{144} CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Reaching Utmost Happiness

Is there such a thing as reaching utmost happiness^A? Or is there not? Is there a way to keep one’s body alive, or is there not? What should we be doing, what should we depend upon, what should we avoid, what should we situate ourselves in, what should we approach, what should we depart from? What should we delight in, what should we abhor?

What everyone in the world honors is wealth, high rank, long life, and others thinking well of them. What they delight in is physical security and comfort, rich flavors, lovely clothes, alluring forms, fine tones, and music. What they despise are poverty, low status, early death, and others thinking ill of them. What they suffer from are a body unable to obtain ease and comfort, a mouth unable to obtain rich flavors, a figure unadorned by lovely clothes, eyes unable to see alluring forms, ears unable to hear fine tones and music. If they cannot obtain these things, how worried and terrified they become!

But this is a really foolish way to treat one’s own body. The wealthy torture their bodies, frenzied by work, accumulating so much wealth that they are unable to use it all. This is treating one’s own body as an outsider. The people of high status worry all day and then into the night about how well or poorly they are doing. This is treating one’s own body as a stranger. Anxiety is born the moment a human being is born, and when the long-lived become stupid and benighted, this anxiety lasting on and on and refusing to die—what suffering this is! This is treating one’s own body as a distant outsider.

Martyrs for a cause are regarded by everyone in the world as good men, but their goodness is not enough to keep their bodies alive. So I am not sure whether this goodness is really any good or whether it isn’t really any good. Is it good? Clearly not good enough to keep their own bodies alive. Is it not good? Clearly good enough to keep other people alive. Thus it is said, “If your loyal remonstration is not heeded by the ruler, remain kneeling compliantly and don’t wrangle with him any further.” Thus when Zixu went on with his wrangling,¹ it brought {145} mutilation to his body. If he had not continued his wrangling, though, he would not have achieved such fame.

I don’t know: is there anything that is really good, or isn’t there?

Nor do I know whether what the ordinary people nowadays do, what they find their happiness in, is really happiness or not. I notice that when the ordinary people consider something happiness, they all throng after it in a mad dash, so definite and certain, like they can’t stop themselves. And yet they all continue to call this happiness. But I don’t have any way to judge that to be either happiness or not happiness.

I don’t know: is there really such a thing as happiness, or isn’t there?

As for me personally, I regard total lack, non-doing,^B as the real happiness. And yet this is just what ordinary people regard as the greatest suffering of all. But I say, “When you reach happiness, ‘happiness’ is totally lacking; when you reach honor, ‘honor’ is totally lacking.”²

What is right and what is wrong have never yet been stably determined in this world. But though this is so, non-doing can stably determinate what is right and what is wrong. The reaching of happiness, keeping the body alive—it is only nondoing that comes close to maintaining this. Let me try to explain what I mean. It is by non-doing that the sky is clear. It is by non-doing that the earth is tranquil. When these non-doings join together, there occur the transformations by which all things are generated. So oblivious, so unheeding, emerging from nowhere! So unheeding, so oblivious, devoid of any likeness! All things busily working their works emerge from the root of this non-doing! Thus it is said, “Heaven and earth do nothing, and yet there is nothing they do not do.”³ But as for human beings, who among them can attain to this non-doing?

When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi went to offer his condolences. He found Zhuang zi squatting on the floor singing, accompanying himself by pounding on an overturned washtub held between his splayed legs.

Huizi said, “You live with someone, raise children with her, grow old with her—not crying over her death is enough already, isn’t it? But to go so far as to pound on a washtub and sing, isn’t that going too far?”

Zhuangzi said, “No, it’s not. When this one first died, how could I not feel grief just like anyone else? But then I considered closely how it had all begun: previously, before she was born, there was no life there. Not only no life: no physical form. Not only no physical form: not even energy.⁴ Then in the course of some heedless mingling mishmash a change occurred and there was energy, and then this energy changed and there was a physical form, and then this form changed and there was life. Now there has been another change and she is dead. This is how she participates in the making of the spring and the autumn, of the {146} winter and the summer. For the moment a human lies stiffened here, slumbering in this enormous house. And yet there I was getting all weepy, even going on to wail over her. Even to myself I looked like someone without any understanding of fate. So I stopped.”

