{118} CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Spinning of the Heavens

The heavens: are they spinning? The earth: is it standing still? The sun, the moon: are they vying back and forth for position?

What is in charge of spreading all this before us? What nets and tethers all of this together? What remains itself unoccupied by any activity and yet shoves all this around to make it happen?

Could it be: there is some mechanism that cannot help itself?

Could it be: they spin and turn and are unable to stop themselves?

Do the clouds make rain?

Does the rain make clouds?

What so lavishly puts all this forth?

What remains itself unoccupied by any activity and yet in a symphony of lascivious joy goads it all on?

Winds rise in the north, head east, head west, rise as if vacillating back and forth. What is inhaling them, exhaling them? What remains itself unoccupied by any activity and yet gusts through and scatters it all in every direction? I venture to ask why it all happens!

That’s when the shaman Allseasons beckons.^A “Come, I will tell you!” he says. “Heaven has Six Extremities,¹ and Five Constants.² When emperors and kings accord with them, they are able to govern well, but when they violate them, there is disaster. The things described in the Nine Divisions of the Luo writings^B bring good governance to perfection, and virtuosity to completion. Thus they surveil the territories under their possession, and all in the world supports them! They may be called the supreme emperors!”

{119} Washaway,³ the Grand Overseer of Shang,⁴ asked Zhuangzi about [Human-]kindness.

“Tigers and wolves are kind,”^C Zhuangzi said.

“What do you mean?”

“The parents and children among them feel mutual affection—can you say they feel no kinship with their kind, that they’re unkind?”

“But I am asking about perfect kindness.”⁵

“To really reach the state of kinship, perfect kindness, is to feel no kinship with anyone.”

“I have heard that without the feeling of kinship there is no love, and without love there is no filial piety. Surely perfect kindness cannot be lacking in filial piety!”

“Not so,” Zhuangzi said. “Reaching perfect kinship, perfect kindness, is a lofty thing; it is quite impossible to talk about it in terms of filiality. And by this I don’t mean it goes beyond filiality, but just the contrary: it does not even reach filiality. When a traveler to the south reaches the city of Ying, he may turn around to gaze northward, but he will never be able to see Mt. Ming in the north. It is just too far away. Hence I say it is easier to be filial out of respect than out of love. And it is easier to be filial out of love than to forget your parents. It is easier to forget your parents than to get them to forget you. It is easier to get them to forget you than to forget the whole world. It is easier to forget the whole world than to get the whole world to forget you. Real virtuosity like this leaves behind even Yao and Shun: not doing anything at all, but bestowing its nourishing bounty on ten thousand generations, though no one in the world is ever aware of it. How could this be matched by those who just go around mouthing off and sighing about kindness and filiality? All such things as filiality and fraternity, humankindness and responsible conduct, loyalty and faithfulness, resoluteness and integrity—these are all just ways of forcing yourself to act, thereby enslaving your own intrinsic virtuosities. They merit no special esteem. Hence it is said, ‘The noblest are those who scorn even the highest rank of the nation; the wealthiest are those who abandon even the greatest riches in the nation; the most ambitious discard even fame and honor.’ Thus does their Course run unmuddied.”

Fullyformed⁶ of Northgate said to the Yellow Emperor, “When I heard you perform the Xianchi music in the wilds of Dongting, I was at first terrified. As it continued, I became weary and lethargic, and by the end I was in a state of total confusion—cast into chaos, speechless, unable to get a hold of myself!”

