Chuang-Tzǔ: The Inner Chapters

Six of the Mixed chapters, chapters 23–27 and 32, include strings of miscellaneous pieces, some no more than fragments, which may come from any or all of the authors in the book. A number of them resume themes otherwise absent after the Inner chapters – the maker of things, the advantages of uselessness, the games Chuang-tzŭ liked to play with logic. Since he developed his philosophy in reaction against the Sophists, he had to devise a terminology of his own with which to clarify his own position. The need of it would hardly have outlasted his lifetime; in general one gets the impression that he was an enemy of logic who knew what logic is, while his successors did not. It is only in ‘The sorting which evens things out’ and in these Mixed chapters episodes that we find his idiosyncratic variations on shih, ‘That’s it’ (the shih which deems, the shih which goes by circumstance, the common shih, the shifting shih), the contrasting of ‘It’ and ‘Other’, judging from a ‘lodging-place’, the ‘whetstone of Heaven’, the ‘potter’s wheel of Heaven’. The Syncretist editors of the second century BC must have found this material uninviting if not unintelligible, which may be why they relegated so much of it to the chapters which served as ragbags instead of incorporating it in ‘The sorting which evens things out’. It will be equally unrewarding for a modern reader who is interested primarily in the literary side of Chuang-tzŭ, but anyone trying seriously to come to grips with the philosophy will find it very important.

‘It is only with people who know about the useless that there is any point in talking about uses. In all the immensity of heaven and earth, a man uses no more than is room for his feet. If recognising this we were to dig away the ground round his feet all the way down to the Underworld, would it still be useful to the man?’

‘Then it is plain that the useless does serve a use.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 26)

‘If archers who hit what they haven’t previously specified as the target were to be called good archers, everyone in the world would be as great an archer as Yi – allowable?’

‘If the world has no common “it” for “That’s it”, and each of us treats as “it” what is “it” for him, everyone in the world is as great a sage as Yao – allowable?’

‘Then of the four doctrines of the Confucians and Mohists, Yang and Ping, which with your own make five, which is really “it”? Perhaps you are people like Lu Chü? When a disciple of his said “I have grasped your Way, sir; I can get a cauldron to boil in winter and can manufacture ice in summer”, Lu Chü answered: “This is no more than using Yang to summon Yang, Yin to summon Yin, it is not what I mean by the Way. Let me show you my Way.” Then he tuned 25-string zithers for him and put one in the hall, the other in a room: when he struck the note kung on one the kung resonated on the other, when he struck the note chüeh on one the chüeh resonated on the other, for note and pitch were the same on both. Should someone else retune one string out of place in the five notes, the twenty-five strings when he strummed would all resonate; without there ever having been a difference from the sound, the master note of the scale would have lapsed. Would you be like him?’

‘At present those Confucians and Mohists, Yang and Ping, are challenging me in disputation. We formulate propositions to refute each other, we shout to browbeat each other. Are you seriously suggesting that they have never denied my position?’

‘In the case of the man of Ch’i who “blamed his son in Sung”, he had failed to make himself clear in giving orders to the gatekeeper. “If it’s the hsing bells he’s looking for he’ll get himself arrested for it, if it’s a lost son he’s looking for they’ve never left the country.” – there was an overlooked category, don’t you agree? As for the lodger from Ch’u who blamed the gatekeeper, in the middle of the night when there was no one there he got into a fight with the boatman. Without him ever having left the hill, it was enough to start a grudge.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 24)

NOTE Chuang-tzŭ is saying that ultimately philosophers disagree only in what they choose to name ‘duty’, the ‘Way’ and so forth, but the detail of the argument is very obscure. The point of the musical example is, I take it, that according to Lu Chü the right-thinking agree on what is meant by ‘duty’ as absolutely as the two zithers agree on the value of the notes, as demonstrated by their sympathetic resonance. He forgets that the notes of the scale vary in pitch with the tuning, and the resonance proves only identity in pitch. (On this interpretation, the retuning of the one string is on both zithers.)

In the last exchange Chuang-tzŭ is alluding to an otherwise unknown story. It may be guessed that the man of Ch’i was going to visit Sung Hsing (Sung-tzŭ), a philosopher of the Chi-hsia academy in Ch’i who is mentioned elsewhere in the book (pp. 44, 278). The gatekeeper misunderstood ‘Sung’ as the state of that name, hsing as the kind of bell so called, and tzŭ in its ordinary sense of ‘son’. I will not hazard a guess about the lodger from Ch’u. The point would be that the bitterest disagreements can start from giving different meanings to words.

