Chuang-tzu and Hui-tzu were playing checkers. “You say that you’re an ordinary person,” Hui-tzu said. “If you’re so ordinary, how can you be so happy?”
Chuang-tzu said, “I’m just like anyone else, except that I don’t have feelings like anger, fear, or sadness. Since I don’t suffer, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can’t affect me.”
Hui-tzu said, “Can someone really not suffer?”
Chuang-tzu said, “Of course. When you understand the mind, you’re no longer attached to likes and dislikes, so they can’t do you any harm. You just follow reality and don’t try to control. It’s as simple as that.”
Hui-tzu said, “But if you don’t suffer at all, how can you be human?”
Chuang-tzu said, “Is happiness inhuman? Where does suffering come from? Can it exist outside the mind?”
Hui-tzu said, “But it’s unnatural to be happy all the time. Anger and sadness are a part of life. We let go of them as best we can.”
Chuang-tzu said, “You have an awfully strange view of the natural. The natural is the spontaneous, the free. When we’re clear, anger and sadness can’t arise. If you spent less time thinking and more time investigating your mind, you’d stop talking nonsense. How can you let go of what’s not there to begin with?”
The ancient Chinese form of checkers was a wickedly complicated game. When the two friends played, Chuang-tzu always won, because he had more than logic at his disposal. He could not only see straight ahead; he could see around corners. This gave him a distinct advantage.
Their dialogues were a form of checkers as well. Here the subject is suffering. Hui-tzu believes that anger, fear, and sadness are a necessary part of life, that they spring up out of nowhere, inevitable, uncaused. But every painful feeling is caused by a prior thought. We can’t understand the why of the thought’s arising, but we can learn the how of undoing it and, with it, our suffering. Then we don’t need to bother about the why.
The constant happiness that Chuang-tzu talks about may seem to be an ideal, but in fact he is the realist here. The only thing that can interrupt happiness is an untrue thought. It’s like a cloud hiding the sun. When we investigate it, it dissolves. Wisdom is the art of cloudlessness.