Unk Discombobulated and Unk Sliding Onefoot were gazing at the dark grave mounds of the Earl of Oblivion in the empty wastes of Kunlun, where the Yellow Emperor had been laid to rest. Suddenly a willow started sprouting out of Uncle Onefoot’s left elbow. His mind was really stumbling over it, very much disliking it.

“Do you dislike it?” asked Unk Discombobulated.

“No, no! Why should I dislike it? Life is a borrowing. What is generated and regenerated through borrowing is just so much dust and dirt. Death and life are day and night. You and I came here to gaze at the process of transformation, and now the transformation has reached my own self. Why should I now instead dislike it?”

Zhuangzi traveled to Chu, where he came upon an empty skull, all whitened and brittle but still retaining its shape. He poked it with his riding crop and then asked it, “Did you come to this because your greed for life made you do something out of order, sir? Or did you come to this in the service of some failing state, meeting with the punishment of an ax or hatchet? Or did you come to this because of some evil behavior that brought disgrace to your parents and wife and children? Or did you come to this because cold and hunger overtook you? Or did you come to this simply because your springs and autumns brought you to it?”

When he had finished with his questions, Zhuangzi hugged the skull toward him as his pillow and went to sleep on it. But in the middle of the night, the skull appeared to him in a dream, and said, “Your words sound like those of a skilled debater. But considered closely, all I see in them are the burdens that are always tying down the living. When you are dead, all such things are gone. Do you want to hear about the joys of being dead?”

“Yes, I do,” Zhuangzi said.

“When you’re dead, you have no ruler above you, no subjects below you, none of the tasks of the four seasons. Floating untethered and with nothing to do,^C heaven and earth are to you as spring and autumn. Even the happiness of a king on his throne cannot surpass that.”

Zhuangzi did not believe him. “If I could make the controller of fate restore your body to life, fashioning again your bones and flesh and skin, and return you to your parents and your wife and your children, to your old home and all your friends, wouldn’t you want that?”

The skull knitted its brows, glaring at him intensely, and said, “Why in the world would I sacrifice the happiness of a king on his throne to return to the toils of being a living person?”^D

When Yan Yuan traveled east to Qi, Confucius looked very worried. Zigong leaned off his mat and asked, “Your little disciple here ventures to ask why you look so worried about Yan Yuan travelling to Qi.”

{147} Confucius said, “A fine question! In olden times Guanzi said something of which I heartily approve: ‘A small bag cannot contain what is large, and a short wellrope cannot draw water from the deep.’ In this way he meant to say that fate forms things in a certain definite way and all forms have certain things for which they are suited, which cannot be augmented or diminished. I am afraid that Hui will talk to the Marquis of Qi about the Course of Yao, Shun, and the Yellow Emperor,⁵ and repeat to him the sayings of Suiren and Shennong.⁶ The marquis will then seek some resonance with it in himself, and he will surely fail to find it. This will confuse him, and such a man’s confusion is what brings doom. Have you alone never heard about it? In olden times a seabird came to roost in the outskirts of Lu. The marquis of Lu took it riding in his chariot to the temple, where he prepared a banquet for it, having the music of the Nine Shao performed for its entertainment and supplying it with the best chops from the butcher for its delectation. The bird looked at it all with glazed eyes, worried and distressed, not daring to eat a bite, not daring to drink a sip, and after three days of this, the bird was dead. The marquis was trying to use what was nourishing to himself to nourish the bird, instead of using what was nourishing to the bird. Those who wanted to nourish a bird with what is nourishing to the bird would let it perch in the deep forest, roam over the altars and plains, float on the rivers and lakes, gorge itself on eels and minnows, fly in formation to wherever it stops and find its place willy-nilly wherever it wants. A bird hates even to hear human beings talking—what use could it have for all this ruckus and noise! If the music of the Xianchi and the Nine Shao were to resonate over the fields of Dongting, the birds there would fly off as soon as they heard it, the beasts there would break into a run and the fish there would dive into the deep, whereas when human beings hear it they all cluster around raptly to watch the performance. Fish thrive when they dwell in water, while humans die there. Thus differently constituted beings necessarily have different preferences. That is why the ancient sages did not require the same ability of everyone, did not assign everyone the same tasks. They titled people only according to their actual abilities, and the duties they imposed were set up to suit what was appropriate to each. This is what is called the hub keeping hold of its spokes by letting each one individually reach it.”^E