‘Confucius by the age of sixty had sixty times changed his mind; whenever he began by judging “That’s it” he ended by judging “That’s not”. We do not yet know of anything which we now affirm that we shall not deny it fifty-nine times over.’

‘It’s that Confucius persevered in his intent, devoted himself to knowing.’

‘Confucius gave up all that, and although he would say things from the mouth he was never saying them from the heart. According to Confucius, we go on drawing our capabilities from the ultimate root, and revert to its magic in order to grow. To make your native note fit the pitch-tubes, your words fit the standards, and with benefits and duties spread out before you, to like and dislike and judge “That’s it” and “That’s not”, this serves only to make men submit from the mouth. But if you do cause men to submit from the heart and not presume to take a defiant stand, you make the empire doubly stable. Enough, enough! We have never yet succeeded in rising to his level!’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 27)

Ch’ü Po-yü at the age of sixty had sixty times changed his mind; what he began by affirming, in the end he never failed to dismiss with a denial. We do not yet know of anything which we now affirm that we shall not deny it fifty-nine times over. The myriad things have somewhere from which they grow but no one sees the root, somewhere from which they come forth but no one sees the gate. Men all honour what wit knows, but none knows how to know by depending on what his wits do not know; may that not be called the supreme uncertainty? Enough, enough! There is nowhere you can escape from it; is it what one might call ‘the alternative which is so together with the alternative which is so’? (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 25)

NOTE The last sentence repeats Chuang-tzŭ’s call to abolish the alternatives of disputation by ‘treating as so even what is not so’ (p. 60 above).

In the interchange of things by the Way, their dividing is formation, their formation is dissolution. What goes on being hateful in dividing is that it makes the divisions into a completed set. The reason why the completion goes on being hateful is that it makes everything there is into a completed set. Therefore having come forth it does not go back, we see its ghost; having come forth, to ‘get through’ is to get through to death. The extinguished persisting as solid is a One which is a ghost; it has used the shaped to image the shapeless and has become fixed.

It has no root in it from which it comes forth and no opening for it through wich to go in, it has solidity but goes on having nothing to reside in, it has duration but never has a root or a tip. (What comes forth from somewhere but has no opening for it has solidity.) That which has solidity but goes on having nothing to reside in is the cosmos-as-spatial; that which has duration but neither root nor tip is the cosmos-as-temporal.

There is somewhere from which we are born, into which we die, from which we come forth, through which we go in; it is this that is called the Gate of Heaven. The Gate of Heaven is that which is without anything; the myriad things go on coming forth from that which is without anything. Something cannot become something by means of something, it necessarily goes on coming forth from that which is without anything; but that which is without anything is for ever without anything. The sage stores away in it. (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 23)

NOTE Except for the later Mohists, no early Chinese thinkers are known to have fully abstracted the concepts of Space and Time; the corresponding words yü and chou seem rather to be ‘cosmos-as-spatial’ and ‘cosmos-as-temporal’. Here Chuang-tzŭ has the thought, explicit nowhere else in the book, that the habit of analysing puts us in the middle of an illusory universe of rigid, static things which persists like a dead man’s ghost as the process of transformation continues. In particular, by dividing off Something from Nothing, we evoke a cosmos floating in empty space and cut off from the living root out of which things grow. The sage returns to the whole which, since it has not yet divided out into separate things, is ‘without anything’ (and conversely ‘without nothing’, cf. p. 21 above).

What is ultimately fixed in the cosmos-as-spatial goes on issuing from the light of Heaven. One who goes on issuing from the light of Heaven, other men see as a man, other things see as a thing. Only the man who is on course possesses constancy. One who has constancy, man lets go of, Heaven assists. Whom man lets go of is called a subject of Heaven, whom Heaven assists is called a ‘Son of Heaven’. (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 23)

NOTE This passage is closely related to the last. In contrast with the artificial fixity of things divided up by the intellect, the ‘ultimately fixed’ is what veers with the fluid course of the Way by letting itself be generated continually from the root of things (cf. p. 62 above, ‘The ultimately fixed supports them’). One who can return to this course has shed the habit of analysis by which man distinguishes himself as agent from Heaven working through him, and is left with only the shape and guise of a man (cf. p. 82 above).

