{2} {3} CHAPTER ONE

Wandering Far and Unfettered

There is a fish in the Northern Oblivion named Kun,¹ and this Kun is quite huge, spanning who knows how many thousands of miles. He transforms into a bird named Peng,² and this Peng has quite a back on him, stretching who knows how many thousands of miles. When he rouses himself and soars into the air, his wings are like clouds draped across the heavens. The oceans start to churn, and this bird begins his journey toward the Southern Oblivion. The Southern Oblivion—that is the Pool of Heaven.

The Equalizing Jokebook, a record of many wonders, reports: “When Peng journeys to the Southern Oblivion, the waters ripple for three thousand miles. Spiraling aloft with the whirling winds, he ascends ninety thousand miles into the sky, availing himself of the gusting breath of the midyear to make his departure.”

“It’s a galloping heat haze!”^A “It’s a swirl of dust!” “It’s some living creature blown about on the breath of the air!” And the blue on blue of the sky—is that the sky’s true³ color? Or is it just the vast distance, going on and on without end, that looks that way? When Peng looks down, he, too, sees only this and nothing more.

Now, if water is not piled up thickly enough, it has no power to support a large vessel. Overturn a cupful of water in a hole in the road and you can float a mustard seed in it like a boat, but if you put the cup itself in there it will just get stuck. The water is too shallow for so large a vessel. And if the wind is not piled up thickly enough, it has no power to support Peng’s enormous wings. That is why he needs {4} to put ninety thousand miles of air beneath him. Only then, bearing the blue of heaven on his back and unobstructed on all sides, can he ride the wind and make his way south.

The cicada and the fledgling⁴ dove laugh at him, saying, “We scurry up into the air, leaping from the elm to the sandalwood tree, and when we don’t quite make it we just plummet to the ground. What’s all this about ascending ninety thousand miles and heading south?”

If you’re only making an outing to the nearby woods, you can bring along your three meals for the day and return with your belly still full. If you’re traveling a hundred miles, you’ll need to husk grain for the journey the night before. And if you’re traveling a thousand miles, you’ll need to save up provisions for three months before you go. What do these two little insects know? A small consciousness⁵ cannot keep up with a vast consciousness; short duration cannot keep up with long duration. How do we know? The morning mushroom knows nothing of the noontide; the winter cicada knows nothing of the spring and autumn. This is what is meant by short duration. In southern Chu there is a tree called Mingling,⁶ for which five hundred years are as a single spring, and another five hundred years are as a single autumn. In ancient times there was even one massive tree whose spring and autumn were each eight thousand years long. And yet nowadays Pengzu⁷ alone has a special reputation for longevity, and everyone tries to match him. Pathetic, isn’t it?

This is exactly what Tang’s question to Ji^B amounted to: “In the barren northland there is a dark ocean called the Pool of Heaven. There is a fish there several thousand miles across with a length that is as yet unknown, named Kun. There’s a bird there named Peng with a back like Mt. Tai and wings like clouds draped across the heavens. In a spiraling ascent that twists like a ram’s horn he climbs ninety thousand miles, breaking through the clouds and bearing the blue of the sky on his back, and then heads south, finally arriving at the Southern Oblivion. The scoldquail laughs at him, saying ‘Where does he think he’s going? I leap into the air with all my might, but before I get farther than a few yards I drop to the ground. My twittering and fluttering between the bushes and branches is the utmost form of flying! So where does he think he’s going?’ Such is the difference between the large and the small.”

{5} And he whose understanding⁸ is sufficient to fill some one post, or whose deeds meet the needs of some one village, or whose personal virtues⁹ please some one ruler, or who is able to prove himself in a single country, sees himself in just the same way. Even Song Rongzi¹⁰ would burst out laughing at such a man. If the whole world happened to praise Song Rongzi, he would not be goaded onward; if the whole world condemned him, he would not be deterred. He simply made a sharp and fixed division between the inner and the outer, and clearly discerned where true honor and disgrace reside. He did not involve himself in anxious calculations in his dealings with the world. Nevertheless, there was still a sense in which he was not really firmly planted.