{120} The emperor said, “That’s just as you should be! I performed it by means of what is distinctively human but attuned it to the Heavenly, advancing it in terms of ritual responsibilities yet rooting it in the Great Clarity. For perfect music—which is perfect joy—must start out by resonating with human affairs while also according with the inherent structures of the Heavenly.⁷ It must run its course through all the Five Virtues⁸ but still accord with what is unforced in things, their spontaneous self-affirmations.^D Only then can it concordantly adjust the four seasons within it, bringing all things into its great harmony. The four seasons arrive in it one after the other, and all things are produced accordingly. Now flourishing, now declining, the peaceful and warlike in it group into their own regularities. Sometimes clear, sometimes turbid, the yin and the yang adjust to each other to form a harmony. The sound becomes an onrush of light, stirring all the hibernating insects to life. I startle them up with sudden thunder and lightning, without overture or conclusion, without head or tail, now dead, now living, now rising, now falling. Invariable only in its endlessness, no single specific thing in it can be depended upon. That’s why you were terrified.

“I then continued to play out that harmony of yin and yang, brightened with the light of the sun and moon. The sound was now a capability to either expand or contract, able to either soften or harden freely. That was now what was equal and the same in every transformation, controlled by no constant precedent or purpose; coming to a valley it perfectly filled the valley, coming to a pit it perfectly filled the pit. But in fitting any opening, it yet maintained its imponderable spirit, taking on the measure of each thing it encountered. It sounded out all liltingly lovely, making impressions all loftily lit, thus enabling the ghosts and spirits to remain stationed in their darkness and also the heavenly bodies to remain moving along in their proper proportions. I let it stop and roost in every limitation, but also let it flow unstoppably beyond each of them. You tried to find a way to conceive it but could not understand it; you looked for it but could not see it; you chased after it but could not catch up with it. All at once you were standing in the midst of a Course that opens out in all directions, leaning against a withered tree and inadvertently moaning along. Your eyes met with frustration in their quest to see it, your strength was defeated in its attempt to catch it. But since the self in you could not catch up with it, your body filled the expanses of space, following along with all its serpentine changes. This is why you were wearied to the point of such lethargy.

“I went on to play out these unwearying sounds, adjusting them now to the self-so mandates of things.⁹ The tones then mingled and chased each other, forests of sounds springing up in clumps but taking no identifiable form, spreading into activity without pulling one another along; too dim and obscure to settle into any {121} definitely identifiable tones. The music sprang into motion from no specifiable place, rooted in the recesses of indistinction and oblivion. Some would call it death, some would call it life; some would call it fruit, some would call it flower—moving, flowing, scattering, escaping, controlled by no unvarying tone. People of the world are thus cast into doubt about it, and can only verify its existence by turning to the sages. For a sage is someone who understands what kind of realness it has and accomplishes all through such mandates: a Heavenly impulsion that remains forever unrevealed and yet includes thereby the workings of all the five tones at their many tasks.^E Just this is called the Heavenly Music, the Heavenly Joy, the wordlessness in which the heart finds its delight. Thus we have the song of praise sung by the man of the Youyan clan:¹⁰ ‘Listening for it, I hear no sound; looking for it, I see no shape. It fills heaven and earth, encompassing the world’s outermost limits.’ You want to listen, but can find to place to receive it, nowhere to make contact with it. That’s why you were confused.

“Music, joy, begins as terror, and so it always comes at first as a calamity. I follow up on that by inducing lethargy, because of which it escapes you. Then I finish it off with confusion, for that is what brings the foolishness. When the foolishness comes upon you, you are coursing in the Course. For then the Course can carry you along, keeping you right there with it wherever it goes.”

Confucius was traveling in the west in Wei. Yan Yuan asked Maestro Jin, “How do you think the Master’s journey is going?”

Maestro Jin said, “It’s such a shame! Your master is finished!”

Yan Yuan said, “How so?”