The men of old, their knowledge had arrived at something: at what had it arrived? There were some who thought there had not yet begun to be any things – the utmost, the exhaustive, there is no more to add. The next thought that there were things, but they preferred to think of life as the loss of something, of death as its recovery, by which dividing comes to an end. The next said: ‘At first there is not anything, afterwards there is life, living we soon die. Deem “being without anything” to be the head, “life” the torso, “death’ the rump. Who knows that Something and Nothing, death and life, have a single ancestor? He shall be my friend.’

These three though different are a royal clan; they are ‘Chao’ and ‘Ching’ calling attention to positions in the succession, and the ‘House of Ch’ü’ calling attention to the bordered fief, they are not the One. Having ‘life’ is an obscuring accretion; stripping it off, say ‘It as it shifts’. Try to speak about it as it shifts, and it is not what you are speaking about; what it is, however, is unknowable. The Midwinter Sacrifice composed of tripes and hooves can be shared out far and wide yet cannot be shared out at all. The viewer of a house makes a full tour of rooms and shrine – and when the tour is over goes off to a latrine in it.

A ‘That’s it’ which deems picks out by a reference it as it shifts. Let’s see what happens now when you speak about it as it shifts. This is to take ‘life’ as the root of you and the wits as your authority, and use them to go by in charioteering ‘That’s it, that’s not’. They really exist for you, names and substances, and using them to go by you make yourself into a hostage. You let other men judge what is honourable for yourself, and using them to go by you will die to redeem honour. People like that think of the employed as wise and the out of office as foolish, of success as glorious and failure as disgraceful. It as it shifts being the men of today is the cicada and the dove thinking the same as whoever thinks the same. (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 23)

NOTE In distinguishing ‘life’, we divide into a triad like the three branches of the royal clan of Ch’u. We name the bordered thing ‘living’ (as the Ch’ü branch is named after the bordered land in which it is enfiefed), and the other two phases by their positions before and after (as Chao and Ching are named after ancestors in the line of the kings of Ch’u). The sage, by unlearning distinctions, reverts from the phases between which one judges ‘That’s it, that’s not’ to the ‘it as it shifts’ from which they are abstracted. But the rest of us take the living phase as fundamental and let our contemporaries decide for us what is ‘it’ and what is not, supporting ourselves on a local and temporary unanimity which is as meaningless as the agreement of the cicada and the dove on the impossibility of long-distance flying (cf. p. 43f above).

Tzŭ-ch’i of Nan-po reclined elbow on armrest. As he looked up at the sky and exhaled, Yen-ch’eng-Tzŭ-yu entered and saw him.

‘Master, you are supreme among things! Can the frame really be made to be like dry bone, the heart like dead ash?’

‘I used to live in a mountain cave,’ said Tzŭ-ch’i. ‘During that time T’ien Ho noticed me once, and his subjects in Ch’i country congratulated him three times. I must have taken the initiative, that’s how he knew; I must have offered for sale, that’s how he bought. Without my taking the initiative, how would he get to know? Without my offering for sale, how could he get to buy? Alas! I lamented the man who had lost himself, then I lamented the lamenter of the man, then I lamented the lamenter of the lamenter of the man, and afterwards I withdrew further every day.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 24)

NOTE Tzŭ-ch’i knows that to lament is to make the mistake of distinguishing the disliked from the liked, therefore laments that he lamented and is caught up in a succession of lamenting and lamented selves. He breaks out of the dichotomy in the opening episode of chapter 2 (p. 48f above) through a trance in which he loses both ‘the counterpart of himself’ and ‘his own self’, and is declared by Yen-ch’eng Tzŭ-yu to be no longer the man who was leaning on the armrest the day before. This must be the discarded introduction of the story in chapter 2, where the editor must have revised at least the first sentence to make a new beginning.

‘After I heard your words, one year and I ran wild, two years and I was tame, three years and things interchanged, four years and they were simply things, five years and the daemonic came, six years and the ghostly entered in, seven years and I was wholly Heaven’s, eight years and I did not know life from death, nine years and I had the great secret.