Now Liezi¹¹ got around by charioting upon the wind itself and was so good at it that he could go on like that in his cool and breezy way for fifteen days at a time before heading back. He was someone who didn’t get caught up in anxious calculations about bringing the blessings of good fortune upon himself. Nevertheless, although this allowed him to avoid the exertions of walking, there was still something he needed to depend on.

But suppose you were to chariot upon what is true¹² both to Heaven and to earth, riding atop the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths,^C so that your wandering could nowhere be brought to a halt. You would then be depending on¹³—what? Thus I say, the Utmost Person has no definite identity, the Spiritlike Person has no particular merit, the Sage has no one name.^D

{6} When Yao¹⁴ went to cede the empire to Xu You, he said, “To keep the torches burning in broad daylight would be making needless trouble for oneself. To continue watering one’s garden during a heavy rainfall would be pointless labor. Now you, sir, so much as appear in the world and at once it is well ordered. And yet here I am, playing the host and master,¹⁵ acting like I control it all. I feel I am greatly deficient. Please accept the rulership of this world from me.”

Xu You replied, “You are ruling the world, and thus is the world already ruled however you rule it. If I were nonetheless to take your place, would I be doing it for the name? But name is just a guest of the real. Shall I then play the role of the guest? The tailorbird lives in the depths of a vast forest, but uses no more than a single branch to make his nest. When the beaver drinks from the river, he takes only enough to fill his belly. Go home, my lord! I have no use for an empire. Although the cook may not keep the kitchen in order, that doesn’t mean the impersonator of the deceased—or even the priest who arranges the ritual vessels—needs to leap over the sacrificial vessels to replace him!”^E

Shoulder Self¹⁶ said to Unk Linkin’, “I was listening to the words of the madman Jieyu.¹⁷ He talked big without getting at anything, going on and on without getting anywhere. I was shocked and rather scared by what he said, which seemed as limitless as the Milky Way—vast and excessive, with no regard for the way people really are.”

“What in the world did he say?”

“‘There are imponderable Spiritlike Persons who live on distant Mt. Guye with skin like ice and snow, gentle and yielding like virgin girls. They do not eat the five grains, but rather live by breathing in the wind and drinking in the dew. They ride upon the air and clouds, charioting upon soaring dragons, wandering beyond the four seas. They just concentrate their spirits and straightaway all things are free from sickness and the harvest matures.’ I regard this as crazy talk, which I refuse to believe.”

“No surprise there,” said Unk Linkin’. “The blind have no access to the beauty of visual patterns, and the deaf have no part in the sounds of bells and drums. It {7} is not only the physical body that can be blind and deaf; the understanding¹⁸ can also be so. If you were then to ‘agree’ with his words, you would be acting like a virgin girl who has just reached her time.^F Such persons, or the virtuosity¹⁹ in them, would be spreading everywhere through^G the ten thousand things until all are made one, while the current world is busy groping toward its own chaotic order²⁰—why would they wear themselves out fretting about the world as if it were something to be managed? Such persons are harmed by no thing. A flood may reach the sky without drowning them, a drought may melt the stones and scorch the mountains without scalding them. From their dust and chaff you could mold yourself a Yao or a Shun. How could they consider any particular thing worth bothering about? It is like a ceremonial cap salesman of Song traveling to Yue, where the people shave their heads and tattoo their bodies—they have no use for such things. After Yao brought all the people of the world under his rule and put all within the four seas into good order, he went off to see four of these masters of distant Mt. Guye at the bright side of the Fen River. Astonished at what he saw there, he forgot all about his empire.”

Huizi²¹ said to Zhuangzi, “The King of Wei gave me the seed of a great gourd. I planted it, and when it matured it weighed over a hundred pounds. I filled it with liquid, but it was not firm enough to lift. I cut it in half to make a dipper, but it was too wide to scoop into anything. It was big and all, but because it was so useless I finally just smashed it to pieces.”