Maestro Jin said, “Before a straw dog¹¹ is set out for the ceremony, it is kept in a bamboo box and wrapped in embroidered cloths, and the representative of the dead and the priest engage in self-mortifying fasts to prepare themselves to receive it. After the ceremony is over, however, people trample over its head and back; then the custodian collects the remains for incineration, and that’s the end of it. If someone were to gather it back into its bamboo box and again wrap it in its embroidered cloths, taking it home with him and setting it above him as he lived out his days and sleeping beneath it at night, he would not only be disturbed by restless dreams, but would certainly be again and again terrorized by blinding nightmares. Now your master here has gathered up the straw dogs once set out by the former kings, gathering you disciples to live your days and sleep your nights beneath them. That is why a tree was cut down on him in Song and his footprints were wiped away in Wei, why he was thwarted in Shang and Zhou—are these not the restless dreams he got as a result? Then he was caught between Chen and Cai, at death’s door after getting no cooked food for a week—was that not a blinding nightmare? For traveling on water, there is nothing better than a boat. But for traveling on land, there is nothing better than a carriage. If you tried your {122} whole life long to push a boat along on dry land because it’s a good vehicle for the water, you would not get it to budge even a few feet. Are not the past and the present as different as water and land? Are not the ways of Zhou and Lu like the boat and the carriage? Now he tries to practice the ways of Zhou in the state of Lu—that is like pushing a boat over dry land: a lot of toilsome labor with no result, which will surely bring calamitous harm to his own person. He has not learned the methodless tradition, which responds to all things without being thwarted by any of them.

“And by the way, have you alone never seen a well-sweep? When the end is pulled it lowers, when released it rises again. It lets itself be pulled up or down by a person; it does not try to pull the person up or down, and thus whether it is up or down, it causes no offense to the person. Similarly, the rituals and principles and standards and measures used by the Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors are not esteemed because they were all the same, but because of the good governance they produced in each case. They are like hawthorns, pears, oranges, and grapefruits—their flavors are completely different and opposed to each other, but all of them are pleasing to the tongue. Thus rituals, principles, standards, and codes must change in response to the times. If you dress up a monkey in the robes of the Duke of Zhou, it will surely bite and gnaw and rip at them, not satisfied until it has torn them completely off of its body. If we really look at the difference between the past and the future, we see that it is as great as the difference between the monkey and the Duke of Zhou.

“Once the great beauty Xishi had a pain in her chest and went around her neighborhood glaring goggle-eyed at everyone she met. An ugly neighbor saw this and took it to be what was beautiful about her, and so started going around with her hands clutching her chest, giving everyone a goggle-eyed glare. When the rich men of the neighborhood saw her, they shut their doors tightly and refused to go out. When the poor men saw her, they grabbed their wives and children and ran away. This ugly neighbor knew that Xishi’s scrunched angry glare was beautiful but she didn’t know what made it beautiful. Such a pity! Your master is finished!”

Confucius was fifty-one years old and still had not heard the Course. So he went south to Pei to see Lao Dan.¹² Lao Dan said, “So you have come! I have heard that you are the most worthy man among the people of the north. Have you then attained the Course?”

Confucius said, “Not yet.”

Lao Dan said, “How have you sought it?”

Confucius said, “I sought it in standards and procedures, but even after five years of that I had not yet found it.”

Lao Dan said, “How did you seek it after that?”

“I sought it in the yin and yang, but after twelve years of that I still had not found it.”

{123} Lao Dan said, “No wonder. If the Course could be presented, every man would present it to his ruler. If the Course could be put forth, every man would put it forth to his kinfolk. If the Course could be told, every man would tell it to his brothers. If the Course could be given, every man would give it to his sons and grandsons. The only reason this cannot happen is that, lacking the right host within to receive it, the Course will not reside inside, and lacking alignment on the outside, it can have no effect. If what comes forth from him will not be received by those who are external to him, the sage puts nothing forth. Yet even though others may have no host within to receive it, the sage conceals nothing within either. Names, ideals are shared public tools; no one person should take for himself too much of them. Humankindness and responsible conduct were the temporary lodging huts of the former kings, suitable for a brief overnight stay but not for a long residence—for as soon as anyone is spotted there, a whole lot of blaming begins. The Utmost Persons of old temporarily took up humankindness as a way forward, entrusted themselves for a night to responsible conduct, but only so as to wander in the empty wilds of the far and unfettered, feeding in the fields of the sketchy and approximate, finding their place in the gardens of the unborrowed. To be far and unfettered is non-doing.¹³ To be sketchy and approximate is to find nourishment easily. To possess the unborrowed is to never need to pay anything back. The ancients called this the Play that Gathers the True.

