{29} CHAPTER THREE

The Primacy of Nourishing Life¹

The flow of my life is always bound by its banks, but the activity of the understanding consciousness is constrained by no such limits.^A When something thus bounded is made to follow something unbounded in this way, it is put in danger. And to try wielding further understanding to redress this danger only puts it into deeper danger still. It² may do good, but not to the point of getting anywhere near a good name;³ it may do evil, but not to the point of getting anywhere near punishment—for it tends toward the current of the empty central meridian^B as its normal route. And this is what enables us to maintain our bodies, to keep the life in them intact, to nourish those near and dear to us, and to fully live out our years.

The cook was carving up an ox for King Hui of Liang.⁴ Wherever his hand smacked it, wherever his shoulder leaned into it, wherever his foot braced it, wherever his knee pressed it, the thwacking tones of flesh falling from bone would echo, the knife would whiz through with its resonant thwing, each stroke ringing out the perfect note, attuned to the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or the Jingshou Chorus of the ancient sage-kings.

The king said, “Ah! It is wonderful that skill can reach such heights!”

The cook put down his knife and said, “What I love is the Course, going beyond mere skill. When I first started cutting up oxen, all I saw for three years was oxen,⁵ and yet still I was unable to see all there was to see in an ox.⁶ But now {30} I encounter it with the imponderable spirit in me^C rather than scrutinizing it with the eyes. For when the faculties of officiating understanding come to rest, imponderable spiritlike impulses begin to stir,^D relying on the unwrought perforations.^E Striking into the enormous gaps, they are guided through those huge hollows, going along in accord with what is already there and how it already is. So my knife has never had to cut through the knotted nodes where the warp hits the weave, much less the gnarled joints of bone. A good cook changes his blade once a year: he slices. An ordinary cook changes his blade once a month: he hacks. I have been using this same blade for nineteen years, cutting up thousands of oxen, and yet it is still as sharp as the day it came off the whetstone. For the joints have spaces within them, and the very edge of the blade has no thickness at all. When what has no thickness enters into an empty space, it is vast and open, with more than enough room for the play of the blade. That is why my knife is still as sharp as if it had just come off the whetstone, even after nineteen years.

“Nonetheless, whenever I come to a clustered tangle, realizing that it is difficult to do anything about it, I instead restrain myself as if terrified, until my seeing comes to a complete halt. My activity slows, and the blade moves ever so slightly. Then whoosh! All at once I find the ox already dismembered at my feet like clumps of soil scattered on the ground. I retract the blade and stand there gazing at it all around me, both disoriented and satisfied by it all. Then I wipe off the blade and put it away.”

The king said, “Wonderful! From hearing the cook’s words I have learned how to nourish life!”

When the Honorable Ornate Highcart went to see the Rightside Commander, he was astonished. “What manner of man are you, that you are so singularly one-legged?⁷ Is this the doing of Heaven or of man?”

He answered, “It is of Heaven, not man. Heaven, in its generation of each thing as ‘this,’ always makes it singular, unique, alone. Man, in characterizing each thing by its appearance, always groups it with something else.^F Thus I know that whatever it is, it is Heaven, not man. The marsh pheasant finds one mouthful of food every ten steps, and one drink of water every hundred steps, but he does not seek to be fed and pampered in a cage. For though his spirit⁸ might there reign supreme, it would do him no good.”

When Lao Dan^G died, Graingrind Misstep went to mourn for him, but after yowling thrice he immediately departed. His disciple asked, “Weren’t you a friend of the master?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then is this the proper way for you to mourn him?”

{31} “Indeed it is. At first I thought there would be his kind of people there, but then I saw that this was not the case. When I went in there to mourn, I saw the elders among them weeping as if for their sons, and the young among them weeping as if for their mothers. With such as these gathered there, I, too, would no doubt have proceeded to utter some unsought-for words and weep some unsought-for tears. But this would be to flee from the Heavenly and turn away⁹ from what is real, forgetting what one has received, which is why the ancients called such things ‘The punishment for fleeing from Heaven.’ When it came time to arrive, the master did just what the time required. When it came time to go, he followed along with the flow. Resting content in the time and finding his place in the flow, joy and sorrow had no way to seep in. The ancients called that ‘The Lord’s Dangle and Disentangling.’ Those fingers^H can do no more than manage the firewood, but the fire moves on, its ending unknown.”