Zhuangzi said, “You are certainly stupid when it comes to using big things. There was once a man of Song who was skilled at making a balm to keep the hands from chapping. For generations his family had used it to make a living washing silk through the winter. A customer heard about it and asked to buy the recipe for a hundred pieces of gold. The family got together and consulted, saying, ‘We’ve been washing silk for generations and have never earned more than a few pieces of gold; now in one morning we can sell the technique for a hundred. Let’s do it.’ The customer took the balm and presented it to the king of Wu. When Yue started a war with him, the king made the man a general who led his soldiers through a winter water battle with the men of Yue, and beat them big.²² The man was then enfeoffed as a feudal lord. The power to keep the hands from chapping {8} was one and the same, but one man used it to get an enfeoffment and another couldn’t even use it to avoid washing silk all winter. The difference is all in how the thing is used. You, on the other hand, had a gourd of over a hundred pounds. How it is that you never thought of making it into an enormous vessel for yourself and floating through the lakes and rivers in it? Instead, you worried that it was too wide to scoop into anything, which I guess means the mind of our greatly esteemed master here is still all clogged up, occupied with its bushes and branches!”²³

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “I have a huge tree that people call the Stinktree. The trunk is swollen and gnarled, impossible to align with any level or ruler. The branches are twisted and bent, impossible to align to any T-square or carpenter’s arc. Even if it were growing right in the road, a carpenter would not give it so much as a second glance. And your words are similarly big but useless, which is why they are rejected by everyone who hears them.”

Zhuangzi said, “Haven’t you ever seen the wildcats and weasels? They crouch low to await any straggling prey, then pounce east or west in an elegantly arcing leap, high or low without hesitation. But this is exactly what lands them in a trap, and they end up dying in the net. But take a yak: it is big like the clouds draped across the heavens. What it’s good at is just being big—and of course it cannot catch so much as a single mouse. You, on the other hand, have this big tree and you worry that it’s useless. How you could loaf and wander, doing a whole lot of nothing²⁴ there at its side! How far-flung and unfettered you’d be, dozing there beneath it! It will never be cut down by ax or saw. Nothing will harm it. Since it has nothing for which it can be used, what could entrap or afflict it?”

ENDNOTES

A. Literally, “wild horse(s).” Some commentators suggest this is a term for a mirage-like heat haze, which moves through the air like a pack of wild horses seen at a distance. Some take it literally, construing these three lines as describing the results stirred up by Peng’s ascent, like the rippling of the waters, or else what he sees when looking downward, the activities of creatures large and small, all breathing life back and forth into each other. Alternate interpretations of the last line would render “Living beings’ breathing of life back and forth into each other” or even “The blowing of breath back and forth among things in the process of generation of things!” Here it is interpreted as what Peng might look like from below, the guesses made by those down on the ground. He is unknown, has no “definite identity,” because he is so lofty, and he has to be so lofty because he is so big.

{9} B. The Beishanlu 北山錄 of the Tang monk Shen Qing 神清 records the story of the sage-emperor Tang asking an advisor named Ge 革, “Is there a limit to the above, the below, and the four directions?” Ge answers, “Beyond the limitless, there is again further limitlessness.” The commentary by Huibao states that this passage comes from the Zhuangzi, though it is found in no extant manuscript. The character Ge and the name given for the interlocutor here, Ji 棘, are claimed to have been homonyms in ancient pronunciations. The Liezi also includes several dialogues between Tang and Ge (or Xia Ge), though not the one quoted in the Beishanlu. Whether or not question and answer originally belonged here, or were in fact in the text anywhere, is unknown. If not, this could be a reference to a well-known anecdote, with the emperor’s naïve question being compared to the scoldquail’s blinkered rhetorical question at the end of the following passage.

C. 六氣. Literally, the six qi. For qi, see Glossary. According to Sima Biao, the six are yin, yang, wind, rain, darkness, and light. Cheng Xuanying, citing Li Yi 李頤, interprets them as the atmospheric conditions of dawn, high noon, sunset, and midnight, together with the energies of heaven and earth generally. Zhi Daolin 支道林, more simply, takes them to be the four seasons together with the general energies of heaven and earth. The character 辯 bian, translated as “back-and-forth,” means disputation or argument, the central topic of much of the following chapter. see Glossary. The usage is odd, and several substitutions of homonyms have been suggested, for example 變 meaning “transformation” and 辨 meaning “differentiation,” other important Zhuangzian themes. But replacing the character seems to miss the resonance with the trope of the windstorm sounds as disputations that open the next chapter. The phrase “back-and-forth” here is meant to cover all of these meanings: the shifting weather all around us as the sound of bickering, bantering disputation among many differentiated viewpoints. Each atmospheric state is, as it were, making an “argument,” presenting what is right to it. We are urged to ride what is true both to heaven and to earth, and similarly to hitch our chariots to the disputational deposition of each contrasting atmospheric state in turn. This is what the next chapter calls “Going along with thisness, going by the rightness of the present ‘this.’” 因是 yinshi. see Glossary.