“Those who consider wealth to be a definite good are unable to give up their salaries. Those who consider distinction to be a definite good are unable to give up their fame. Those who love power are unable to give control over to others; they are frightened while they hold onto it and grieved when they let it go. And yet they refuse to reflect even fleetingly on what it is that makes them so unable to give it up. These people are the casualties of Heaven.¹⁴ Hatred and favor, taking and giving, reproof and instruction, giving life and killing—these eight are corrective tools. But only those who comply with the vast transformation without the least blockage are qualified to make use of these tools. Thus it is said, ‘Correction must come from the correct.’ When the heart and mind refuse to acknowledge this, the Heaven-gate does not open.”

Confucius came to see Lao Dan and spoke to him of humankindness and responsible conduct. Lao Dan said, “If you are winnowing grain and the dust gets in your eyes, heaven and earth and the four directions may seem to change positions. If your skin is menaced by mosquitos and flies, it can keep you awake all night. This humankindness and this responsible conduct that you speak of in such baleful tones—they really upset our hearts and minds. There is no greater disorder. If only you could allow all in the world to keep from losing their unhewn uncontrived state, my child! Then you could move along simply by releasing yourself to the winds, and stand firm just by absorbing in yourself the totality of all the inherent {124} powers. Then how could you still need to go so heroically about, banging a drum to call for battle with the vehemence of a man seeking his lost son?¹⁵ A snow-goose does not need a daily bath to become white, and a crow does not need a daily tarring to become black. So there is no need to dispute about their uncontrived blackness and whiteness, and whatever prospects they may have to bring fame and honor are not worth disseminating. When the streams dry up, the fish cluster together on the banks, gasping and spitting on one another to keep themselves wet and foamed over. But this is no match for forgetting each other in the rivers and lakes.”¹⁶

When Confucius returned from this meeting with Lao Dan, he did not talk about it for three days. His disciples then asked him, “Master, now you have seen Lao Dan; how would you characterize him?”

Confucius said, “Now, in this man, I have finally seen a dragon. When a dragon gathers itself together, it solidifies as a concrete body, and when it scatters itself, it becomes an emblematic pattern; it rides on the mists of the clouds and nourishes itself on the yin and yang. I just stood there with my mouth open, unable to shut it. How could I characterize someone like Lao Dan?”

Zigong said, “So then there really is a person who can be as still as a corpse and yet manifest like a dragon, sounding out like thunder though silent as an abyss,¹⁷ springing forth into motion just as heaven and earth do? Might it be possible for me also to go see him?”

Thereafter, with an introduction from Confucius, he went to visit Lao Dan. Lao Dan was sitting down in his guest hall with his legs stretched out, and answered faintly, “My years roll on and away. With what warnings would you try to restrain me?”

Zigong said, “The Three Kings and the Five Emperors all governed the world in different ways, but the fame they acquired for it was the same. But you alone do not regard them as sages. Why?”

Lao Dan said, “Come a little closer, child! What do you mean by ‘different ways’?”

He answered, “Yao gave the throne to Shun, Shun gave it to Yu. Yu used his own strength but Tang used the army. King Wen complied with the evil King Zhou and dared not rebel, while his son King Wu rebelled against Zhou, unwilling to submit to him. Thus I said they all employed different ways.”