‘The “living” when its time comes we deem to be the “dead”; urging impartiality towards both is because we have been showing partiality to death. There is an origin, from which we are in the living, the Yang phase — but if there was no origin is it really so? Towards when are we proceeding, towards when not proceeding? Heaven has the numbers of the calendar, earth has the dates men count from; where would I seek an answer?

‘ “None knows where we shall end, how can there not be a destiny?” – None knows where we began, what destiny could there have been? “You do something to which it answers, what can it be but the spirits?” – There was nothing to be answered, how could it have been the spirits?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 27)

NOTE Chuang-tzŭ is playing one of his logical games with the idea of the beginning of things (as on p. 55 above). As soon as you distinguish life from death you have to give the name ‘death’ to the later of the phases, and therefore give it the advantage over life. You also raise the issue of why a man lives out his term or dies young, to which Confucians answer ‘destiny’ and Mohists ‘reward or punishment by the spirits’. But to postulate an origin is to imply a time before the origin, so that the former phase (of the Yang, of life) can just as well be conceived as latter to what preceded. And how can one think of the origin either as destined (there would be nothing yet to decree the destiny) or as the work of spirits (who would have nothing to reward or punish)?

Archer Yi was skilled in hitting a minute target but clumsy in stopping others from praising himself. The sage is skilled in what is Heaven’s but clumsy in what is man’s. To be skilled in what is Heaven’s and deft in what is man’s, only the perfect man is capable of that. Only the animal is able to be animal, only the animal is able to be Heaven’s. The perfect man hates Heaven, hates what is from Heaven in man, and above all the question ‘Is it in me from Heaven or from man?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 23)

NOTE Chuang-tzŭ generally either exalts Heaven or denies the dichotomy of Heaven and man, and to find him siding with man is so extraordinary that many try to force another meaning out of the passage. But on closer consideration one sees that to get to grips with the last and most obstinate dichotomy in his thought Chuang-tzŭ would be driven to seek an angle from which Heaven is the wrong one of the pair, to balance the only too familiar angle from which it is the right one. One cannot in the last resort distinguish the work of Heaven and of the man in the skilled spontaneity of the Taoist or the craftsman; if one tries, what is left as Heaven’s is the purely animal, and from this point of view it is wrong to prefer Heaven.

‘Saying from a lodging-place works nine times out of ten, weighted saying works seven times out of ten. “Spillover” saying is new every day, smooth it out on the whetstone of Heaven.’

‘Saying from a lodging-place works nine times out of ten’ – You borrow a standpoint outside in order to sort a matter out. A father does not act as marriage broker for his own son; a father praising his son does not impress as much as someone not the father. The blame for the standpoint is not on me, the blame is on the other man. If my standpoint is the same as his he responds, if it is not he turns the other way. What agrees with his standpoint he approves with a ‘That’s it’ which deems, what disagrees he rejects with a ‘That’s not’ which deems.

‘Weighted saying works seven times out of ten’ – It is what you say on your own authority. This is a matter of being venerable as a teacher. To be ahead in years, but without the warp and woof and root and tip of what is expected from the venerable in years, this isn’t being ahead. To be a man without the resources to be ahead of others is to be without the Way of Man; and a man without the Way of Man is to be called an obsolete man.

‘ “Spillover” saying is new every day, smooth it out on the whetstone of Heaven’ – Use it to go by and let the stream find its own channels, this is the way to last out your years. If you refrain from saying, everything is even; the even is uneven with saying, saying is uneven with the even. Hence the aphorism ‘In saying he says nothing’. If in saying you say nothing, all your life you say without ever saying, all your life you refuse to say without ever failing to say.

What from somewhere is allowable from somewhere else is unallowable, what from somewhere is so from somewhere else is not so. Why so? By being so. Why not so? By not being so. Why allowable? By being allowable. Why unallowable? By being unallowable. It is inherent in the thing that from somewhere that’s so of it, that from somewhere that’s allowable of it; of no thing is it not so, of no thing is it unallowable. Without ‘ “Spillover” saying is new every day, smooth it out on the whetstone of Heaven’, who could ever keep going for long? The myriad things are all the seed from which they grow:

In unlike shapes they abdicate in turn,
With ends and starts as on a ring.
None grasps where to mark the grades.
Call it the ‘Potter’s Wheel of Heaven’.

The ‘Potter’s Wheel of Heaven’ is the whetstone of Heaven. (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 27)

NOTE The three varieties of saying are mentioned as Chuang-tzŭ’s own three modes of language in the account of him at the end of the book (p. 283 below).

