Chuang-Tzǔ: The Inner Chapters

In the Inner chapters, at the very end of chapter 2, Chuang-tzŭ speaks once of a personal happening, his dream that he was a butterfly. Otherwise, we meet him in person only in dialogues with Hui Shih. But his school preserved or invented many tales about him, scattered over the Outer and Mixed chapters. In these he is never merely the ideal type of a Taoist sage, as Lao-tzŭ is in other stories; the humour and poetry, the irreverence for logic and for death, the scorn of worldly success, the imagery of birds, animals and trees, connect him unmistakably with the author of the Inner chapters. We cannot be sure that they are earlier than the third, or in most cases even the second century BC; but if they are legend, it is of the kind which accumulates round a historical person of strong personality, and is already illuminating, simplifying and disguising him within his own lifetime. They deserve the same sort of belief or suspended disbelief as unsubstantiated anecdotes about Oscar Wilde, Einstein or Churchill – ‘Anyway, he was like that! (Or if he wasn’t he should have been).’

Although China has a solid political history and reliable dates back to about 1000 BC, anyone not in public office remained unrecorded, and it took only a couple of generations for people to be becoming vague even about his date. If we are certain that Chuang-tzŭ lived in the late fourth century BC, it is because his friend Hui Shih did take office (under King Hui of Liang, 370–319 BC), and also because of his general place in the history of Chinese thought and literature. But the authors of these stories are not at all sure when he lived, and seldom name the rulers whom they mention. One story is plainly anachronistic, perhaps deliberately, to make an anti-Confucian joke; by crediting Chuang-tzŭ with a visit to Duke Ai of Lu (494–468 BC) it hints that an unnamed character is Confucius himself (who died in 479 BC). At the end of the second century BC the great historian Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien did try to place him chronologically. He had little to go on but the book Chuang-tzŭ itself (still unabridged), but adds a little more information in the opening sentences of his brief note:

‘Chuang-tzŭ was a man of Meng. Personal name: Chou. He was at one time a public employee in Lacquer Garden (Ch’i-yüan). He was a contemporary of Kings Hui of Liang (370–319 BC) and Hsüan of Ch’i (319–301 BC).’

Meng was in the state of Sung, in what is now the province of Honan. Lacquer Garden may have been either the garden or the city named after it, but Chuang-tzŭ’s expertise with trees and animals supports the former possibility. Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien also reproduces the full version (which we shall use) of a story mutilated in Chuang-tzŭ, of a mission to him from someone identified by the historian as King Wei of Ch’u (339–329 BC).

Apart from the episodes in the Inner chapters and one in the ‘Yangist Miscellany’, which we translate in their places, we assemble here all stories about Chuang-tzŭ (as distinct from dialogues in which he is merely the spokesman of his philosophy). In reading them, it should be remembered that they testify in the first place to how Chuang-tzŭ looked for the first half-dozen generations after his death. We can imagine even admirers having reservations, for example, about the unqualified praise of uselessness in the Inner chapters. They would be reassured by the story of the mountain tree,³ where Chuang-tzŭ makes a judicious compromise between the claims of uselessness and usefulness. (This story is the earliest attested by another source; it appears complete in the Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu, about 240 BC.) Of the people who delighted in tales of Chuang-tzŭ grandiosely refusing high office, some would despise worldly success on principle, others would be seeking excuses for their own failure; it would be someone of the latter sort who wrote of Chuang-tzŭ in his rags passing the King of Wei, and lamenting that the times are unfavourable to men of talent.⁴