Lao Dan said, “Come a little closer, child! I will tell you how the Three Emperors and Five Sovereigns ‘ordered the world.’ The Yellow Emperor ordered the world by making the hearts and minds of the people focus on unity, so that when someone didn’t cry at the death of his parents, nobody blamed him. Yao ordered the world by making the people’s hearts and minds all focus on kinship affection, so that when someone killed the killer of his parents, no one blamed him. Shun ordered the world by making the people’s minds focus on competition, {125} so that the women would give birth after ten months, but five months later each one of those babies could already speak and before the age of three each had already become a full-on somebody. It was then that people began to die young. Yu ordered the world by causing the people’s hearts and minds to focus on making changes, so that leaders had definite intentions and armies obeyed whatever orders they were given, saying that ‘to kill a thief is not really murdering a person.’¹⁸ People divided themselves into different types, and each considered his own type the whole world. Thus the world was gripped in great terror, and the Confucians and Mohists arose. It was with their rise that there first came to be the whole idea of ethical roles and relationships, the result being that now men have to take daughters as their wives.¹⁹ What can I say? I tell you, the Three Emperors and Five Sovereigns sure did ‘order the world’—well, that is what people call it, but in reality there is no greater disorder than what they brought about. The so-called wisdom²⁰ of the Three Emperors violated the brightness of the sun and moon above and clashed with the pure energy of the mountains and streams below, and brought everything presented by the four seasons crashing down in between. Their wisdom is crueler than a scorpion’s tail. Even rarely-sighted beasts in the field have thus become unable to find rest in their own inborn natures and allotments of life. And yet these people regarded themselves as sages. Such shamelessness—is it not shameful?”

Zigong just stood there, unsteady on his feet as if jolted by a kick.

Confucius said to Lao Dan, “I have studied the Six Classics—the Book of Odes, the Book of Documents, the Record of Ritual, the Classic of Music, the Classic of Changes, and the Spring and Autumn Annals—for what I consider to be quite a long while, so that now I know them quite thoroughly. I have used this knowledge to explain to seventy-two miscreant rulers the Course of the ancient kings, as well as the footprints left by the ways walked by the Duke of Zhou and the Duke of Shao, and not one of them has put what I teach into practice. How great is the difficulty of convincing human beings! How difficult it is to make the Course known to them!”

Lao Dan said, “It’s lucky for all of us that you’ve never met a ruler who had the wherewithal to bring such ‘order’ to the world! Those Six Classics are indeed just the stale footprints of the former kings—how could they be that which leaves the footprints? Now your present words are just further footprints. Footprints are produced by the gait, but they are not the gait itself. White herons gaze at each other, and before they move the pupils of their eyes, the transformative power of their fertility has disseminated. The male insect sings into the breeze and the female responds downwind, and with that the transformative power of their {126} fertility has been disseminated. Each type naturally has a male and a female, and thus does the transformative power of their fertility disseminate. The inborn nature of one cannot be exchanged for another; the allotment of life of each cannot be changed; time cannot be stopped; the Course cannot be blocked. If their Course is attained, whatever they do is right. If it is not, whatever they do is wrong.”

After that, Confucius did not leave his house for three months. When he came to see Laozi again, he said, “I get it! Crows and ravens hatch their young, fish exchange milt, every wisp-wasp of a creature however meager is involved in transformation: whenever a younger brother is born, the older brother weeps. For a long time I have failed to be a companion to transformation, failed to be human as a way of participation in transformation. If a person is not a person as a form of participation with transformation, how can he transform others?”

Laozi said, “There you have it, Qiu!”

ENDNOTES

A. Reading 袑 as 招, as suggested by Xuan Ying. The name then may be an abbreviated version of the name of the wizard who was stumped by Huzi in Chapter 7.

B. Probably a reference to the “Great Plan” (洪範 Hongfan) chapter of the Shangshu 尚書, which was linked to the “Luo Inscription,” a numerical magic square arrangement of the numbers 1 to 9 derived from the markings discovered on the back of a tortoise emerging from the Luo River. The eponymous plan, too, was divided into nine items, the first of which is the putatively earliest revelation of precisely the five agents (see note 2 above). The ninth and final item finishes with a reference to “the six extremities,” enumerated not as the six coordinates, but as the six states of extreme misfortune to be avoided: misfortune leading to short lifespan, sickness, worry, poverty, wickedness, and weakness. So the shaman’s reference to “the Six Extremities and the Five Constants” might be a back-to-front shorthand way of indicating the entire nine-point plan disclosed in that text.