D. The three do not seem to be sharply distinguished elsewhere in the text, so these are generally read as three alternate names for the same type of figure. An alternate interpretation would be, “To the Utmost Person there is no self, to the Spirit Man there is no achievement, to the Sage there is no reputation,” meaning that he has no regard for them. Note also that the word “name” (ming 名) always has a strong implication of, and can simply mean, “fame, reputation,” even “social position and role.”

E. The reference is to a ritual sacrifice to the ancestors, where the spirit-medium is a stand-in for the deceased, occupying his place and thus receiving the offerings presented to him. The priest is the one who arranges the ritual vessels. The cook prepares the food to be used as sacrificial offerings. Xu You, picking up Yao’s use of the term in reference to himself, here admits that he might well be the “host” or “master,” but in the strange sense implied by Yao’s term: like the impersonator of the dead, he does nothing, and in his person presence and absence, life and death, coincide. He is silent, inactive, majestic, awe-inspiring, sacred. He is the one who receives the offerings of the “cook,” i.e., the ruler, and yet he does not really receive them; they pass through him. If he were to leap over the vessels to take the place of the cook, because the food was ill prepared, he would be relinquishing precisely the qualities that make him worthy of the offering, and thus undermine the ritual even more disastrously than the poor-quality food does. The ruler may be offering unpalatable fare, but to try to fix it would be to give up an even more sacred position, one which alone makes the whole arrangement meaningful. In this version, Xu You wryly also allows that he may be a mere arranger of vessels for the offering, rather than the host, but even so he wouldn’t want to be the cook. In the Huainanzi, “Taizuxun,” a slightly modified version of this statement occurs: the spirit-medium doesn’t want to replace the cook {10} or the vessel-arranger, no matter how poorly they do their job. The Zhuangzi version draws the line in a different place, putting the dead-living non-doing impersonator of the dead in the same category as the arranger of the food vessels, and the cook in another. Perhaps this suggests playing both roles at once: the non-doing living-dead pseudo-ancestor and also the mere arranger of the vessels that receive the ceaseless offerings of sustenance to that holy paradoxical being.

F. Many commentators suggest that this sentence should be read to mean, “This describes you perfectly,” taking 時shi as a loan for 是 shi, and 女 nu as a loan for 汝 ru. This is feasible, but the more literal translation given here suggests that it is only right for Shoulder Self to consider these words untrue, for if someone who is “blind and deaf” in this way were to blindly “agree” with them (literally “consider these words right 是其言 shi qi yan; cf. Chapter 2, p. 20; for shi, see Glossary), he would be like a flirtatious virgin girl, who has not really experienced, does not really understand, what she is agreeing to.

G. Taking pangbo 旁礡 as cognate with banbo 般礡 as used in Chapter 21, p. 169, following the interpretation of Xuan Ying; elsewhere written pangpo 旁魄, panbo 盤礡, and bangbo 磅礡.

¹. 鯤. The name means literally “a fish egg.” The character consists of a “fish” radical beside a phonetic element that means literally “elder brother.” If we were to take this as a kind of visual pun, the name might be rendered “Big Brother Roe.” The paradoxes implicit in this name are not irrelevant. The largest fish is thus also the smallest speck of pre-fish, the tiny fish egg. The youngest newborn here, the not-yet-fish, is also the elder brother.

². 鵬. The name is cognate with 鳳 feng, meaning “phoenix,” a mythical bird of enormous proportions. The phonetic of the form used by Zhuangzi here is the character 朋 peng, meaning a friend or classmate, a comrade or peer. If we wished to render the visual pun, we might translate “Peer Phoenix.” Again, the paradox is of some importance. Peng is vast, and his superiority to other birds seems to be stressed in what follows. But his name also includes a reference to parity and companionship.