Is there any point in trying to penetrate through the legend to the man himself? Anecdotalists and legend-mongers do not care about the thing we most want to know about a thinker, the stages and direction of his intellectual growth. The Inner chapters, permeated by an obsession with the life and legend of Confucius, invite the suspicion that their author must have been brought up as a Confucian,⁵ but nothing in the anecdotes supports the conjecture except for a single, anomalous, reference to Chuang-tzŭ as wearing Confucian dress.⁶ However, to search the stories for traces of his intellectual development may not be as futile as it appears. The alternative tradition throughout Chinese history of preferring private to public life, of which Chuang-tzŭ is the first representative who came to be classed as ‘Taoist’, began about 350 BC with the ‘Nurture of life’ school. These were the ‘Yangists’, the followers of the quite unmystical Yang Chu, who was content to insist that the life and health of the body are more important than worldly possessions. It is permissible to guess that Chuang-tzŭ would have started from this position. If so, stories about him may have circulated, not only among Taoists, but in the Yangist school, which survived until about 200 BC. Now the book Chuang-tzŭ does contain a set of four chapters representative of this tendency, which we translate under the title ‘Yangist miscellany’. One of these, ‘The discourse on swords’, is a tale about Chuang Chou dissuading a king from encouraging swordfights, so uncharacteristic of the philosopher that many suppose it to be about someone else of the same name. The point of the story is that life is not to be sacrificed uselessly. Outside the ‘Yangist miscellany’, the story told to the Marquis of Chien-ho about the fish on the road⁷ makes a similar point, that when a man needs help to stay alive any other help is an empty gesture. More remarkable is the eerie, anxiety-ridden story of the poaching in Tiao-ling, the only one in which Chuang-tzŭ suffers doubts.⁸ Here he is unmistakably a ‘Nurture of life’ teacher, whose only concern is to care for his own body and avoid endangering ties. Watching the animals prey on each other, as he hunts the strange magpie and in his turn gets chased by the gamekeeper, he discovers that the whole order of nature is inimical to survival, and is thrown into confusion for three days. One might take the moral to be simply ‘Be more careful in future’. But Chuang-tzŭ has made the discovery that ‘it is inherent in things that they are ties to each other’, which undermines the hope that one can ensure survival by renouncing external involvements. Does this story preserve a memory of Chuang-tzŭ’s crisis of conversion? (I picked up this idea in conversation with Lee H. Yearley.) Perhaps it was in those three days that he took the step from self-centredness to selflessness, from the Yangist obsession with individual survival to the reconciliation with death which is the theme of ‘The teacher who is the ultimate ancestor’.

The stories of the poaching at Tiao-ling and of the fish on the road are the only ones which call him by surname and given name, ‘Chuang Chou’ (apart from Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien’s story,⁹ and the butterfly episode, in which Chuang-tzŭ is talking about himself). This rather suggests a stage in his life before he earned the honorific suffix ‘tzŭ’. The Tiao-ling story is unique in crediting Chuang-tzŭ with a named disciple (Lin Ch’ieh) and also with an unnamed teacher of his own. Elsewhere he is only twice mentioned as having disciples at all.¹⁰ It is therefore tempting to essay after all a little skeleton biography of Chuang-tzŭ. His upbringing was probably Confucian, but he studied under a Yangist, and in due course became a qualified Yangist teacher with his own disciples. After a crisis which may be reflected in the Tiao-ling story he went his own way, as the irreverent drop-out of the more characteristic tales. He visited Hui Shih, and heard him use the paradoxes of space and time to prove that all things are one; but his attitude hardened against logic, and he discovered in his own ecstatic experiences the vision which dissolves all distinctions, above all the dichotomy of life and death. He never again became a formal teacher – in one story¹¹ he is weaving sandals for a living – and such disciples as he had were people who hung around to pick up something from his words or his mere presence, like the retinue of Wang T’ai of the chopped foot at the beginning of ‘The signs of fullness of Power’. All this is speculation, but will do to make a frame on which to arrange the stories, starting from the Tiao-ling crisis and ending on his deathbed.

When Chuang Chou was roaming inside the fenced preserve at Tiao-ling, he noticed a strange magpie coming from the south, with wings seven feet wide and eyes a full inch across. It brushed against his forehead and perched in a chestnut grove.

‘What bird is this?’ said Chuang Chou. ‘With wings so huge it doesn’t fly away, with eyes so big it didn’t notice.’

He hitched up his robe and quickened his step, and with crossbow at the ready waited to take aim.

He noticed a cicada, which had just found a beautiful patch of shade and had forgotten what could happen to it. A mantis hiding behind the leaves grabbed at it, forgetting at the sight of gain that it had a body of its own. The strange magpie in his turn was taking advantage of that, at the sight of profit forgetful of its truest prompting.

‘Hmm!’ said Chuang Chou uneasily. ‘It is inherent in things that they are ties to each other, that one kind calls up another.’

As he threw down his crossbow and ran out of the grove, the gamekeeper came running behind shouting curses at him.