ENDNOTES

A. “Activity of the understanding consciousness” in this context renders 知 zhi. see Glossary. This sentence is often interpreted to mean “My life is limited, but knowledge is unlimited.” On this reading, “life” refers to the duration of a human lifespan, while “knowledge” is interpreted as the body of all knowable things to be learned. The point would then be that my lifespan is too short to learn all there is to learn, and hence the pursuit of learning is a futile, even dangerous endeavor. But this reading of both 生 sheng (life) and 知 zhi is not consistent with the rest of the Inner Chapters, nor the usual usage in texts of this period generally, where the former refers primarily to the process of coming to be in general, and the latter primarily to the faculty of conscious knowing, including the conscious commitment to values of good and bad, right and wrong, rather than the field of things to be known. Nonetheless, something of this sense of the inexhaustibility of knowables is not irrelevant to the points being made in this chapter. More directly, though, the meandering path of a river forming its own definite but zigzag shape between two banks should be kept in mind as an analogue to the definite but undirected motion of the knife in the butcher’s story to follow, of life not controlled by conscious values or ideals.

B. 督 Du. In Chinese medicine this term, which in other contexts means “controller,” is used for the current of energy that runs vertically through the middle of the human back. The image of a flowing current connects to the opening trope of the chapter of a river between banks, and to that of the butcher’s knife running through the hollows in the ox to follow. This flow tends toward the central (hence, if left to itself, never going too far toward either good or {32} evil), unseen (hence opposed to “the knowing mind”), and the real controller (as opposed to the knowing mind’s pretensions to control and direct life).

C. 神 Shen. see Glossary. The word is used to denote both the spirits of the dead and of nature to whom sacrificial offerings are made, and also the consciousness of humans when alive, but it is most commonly characterized not as a cognizing faculty that is transparent to itself, but rather as something unpredictable and beyond understanding, a sense it retains when used as an adjective, as in the following sentence. Hence usually translated in this work as “spiritlike” or “imponderable spirit.”

D. Following Fan Gengyan: “What moves only after investigating that which it monopolizes the control over is called ‘officiating conscious knowing.’ To let the hand go and release the attention, attaining whatever comes without intention, is called the spirit’s desires.” 專司所察而後動, 謂之官知, 從手放意, 無心而得, 謂之神欲. The proximity of the previous line about the eyes and the common use of guan in later times to refer to the sense organs specifically have disposed many to read the parallelism as follows: “Sense-knowledge stops and spirit-desire operates.” But this reading may bring some danger of assimilating Zhuangzi’s point here to a familiar “inner spirit good, outer senses bad” position, where the controlling spirit of the human being with knowledge of unchanging or immaterial truths and values is to be exalted over the out-of-control senses deceived by appearances and sense-pleasures. This sort of thinking would be sharply at odds with the rest of this chapter and with the Zhuangzi’s thought in general, where the problem is not that sensory knowledge undermines the rightful dominance of intellect or spirit, but the hegemony of the intellect distorting our interaction with the world and impeding the imponderable spiritlike operations both within and without. Nevertheless, on purely philological grounds, in the present context it is not impossible to read guanzhi as meaning “knowledge of the sense-organs,” understood as delineating a contrast not with spirit as self-knower and executor of higher purposes but with spirit as unknowable and free of all purpose, inasmuch as we do find the trope describing the “nine openings” (including not only the two nostrils, two ears, two eyes and mouth, but also the urethra and anus) as the “officials” in the microcosm of the body, serving the “heart” as ruler, in possible contemporaneous texts like the “Xinshushang” of the Guanzi. We try to include this meaning here with the broad term “faculties.” However, the definite usages of the guan without modification to mean the five sense organs do not appear unmistakably until Xunzi (third century BCE) (e.g., his “Tianlun” and “Zhengming”), so I don’t think it can be assumed as a term with a fixed meaning at the time this Zhuangzi chapter was written, probably a century or so earlier. In so far as this passage may be taken as serving to explicate the opening passage of the chapter, where the topic is the relation between 生 sheng and 知 zhi, the reference to zhi as the understanding consciousness, characterized as “officiating,” makes better sense of the passage. It is precisely the role of zhi as officiating, i.e., as something that life is forced to “follow,” that is there critiqued. Indeed, as a verb zhi itself can sometimes be used to mean “control.” As an alternative to all of these possibilities, parsing the parts of speech completely differently, it is also possible to read this line to mean, “The senses know how to find their proper resting places and go no further, and then the imponderable spirit is readied for action.”

E. 天理 Tianli. Most literally, “Heavenly configuration,” i.e., the preexistent perforations, the lines in the grain in a thing (in this case, the marbled lines in the flesh of the ox) along which it is most easily cut. This is the only occurrence of this character li in the Inner Chapters, and, judging by extant texts, the first time in Chinese history that the binome tianli is used. This term would later come to stand for a crucial category in Neo-Confucian metaphysics, in which context it is sometimes translated as “the Principle of Heaven” or “Heavenly Pattern.” The meaning here is much more literal. The term li can refer to the optimal way of dividing up and organizing a raw material to suit human purposes, or the nodes in the material along which such division can most easily be done. In this context, it remains closely connected to a {33} still more literal meaning, the pattern of lines on skin (couli 腠理), which is probably the concrete image inspiring the creation of this resonant new term here.

