’ have not been plausibly identified.
Said Hui Shih to Chuang-tzŭ
‘The King of Wei gave me the seeds of a great calabash. I planted them, they grew up, with gourds of five bushels. When you filled them with water or soup they weren’t solid enough to stay upright, if you split them to make ladles they sagged and spilled over. It’s not that they weren’t impressively big, but because they were useless I smashed them to bits.’
‘You really are clumsy, sir, in finding uses for something big. There was a man of Sung who was expert in making a salve to keep hands from chapping. For generations the clan had been silk-bleachers by trade. A stranger heard about it, and asked to buy the secret for a hundred pieces of gold. The man assembled his clan and talked it over. “For generations”, he said, “we have been silk-bleaching, for no more than a few pieces. Now in one morning we can sell the art for a hundred. I propose we give it to him.”
‘The stranger when he got it recommended it to the King of Wu. There was trouble with Yüeh, and the King of Wu made him a general. That winter he fought a battle by water with the men of Yüeh. He utterly defeated the men of Yüeh, and was enfiefed in a bit of the conquered territory.
‘In their ability to keep hands from chapping, there was nothing to choose 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 if you had five-bushel 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 Yangtse and the Lakes? If you worried because they sagged and wouldn’t hold anything, isn’t it that you still have a heart where the shoots grow up tangled?’
Said Hui Shih to Chuang-tzŭ
‘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.’
‘Haven’t you ever seen a wild cat or a weasel? It lurks crouching low in wait for strays, makes a pounce east or west as nimble uphill or down, and drops plumb into the snare and dies in the net. But the yak now, which is as big as a cloud hanging from the sky, this by being able to be so big is unable to catch as much as a mouse. Now if you have a great tree and think it’s a pity it’s so useless, why not plant it in the realm of Nothingwhatever, in the wilds which spread out into nowhere, and go roaming away to do nothing at its side, ramble around and fall asleep in its shade?
Spared by the axe
No thing will harm it.
If you’re no use at all,
Who’ll come to bother you?’.