³. 正 Zheng. see Glossary. Note also that “sky” here translates as 天 tian, the same word elsewhere translated as “Heaven” or “the Heavenly.” see Glossary.

⁴. Literally “studying,” 學 xue.

⁵. 知 Zhi, elsewhere translated as “understanding,” “the understanding consciousness,” “knowing consciousness,” “conscious knowing,” “knowledge,” “cleverness,” or “wisdom.” see Glossary.

⁶. The name, unattested elsewhere, plays on the name of Kun’s dwelling place and Peng’s destination, meaning something like “Oblivion’s Numinosity.”

⁷. A legendary figure reputed to have lived to be several hundred years old.

⁸. 知 Zhi. see Glossary.

⁹. 德 De. Elsewhere translated as “virtuosities,” “intrinsic virtuosities,” and, for nonhuman entities, “intrinsic powers.” see Glossary.

¹⁰. Song Rongzi is another name for the philosopher Song Xing, to be discussed at greater length in Chapter 33, p. 269. His doctrine that “to be insulted is not a disgrace” is acknowledged by the author here as a salutary first step toward independence from the opinions and value judgments of convention. But as many commentators point out, this is still just a first step, which rests on making a clear and fixed distinction between self and other, safeguarding one’s identity against external influence. The author sees true independence both as lying beyond this, taking it further, and in another sense as going in just the opposite direction: the effacement of any fixed border between self and other, any definite identity.

¹¹. Lie Yugou, a figure of doubtful historicity mentioned many times in the Zhuangzi, to whom a later philosophical work, the Liezi, is attributed. If translated as a made-up name, perhaps “Lineup Banditpreventer.”

¹². 正 Zheng. see Glossary. This echoes the question at the beginning of the chapter about the “true” color of Heaven, the sky, as seen from the earth. Now Zhuangzi speaks of riding upon what is true both to Heaven and to earth, what he later calls “Walking Two Roads” (Chapter 2, p. 16) or neither Heaven nor man winning out over the other (Chapter 6, p. 55). “True to” here is opposed to “swerving from,” meaning “straight” or “aligned with,” rather than “true” as opposed to “false.”

¹³. 待 Dai. see Glossary.

¹⁴. Mythical ancient sage-emperor who ceded his empire not to his son but to the most worthy man in the realm, Shun, also subsequently revered as a sage. The current incident, in which he tries and fails to cede it to the hermit Xu You, suggests that Shun was a second choice at best.

¹⁵. Shi 尸. This word, literally denoting the ritual role of the impersonator of the deceased at funerals, has an extended meaning of “to control, preside over, serve as host or master.” Its double meaning sets up the play on guest and host in Xu You’s answer, and especially his final riposte, where he uses the same term.

¹⁶. “Shoulder Self” (Jian Wu 肩吾) appears also in Chapters 6, 7, and 21. In the Chapter 6 (p. 68) instance, he is listed among a set of mythological figures and identified by Cheng Xuanying as a god.

¹⁷. Jieyu ridicules Confucius in the Analects (18:5) and thus serves as a classic symbol of anti-Confucian sentiment. He appears again at the end of Chapter 4 and passim.

¹⁸. 知 Zhi. see Glossary.

¹⁹. 德 De. see Glossary.

²⁰. The term luan 亂 usually meant “disorder” in Zhuangzi’s time but also had an archaic meaning of just the opposite: “to govern or put in order.” Zhuangzi seems to be playing on this double meaning here.

²¹. The logician Huizi is a key presence throughout much of this book as Zhuangzi’s interlocutor, foil, frenemy, sparring partner, rival, companion, perhaps even intended audience. His interest in logic and its paradoxes, as documented especially in the final section of Chapter 33, p. 272, highlights both his similarities to and difference from the Zhuangzian positions that are developed in contrast to them, but which often seem to some extent to echo their language and even procedures.

²². Because the balm protected their hands.

²³. Following Luo Miandao’s interpretation, linking this to the preferred habitat of the little birds featured earlier in the chapter.

²⁴. 無為 Wuwei, which in this volume is usually translated as “non-doing.” see Glossary.