F. Following Hu Yuanjun’s reading of youyu 有與 and du 獨. Cf. also Shenzi, “Duli,” on the harm of illegitimate children as potential claimants to the throne: 疑則動, 兩則爭, 雜則相傷. 害在有與, 不在獨. “If there is doubt on which one is legitimate, someone will take action. If there are two, there will be struggle. If there is admixture, they will harm one another. The harm lies in grouping with something else, not in what is singular.” Each thing as born is uniquely what it is; it is man who groups things into categories and thus judges some to be unnatural, in comparison to others in the normatively identical grouping. Many readers, however, take the one-leggedness to be a birth anomaly rather than a punishment, and thus interpret “Heaven caused this person to be born with this singularity (of one-leggedness), for there is that which bestows on humans their (various) appearances (i.e., Heaven).”

G. Also known as Laozi, traditionally considered the author of the Daodejing, although there is no reference either to this text or to any such authorship in the Inner Chapters. This glaring absence has led some scholars—notably Qian Mu and A. C. Graham—to conclude that the Inner Chapters of Zhuangzi actually predate the Daodejing, and possibly even that Lao Dan was a character created right here in this passage of the Zhuangzi, who later came to be connected to the Daodejing. The subsequent discovery of fragments of the present Daodejing in the Guodian bamboo slips, dated to around the mid- to late fourth century BCE, have made the temporal priority of the Inner Chapters to all of the passages in the Daodejing less plausible, but the completion of that text, its assumption of its present form, and its linkage to the name of Lao Dan are still unattested until well after Zhuangzi’s death.

H. Sic. Some interpreters suggest that this is zhi not in the literal sense of finger, but the extended logical sense alluded to in Chapter 2 (p. 15), i.e., “indication, what is indicated,” i.e., meanings, things, referents in general: “The indications reach only as far as what is deemed firewood, but when the fire moves on, they have no knowledge of its ending,” or perhaps “If the referent is restricted to deeming the firewood, then when the fire is transmitted, there will be no recognition of it in the used-up embers.” (Cf. Graham.) Others suggest this is a loan for zhi 脂, meaning “fat, fuel,” used to serve as firewood: “the fat is exhausted in making kindling, but the fire moves on, its ending unknown.” The present translation follows Guo Xiang’s sense of the passage, while also trying to nudge the interpretation closer to the grammar of the text, but I think the broader logical and cognitive sense of the term should also be implied: those literal fingers that point and indicate and grasp and execute conscious purposes give a strong image of the endeavor of the activity of the understanding consciousness, the critique of which started this chapter. The immediately preceding image of “The Lord’s dangle” is perhaps also relevant to the hand imagery here, and can be read in accord with Wang Fuzhi’s sense of the passage as implying achieved freedom from the control of Heaven or of God: the fingers, the knowledge, the conscious doings of the Lord end when the fire, our unknowable life flow, moves on in its transformations.

¹. The title of this chapter could also be interpreted to mean “Nourishing the Host [or Master] of Life,” which is how many commentators take it. Alternately, it could mean “What Is Primary in Nourishing Life.”

². I.e., the life in me, when not forced to follow the directives of conscious knowledge.

³. 名 Ming, the same word elsewhere translated simply as “fame” or “reputation” and even unmodified “names.”

⁴. Identified as “the King of Wei” mentioned in the penultimate story of Chapter 1.

⁵. Or, “All I could see [when I looked at the ox] was the actual ox”—rather than the spaces within it where the knife could go.

⁶. Some manuscripts have an additional quan 全 in this sentence, which then would mean “When I first started carving up oxen, all I saw was the intact ox, but now after three years, [it is as if] I have never seen any intact ox there at all.”

⁷. Presumably having had his foot cut off as a punishment, and thus also having been relieved of the post for which he got his (now ironically appropriate) official title.

⁸. 神 Shen. See endnote C.

⁹. Following the manuscripts that have bei 背 instead of bei 倍, or reading the latter as equivalent to the former, in its sense of “opposition,” 反也 as given in its Shuowen definition. Taking the latter character instead in its more usual sense, as Guo Xiang does, the meaning would be “To double the emotions.” But I have serious doubt that 情 without modifier could be used to mean “emotions” at the time this text was written.