When Chuang Chou got home he was gloomy for three days. It made Lin Ch’ieh inquire

‘In caring for the body I have been forgetting what can happen to me. I have been looking at reflections in muddy water, have gone astray from the clear pool. Besides, I have heard the Master say “If it’s the custom there, do as you’re told.” Now when I wandered in Tiao-ling I forgot what could happen to me; when the strange magpie brushed against my forehead I strayed into the chestnut grove and forgot my truest prompting, and the gamekeeper in the chestnut grove took me for a criminal. That is why I am gloomy.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 20)

King Wei of Ch’u, hearing of Chuang Chou’s excellence, sent a messenger to greet him with rich presents, offering to make him chief minister. Chuang Chou smiled and said to the messenger from Ch’u

‘A thousand pieces is a great gain indeed, to be a noble and a minister is a most honourable station. But have you never seen the ox which is sacrificed in the rites outside the city? After gorging it for several years they dress it in patterned brocades to lead it into the great ancestral hall. When that time comes, even if it should wish for no more than to be an orphaned calf, isn’t it beyond all help? Get out at once, don’t soil me; I would rather amuse myself swimming and playing in a filthy ditch than be made captive by the master of a state. All my life I shall refuse office and please my own fancy.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 32, mutilated; restored from Shih-chi, chapter 63)

Chuang Chou’s family was poor, so he went to borrow grain from the Marquis of Chien-ho.

‘By all means,’ said the Marquis. ‘I shall soon be getting the tax-money from my lands, I’ll lend you 300 pieces. Will that do?’

‘When I was coming yesterday’, he said, ‘there was something calling out right in the middle of the highway. I looked back into the wheel rut, and there was a perch there. I questioned it; “Hello, perch,” I said, “What would you be?” “I am minister of the waves in the empire of the East Sea,” it said; “I suppose you wouldn’t have a dipperful of water to keep me alive?” “By all means,” I said. “I am just going on a journey south to the Kings of Wu and Yüeh, I’ll have the stream of the West River diverted to where you are. Will that do?” The perch looked furious. “I’ve lost what I can’t ever be without,” it said; “I’ve nowhere to live. What I need is just a dipperful of water to keep me alive; if that’s all you have to say, you would do better to come looking for me first thing on the dried fish stalls”.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 26)

There was a man of Sung, Ts’ao Shang, who was sent by the King on a mission to Ch’in. When he set out he was given a few chariots; the King of Ch’in was pleased with him and gave him a hundred more. On his return to Sung he visited Chuang-tzŭ.

‘To live in a cramped alley in a poor quarter,’ he said, ‘needy and wretched and weaving sandals for a living, scrawny in the neck and sallow in the face, I wouldn’t be much good at that. To get noticed at a single stroke by a lord of ten thousand chariots, and win a hundred chariots for my retinue, that’s what I can do.’

‘When the King of Ch’in falls ill and calls his doctors,’ said Chuang-tzŭ, ‘the one who bursts a carbuncle or drains a boil gets a single chariot, the one who licks his piles gets five. The viler the treatment the more chariots one gets. You wouldn’t have been treating his piles of course? What a lot of chariots you have!

Someone had an audience with the King of Sung, who presented him with ten chariots. He came swaggering and bragging about his ten chariots to Chuang-tzŭ.

‘There’s a family by the riverside,’ said Chuang-tzŭ, ‘they’re poor people who weave rushes for a living. A boy of theirs was diving in the deepest water, and found a pearl worth a thousand pieces. His father said to the boy : “Fetch a stone and pound it to bits. A pearl worth a thousand pieces would surely be at the bottom of the ninefold abyss, under the chin of the black dragon. You could never have got the pearl if you hadn’t caught him asleep. Supposing that the black dragon should awake, will there be the tiniest trace of you left?”

‘Now the state of Sung has depths harder to plumb than the nine levels of the abyss, and the King of Sung is fiercer than the black dragon. You could never have got the chariots if you hadn’t caught him asleep. Supposing that the King of Sung should awake, you’ll be chopped up to a fine powder, won’t you?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 32)

Chuang-tzŭ, in a patched gown of coarse cloth and shoes tied up with string, was passing the King of Wei.

‘It’s poverty, it isn’t sinking low. A man having the Way and the Power but being unable to act on them, that’s sinking low. Having tattered clothes and holes in your shoes is poverty, it isn’t sinking low. This is what they call being born in unlucky times. Has Your Majesty never seen a gibbon as it climbs? When it finds cedars, catalpas, camphor-trees, it goes bounding over the branches and frolics in the midst of them, and not even Yi or P’eng Meng would have time to take aim with his bow. But when it’s among prickly mulberries, brambles, hawthorns, spiny citrons, it progresses warily, glances sideways, quivers and quakes and winces and shivers. It’s not that bone or sinew is under more strain or is any less supple. It is dwelling in surroundings which don’t suit it, don’t give scope to prove how nimble it is. Now if one dwells among the unscrupulous ministers of a degenerate prince, yet desires not to sink low, how long can one expect to last? Pi-kan whose heart was cut out would be the test, wouldn’t he?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 20)

When Chuang-tzŭ was travelling in the mountains he saw a great tree with flourishing leaves and branches. A woodcutter stopped at its side but did not choose it. He asked him why, and was told

‘This tree,’ said Chuang-tzŭ, ‘by its timber being good for nothing, will get to last out Heaven’s term for it, wouldn’t you say?’

