‘The essentials of our nature and destiny’ is a phrase which attracts attention especially in the Primitivist essays, where it seems to operate as a slogan. It is explained in a brief essay preserved at the head of chapter 19, ‘Fathoming nature’. Its basic principle is to allow life to follow the natural course laid down for it by Heaven, and accept death when it comes. To pursue worldly ambitions involves us in anxieties about external things, and wears out the ‘quintessence’, the vitalising seminal fluid which sustains health, growth and generation. Nor is there any point in fussing about health; the way to live long is not to worry about it. The phrase may be seen as a slogan against worldliness on the one hand and on the other the cult of prolonging life which obsessed some of the unworldly.
The word hsing, ‘nature’, is derived from sheng, ‘be born, live’, and written with the same graph distinguished by a radical. A thing’s nature is seen as the course which its life must follow if it is to grow to completion and last out its term. In many cases at least the radical was supplied only in a later graphic standardisation of the text, and in ‘essentials of nature and destiny’, as in such phrases as ‘tend nature’, ‘injure nature’, where the choice between ‘nature’ and ‘life’ makes no difference to the sense, the scribal tradition was hesitant and inconsistent in adding it. In the present translation we shall stick consistently to ‘nature’.
The continuity of the thought is twice interrupted by what look like hostile comments by an irritated reader; we print them between the lines in italics.
Whoever fathoms the essentials of our nature will not busy himself with anything irrelevant to life. Whoever fathoms the essentials of our destiny will not busy himself with what knowledge can do nothing about.
To nurture the body, one in the first place becomes dependent on other things; but sometimes the things are more than enough yet the body remains unnourished. To stay alive, the precondition is not to part from the body; but sometimes without parting from the body one has ceased to be alive. Life’s coming cannot be resisted, its going cannot be stopped Alas! the worldly think nurture of the body is sufficient to preserve life; and if really it is insufficient to preserve life, why should worldly things be worth doing?
(Even if they aren’t worth doing, there’s no escape from doing what has to be done.)
For one who wishes to escape from concern with the body, the best course is to abandon worldly ambitions. Abandoning them, he will be without ties; without ties, his course will be straight and smooth; if it is straight and smooth, he renews life side by side with what is other than himself; and to be renewing life is to be almost there.
If we abandon affairs the body will not be worn out, if we forget about life the quintessence will be unimpaired. When the body is intact and the
(Are affairs so unimportant that we can abandon them, is life so unimportant that we can forget about it?)
quintessence restored, we become one with Heaven. Heaven and earth are the father and mother of the myriad things.
Cohering we become separate,
Dissolving become what first we were.
To have body and quintessence unimpaired,
It is this that is called ‘being able to move on’.
Through the quintessential to the still more quintessential, we return to becoming the helpers of Heaven.
(Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 19)
Who fathoms the essentials of our nature is sublime, who fathoms how to know is petty. Who fathoms the universal destiny follows where it takes him, who fathoms a little destiny is the creature of his luck.
(Chuang-tzŭ, chapter 32)