(1) ‘Saying from a lodging-place’ is traditionally taken to be the expression of ideas through imaginary conversations, a device so characteristic of Chuang-tzŭ. But in the terminology of ‘The sorting which evens things out’, which was obsolete very early but pervades this section, ‘lodging-places’ are the temporary standpoints between which the sage circulates as the situation changes (pp. 54, 55, 60 above). The context here implies that the lodging-place is the standpoint of the other party in debate. Although nothing can be settled by disputation, in which everyone has started from his own choice of names, it is possible to convince a man by temporarily assuming his standpoint and arguing from it – the argumentum ad hominem would indeed be for Chuang-tzŭ the only useful kind of debate.

(2) ‘Weighted saying’ is the aphorism with the weight of the speaker’s experience behind it.

(3) ‘Spillover’ saying, the most important, is traditionally, and this time plausibly, supposed to be named after a kind of vessel designed to tip and right itself when filled too near the brim. It is speech characterised by the intelligent spontaneity of Taoist behaviour in general, a fluid language which keeps its equilibrium through changing meanings and viewpoints.

Huan, a man of Cheng, was droning and intoning his lessons in the country of Ch’iu-shih. In a mere three years Huan became a Confucian scholar. The Yellow River moistens only to three miles from its shores, Huan’s bounty spread only to the clans of his father and mother and wife. It caused his younger brother to become a Mohist. When the Confucians and Mohists competed in disputation, their father gave his support to old Mo-tzŭ. Ten years later Huan killed himself. Their father dreamed that he said: ‘The man who caused your son to become a Mohist was I myself.’

Why not take a look at his grave? Already he has become the cones of the autumn cypress. When the maker of things recompenses a man he recompenses not the man but what is from Heaven in the man. He treated as Other, therefore caused to treat as Other. That sort of man thinks himself somehow different from other men, to the point of putting his own parent below him; it’s villagers equally humble grabbing from each other as they drink from the well. So we may say that in the present age everyone is a Huan. Thinking of one’s own as the alternative that is It – one who has Power in him wouldn’t know how to do that, not to mention one who has the Way. Of old this was called the punishment for retreating from Heaven. (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 32)

NOTE This is a concrete instance of the ‘That’s it, that’s not’ of Confucians and Mohists (cf. p. 52 above). In the Confucian morality the family comes first, in the Mohist love is equal for all. The man who first raises such an issue, splitting It and Other, is himself responsible for someone else choosing the alternative he rejects.

Confucius asked the historiographers Ta T’iao, Po Ch’ang-ch’ien and Hsi Wei

‘Duke Ling of Wey was a drunkard and voluptuary, paid no heed to the government of the state, hunted to hounds and with net and stringed arrow, neglected to deal with the lords of the other states; why should he have been deemed “the magical Duke”?

‘It was the ‘That’s it’ which goes by circumstances,’ said Ta T’iao.

‘Duke Ling used to bathe with his three wives in the same tub,’ said Po Ch’ang-ch’ien, ‘yet when Shih Ch’iu was summoned to an audience he let other people carry the gift and hold him by the arm as he came towards the throne. He would be so utterly frivolous, yet so princely when he saw a man of worth; that is why he was deemed the magical Duke.’

‘When Duke Ling died,’ said Hsi Wei, ‘they took auspices for a burial in the family graveyard, which were unlucky. They took auspices for Sandy Hill, which were lucky. They dug down a few dozen feet and found a stone coffin. They washed it and examined it, there was an inscription on it:

“No faith that my sons will put me here.
The Magical Duke will steal it and make it his tomb.”

Duke Ling being deemed magical goes a long way back. What would these two know about it?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 25)

NOTE Ling, ‘magical’, is the Duke’s posthumous name, chosen as in some way descriptive of his reign. It can have a sinister sense, but Confucius takes it as an undeserved compliment to the Duke, and it does in fact have its good sense everywhere in Chuang-tzŭ (the sage’s ‘Magic Storehouse’ from which he draws his capabilities, his ‘Magic Watchtower’ up which he climbs for wider vision). The mysterious discovery of the tomb shows that the Duke was blessed or damned by Heaven before he was born, it is by no means clear which. The point would be that the quality of Duke Ling (the sort of man who impresses as a force of nature) is in the stuff of him as Heaven generated it, and has nothing to do either with men’s moral judgements or with any deliberate choice of how to live his life. ‘When the maker of things recompenses a man he recompenses not the man but what is from Heaven in the man’ (p. 108 above).