Coming down from the mountains, he lodged at a friend’s house. The friend was delighted, and ordered a boy to kill a goose in his honour. The boy had a question:

“Yesterday, because its timber was good for nothing, the tree in the mountains could last out Heaven’s term for it. Today, because the stuff it’s made of is good for nothing, our host’s goose is dead. Which side are you going to settle for, sir?’

‘I should be inclined to settle midway between being good for something and being good for nothing. That seems the thing to do yet it is not, and so one still fails to shake off ties. But in roaming adrift with the Way and the Power as your chariot, that’s not so.

Without praises, without curses,
Now a dragon, now a snake,
You transform together with the times.
And never consent to be one thing alone.

Now up, now down, you take as your measure the degree which is in harmony; and if roaming adrift over the Ancestor of the myriad things you treat things as things and refuse to be turned into a thing by things, how can you ever be tied? This was the rule for Shen-nung and the Yellow Emperor. But when it comes to the facts about the myriad things or the code of conduct handed down for men, that’s not so.

What you join together will part,
What you achieve will decay.
Honesty’s hard corners will get blunted,
If you are esteemed you are criticised,
Do anything and there’s something you leave out.

Be clever and they’ll plot against you, be stupid and they’ll cheat you, how can you get to be certain of anything? Sad, isn’t it? Make a note of it, my disciples. Is there any direction to take except by the Way and the Power?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 20)

‘We have a lot of Confucian scholars in Lu,’ said the Duke. ‘Not so many study your doctrine.’

‘The whole country is wearing teacher’s garb. What do you mean, there are not so many?’

‘I have heard Confucians say that the man with the round cap on his head knows the seasons of Heaven, the man with the squared shoes on his feet knows the configuration of earth, the man with the half-disc of jade on his girdle can judge decisively on one side or the other when an issue arises. But it’s not so sure that gentlemen who possess their Way do wear their garb, or that wearers of their garb do know about their Way. If Your Grace really thinks otherwise, why not proclaim throughout the country “For wearing this garb without possessing this Way the punishment is death”?’

Then Duke Ai did proclaim it, and within five days there was not a man in the state of Lu who dared put on teacher’s garb, except just one fellow in teacher’s garb standing at the Duke’s gate. The Duke summoned him at once and questioned him about affairs of state. Through a thousand, ten thousand tricks and turns he was never at a loss.

‘Throughout all Lu’, said Chuang-tzŭ, ‘the Confucians amount to just one man. Would you call that a lot?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 21)

Chuang-tzŭ was fishing in P’u river. The King of Ch’u sent two grandees to approach him with the message:

‘I hear that in Ch’u there is a sacred tortoise’, he said, ‘which has been dead for three thousand years. His Majesty keeps it wrapped up in a box at the top of the hall in the shrine of his ancestors. Would this tortoise rather be dead, to be honoured as preserved bones? Or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud?’

‘Away with you! I shall drag my tail in the mud.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 17)

When Hui Shih was chief minister of Liang, Chuang-tzŭ went to visit him. Someone told Hui Shih

At this Hui Shih was frightened, and searched throughout the state for three days and three nights.

‘In the South there is a bird,’ he said, ‘its name is the phoenix, do you know of it? The phoenix came up from the South Sea to fly to the North Sea; it would rest on no tree but the sterculia, would eat nothing but the seeds of the bamboo, would drink only from the sweetest springs. Just then an owl had found a rotting mouse. As the phoenix flew over, it looked up and glared at it, “Shoo!” Now am I to take it that for the sake of that Liang country of yours you want to shoo at me?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 17)

‘Out swim the minnows, so free and easy,’ said Chuang-tzŭ. ‘That’s how fish are happy.’

‘You aren’t me, whence do you know that I don’t know the fish are happy?’

‘We’ll grant that not being you I don’t know about you. You’ll grant that you are not a fish, and that completes the case that you don’t know the fish are happy.’