Liezi was traveling and had stopped to picnic by the side of the road when he spotted a hundred-year-old skull nearby. Pulling aside the underbrush, he pointed a finger at it and said, “Only you and I know that you have never been the dead one and [I] have never been the living one.⁷ Is it you who is really eating his fill? Is it I who am really enjoying it? How multitudinous are the seeds of things, how {148} minute the wellsprings in them!⁸ When they come into contact with water a filmy surface forms, reaching all the way to the shoreline and becoming the moss that cloaks the frogs and oysters. Then growing on the mounds and hills it becomes plantago grass, which upon finding dense soil becomes crowfeet, the roots of which turn into maggots and the leaves of which become butterflies. These butterflies, which soon transform into insects that resemble cast-off skins and live under stoves, known as the Quduo, become after a thousand days birds called Leftover Drybones, the saliva of which become the Simi bugs, which turn into the Shixi, from which are born Yilus, just as Huangkuangs are born from Jiuyous and Mouruis are born from Fuquans, and as the Yangxi, when combined with long unsprouting bamboo, produces the Qingning, which generates the panther, which generates the horse, which generates humans, who then again return back into minute wellsprings. All things emerge from minute wellsprings, and all go back into them.”^F

ENDNOTES

A. Literally, “arriving at happiness,” which can also mean, “arrived happiness,” i.e., perfect or utmost happiness. However, given the conclusion to this interrogation of this term in the statement zhilewule 至樂無樂, “perfect happiness lacks happiness,” the sense seems to be the subjective state of “really reaching the experience of being happy.” The sense of zhilewule 至樂無樂 is then the familiar Daoist claim that one who has reached happiness is no longer aware of happiness. Hence we have another “double translation” here (see “Notes on the Translation”). The term “happiness” is written with the same character as the term meaning “music.”

B. Grammatically, the sentence says “I take nothingness (wu) as (wei) the real happiness,” but the following discussion seems to conflate this with “non-doing” (wuwei; see Glossary), as if a second wei had dropped out of the text. The translation here tries to cover both meanings.

C. Following Xi Tong in taking cong 從 as standing in for fan 泛.

D. Following the manuscripts that have 生人 instead of 人間.

E. Adopting Qian Mu’s suggestion to read fu 輻 for fu 福.

F. The exact identity of all the specific flora and fauna alluded to in this passage is a matter of uncertainty, and is much disputed among commentators, but the intended effect seems pretty clear: a general evocation of the natural world as a surreal whirlwind of bizarre transformations, a setting in which the sudden appearance of a willow growing out of a human elbow, or a living human being turning into dead matter or energy or nothingness, would not be especially out of place.

¹. Continually warning the king of Wu about imminent attack from Yue. His warnings were unheeded, and his motives for such insistence doubted. In 484 BCE he was finally forced to commit suicide.

². I.e., there is no longer any awareness of happiness or honor as goals or even as objects of consciousness; really inhabiting any state, X, is to forget Xness.

³. Cf. Daodejing 37, 48.

⁴. Qi. Literally “breath,” elsewhere translated as “vital energy.” see Glossary.

⁵. All here considered sage-kings.

⁶. The ancient domesticator of fire and the inventor of agriculture, respectively.

⁷. Literally, without adding the interpretive bracketed word, “Only you and I understand your never-having-died, never-having-lived.”

⁸. This could mean either “How multitudinous are the seeds of things,” or, following Fang Yizhi’s text, which has 機 for 幾, “Every type of thing, every seed, has minute wellsprings of change in it.” The translation tries to cover both meanings.