When Confucius was going to Ch’u, he lodged at an inn in Yi-ch’iu. Next door everybody, husbands and wives, retainers and maids, had climbed up on the roof.

‘They are the servants of a sage’, said Confucius, ‘who has buried himself among the people, hidden himself away in the fields. The rumour of his name has faded, but he has set himself a boundless aim. Although he says things from the mouth, at heart he has never said anything. He is in course of turning away from the world, doesn’t at heart deign to have anything to do with it. He’s someone who has submerged on dry land. Wouldn’t it be Yi-liao of Shih-nan?’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Confucius. ‘He knows that I attract more attention than he does, knows that I am on my way to Ch’u, and thinks I am sure to get the King of Ch’u to summon him to court. He will regard me as a man who fawns on princes. Someone like that is embarrassed to hear a fawner’s name, let alone meet one in person. What makes you think he’s still there anyway?’

‘There are the unctuous smug ones, there are the ones who cannot see an inch in front of their faces, there are the ones with bowed shoulders.’

The ones called ‘unctuous and smug’, when they have studied the words of one master, so unctuously, so smugly, become privately self-satisfied and think they have no more to learn, but do not yet know that there have never yet begun to be any things. Hence the term ‘unctuous smug ones’.

As for those who ‘cannot see an inch in front of their faces’, the louse on a pig is one of them. He picks a place where the long bristles are sparse, which he thinks is his broad mansion and spacious park, or a corner deep down in the crotch or the hoof, or in between the dugs or the hams, which he thinks is a safe home or comfortable lodging; he does not know that one morning the butcher will slap his arms and spread the tinder and lift the smoking torch, and he and the pig will both be done to a crisp. These go forward with their surroundings, these go backward with their surroundings, these are what he calls the ‘ones who cannot see an inch in front of their faces’.

An example of the ‘ones with bowed shoulders’ would be Shun. The sheep’s flesh does not hanker after the ants, the ants hanker after the sheep’s flesh, because it has an appetising smell. Shun’s deeds had an appetising smell which pleased the people, so that the three places where he moved to escape them turned into cities, and by the time he came to the wastes of Chih-teng there were ten times ten thousand families. Yao heard of Shun’s excellence and raised him up from the barren lands, saying, ‘We hope for prosperity from his coming.’ When Shun was raised up from the barren lands he was already an old man, his sight and hearing were failing, but he was not allowed to end his years in peace. He was what is meant by ‘one with bowed shoulders’.

This is why the daemonic man hates the coming of a crowd. If a crowd does come he stays aloof, and because he stays aloof they have nothing to gain from him. Therefore he is never too intimate with anyone, never too remote from anyone; he cherishes the Power in him, nurtures the peace in him, in order to accord with Heaven. It is this that is meant by the True Man. He casts away his knowledge to the ants, discovers how to estimate from the fish, casts away his intentions to the sheep. (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 24)

NOTE The fish in a shoal, effortlessly weaving in and out with an infallible sense of the proper distance to keep between each other, seem to fascinate Chuang-tzŭ, cf. pp. 90, 123.

Jan-hsiang found the centre of the ring where becoming veers with circumstance. Other things and he had no end nor start, no ‘How long’? and no times. To be transformed day by day with other things is to be untransformed once and for all. Why not try to let them go? As for citing Heaven as your teacher yet failing to follow Heaven as your teacher, and being a fellow victim with other things, why do you have to busy yourself with them? For the sage, there has never yet begun to be Heaven, never yet begun to be man, never yet begun to be a Beginning, never yet begun to be things. If you walk the path side by side with the men of your times and do not fall away, if the source out of which you walk it is all at your disposal and does not dry up, why would you have to bother about fitting in?

When T’ang won universal dominion the Director of the Gate, T’ien Heng, tutored him in this. He followed him as tutor but was not fenced in within his school, he learned from him how becoming veers with circumstance. For the sake of this he instituted names, and for these names there were corresponding rules; he achieved the double view of it. For Confucius, his own exhaustive thinking was the tutor for this.

8Passages related to the Inner chapters

8
Passages related to the Inner chapters