‘Let’s go back to where we started. When you said “Whence do you know that the fish are happy?”, you asked me the question already knowing that I knew. I knew it from up above the Hao.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 17)

NOTE This is the only instance of disputation with Hui Shih in the Outer chapters (interest in the Sophists was already failing), and is remarkable for a playfulness which in parodying logical debate is more faithful to the detail of its structure than anything else in Chuang-tzŭ. When Hui Shih defended the paradoxes listed without explanation in ‘Below in the Empire’ (p. 283f) he must have been talking like this, as the Later Mohists do in the explanations of some of their Canons; what a pity we never hear what he had to say! Chuang-tzŭ’s own final stroke of wit is more than a mere trick with the idiom An chih ‘Whence do you know …?’, one of the standard ways of saying ‘How do you know …?’ What he is saying is: ‘Whatever you affirm is as relative to standpoint as how I see the fish while I stand up here on the bridge.’

When Chuang-tzŭ’s wife died, Hui Shih came to condole. As for Chuang-tzŭ, he was squatting with his knees out, drumming on a pot and singing.

‘When you have lived with someone’, said Hui Shih, ‘and brought up children, and grown old together, to refuse to bewail her death would be bad enough, but to drum on a pot and sing—could there be anything more shameful?’

‘Not so. When she first died, do you suppose that I was able not to feel the loss? I peered back into her beginnings; there was a time before there was a life. Not only was there no life, there was a time before there was a shape. Not only was there no shape, there was a time before there was energy. Mingled together in the amorphous, something altered, and there was the energy; by alteration in the energy there was the shape, by alteration of the shape there was the life. Now once more altered she has gone over to death. This is to be companion with spring and autumn, summer and winter, in the procession of the four seasons. When someone was about to lie down and sleep in the greatest of mansions, I with my sobbing knew no better than to bewail her. The thought came to me that I was being uncomprehending towards destiny, so I stopped.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 18)

Chuang-tzŭ, among the mourners in a funeral procession, was passing by the grave of Hui Shih. He turned round and said to his attendants

‘There was a man of Ying who, when he got a smear of plaster no thicker than a fly’s wing on the tip of his nose, would make Carpenter Shih slice it off. Carpenter Shih would raise the wind whirling his hatchet, wait for the moment, and slice it; every speck of the plaster would be gone without hurt to the nose, while the man of Ying stood there perfectly composed.

‘Lord Yüan of Sung heard about it, summoned Carpenter Shih and said “Let me see you do it.” “As for my side of the act,” said Carpenter Shih, ‘I did use to be able to slice it off. However, my partner has been dead for a long time.”

‘Since the Master died, I have had no one to use as a partner, no one with whom to talk about things.’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 24)

When Chuang-tzŭ was going to Ch’u, he saw a hollow skull, with the shape of the bone bared. He flicked it with his horse whip and took it as an occasion for questions.

‘Was it by misjudgements in your greed for life that you became this thing, sir? Or was it by the troubles of a ruined state, or punishment by the headsman’s axe, that you became this? Or did you commit some evil deed, and in shame of bringing disgrace on father, mother, wife and children, become this? Or did you in the miseries of cold and hunger become this? Or did you last out the span of your spring and autumn to arrive at this?’

Then at the end of the speech he pulled the skull over to him, pillowed his head on it and went to sleep. At midnight the skull appeared in a dream and said

‘That talk of yours resembled a rhetorician’s. Consider the things you were talking about, all belong to the ties of living men, once dead we have them no longer. Would you like to hear my exposition of death?’

‘In death there is no lord above or subject below, nor any of the toils of the four seasons. Untrammelled we last out the spring and autumn of heaven and earth. Even the joy of a king on his south-facing throne cannot exceed it.’

‘If I were to persuade the arbiter of fate to return your body to life, make you bones and flesh and skin, restore you to father and mother, wife and children, township and neighbourhood, friends and acquaintances, would you desire it?’

‘How could I refuse the joy of a king on his throne, to suffer again the toils of humankind?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 18)

When Chuang-tzŭ was dying, his disciples wanted to give him a lavish funeral. Said Chuang-tzŭ

‘I have heaven and earth for my outer and inner coffin, the sun and moon for my pair of jade discs, the stars for my pearls, the myriad creatures for my farewell presents. Is anything missing in my funeral paraphernalia? What will you add to these?’

‘Above ground, I’ll be eaten by the crows and kites; below ground, I’ll be eaten by the ants and molecrickets. You rob the one of them to give to the other; how come you like them so much better?’ (Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 32)

1Stories about Chuang-tzŭ

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Stories about Chuang-tzŭ