C. “Humankindness,” “kind,” “kindness” throughout this passage are all translations of the same word, ren 仁. see Glossary. Zhuangzi is playing on the ambiguities of implication built into the semantic range of the word, which means the human sense of kinship with other humans (or, in later Confucianism, with all things), expanded to mean the moral sentiments of humaneness and kindness, but rooting these meanings in the basic denotation of the sense of kinship as such, or being-of-a-kind, or being the exemplar or caretaker of the (human) kind, and thus as intrinsically linked to filial piety.

D. 自然Ziran. A double translation. See “Notes on the Translation.” I take the ran in ziran here to mean “it is so” both in the sense of “a thing being what it is” and “a claim being correct,” as we see it used also in Chapters 2, 17, and 27. Ziran denotes both how things come to be without any external interference (e.g., from the norms of the Five Virtues), and the rightness to themselves entailed in becoming and being that way when judged not by those external norms but by whatever happens to be normal to themselves.

E. Adapting Lu Shuzhi’s interpretation of wuguan 五官. Compare Huainanzi, “Bingluexun”: “The mutual formation of things is subtle process; only a sage can understand its ultimate {127} reaches. The drum does not join in the five tones, and thus it is the master of the five tones; water does not join in with the five flavors, and thus it is what adjusts the five flavors to each other. The general does not join into the tasks of the Five Officers (wuguan 五官), and thus is the supervisor of the Five Officers.” The five tones are here compared to the multiple officials controlled by the non-doing sage, by the silent or indeterminate tone that belongs to none of them and never appears among them.

¹. According to Cheng Xuanying, the same as the six coordinates 六合: the four directions plus up and down. But see note B.

². 五常 Wuchang. According to Cheng Xuanying, the same as the five agents 五行: wood (vegetable), fire, soil, metal (mineral), water. In later times this term comes to refer to the five Confucian virtues (humankindness, ritual, good faith, responsible conduct, and wisdom), with which the five agents are often correlated. See note B.

³. 蕩.

⁴. The state of Song, of which Zhuangzi was a native, territory of the descendants of the deposed Shang dynasty imperial family.

⁵. 至仁 Zhiren. The first character can mean both “to arrive” and “perfect,” which is relevant to Zhuangzi’s ensuing answer.

⁶. Cheng. see Glossary.

⁷. 天理 Tianli. Cf. Chapter 3, p. 30, note E, and see Glossary, Li.

⁸. Traditionally understood to refer to humankindness, responsible conduct, ritual propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness. This unexplained reference, assuming prior familiarity with the term, suggests a late Warring States dating for this passage.

⁹. 自然之命 ziran zhi ming. For ziran, see note D. For ming, see Glossary.

¹⁰. The sage-emperor Shennong, “the divine farmer,” inventor of agriculture in distant antiquity.

¹¹. Cf. Daodejing 5.

¹². Laozi, legendary author of the Daodejing.

¹³. Wuwei. see Glossary.

¹⁴. See Chapter 6, p. 60. The implication is that they seem to have been born with this terrible handicap: the inability to escape their own one-sided obsessions.

¹⁵. See note 2, Chapter 13.

¹⁶. Repeating verbatim a line also found in Chapter 6, p. 56.

¹⁷. See the almost identical expression in Chapter 11, p. 90.

¹⁸. This proposition is proposed and defended in the Mohist Canons, “Xiao Qu.”

¹⁹. This could mean either that marrying a woman now requires recognizing her as the daughter of her father and thus entering into the network of familial relationships thereby entailed, or, as Guo Xiang thought, it could be a reference to incest.

²⁰. Zhi. see Glossary.