{275} GLOSSARY OF ESSENTIAL TERMS

BIAN 辯. Debate, Distinguish, Demonstrate, “Back-and-Forth.” The term literally means “debate” or “disputation,” as engaged in by logicians of the day, including Zhuangzi’s friend and foil Huizi (Hui Shi), whose presence looms large in the text. It can mean “demonstration” in the sense of “demonstrating by means of debate which of two alternatives is correct.” It is sometimes used in the Zhuangzi as a cognate for the homonyms bian 辨 (meaning “to distinguish, to differentiate” and by extension, “to clarify by means of debate”) and bian 變 (meaning “transformation”). Zhuangzi exploits this ambiguity, not least in the crucial line in Chapter 1, “riding atop the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths” (p. 6) where “back-and-forth” is meant to capture the sense of “debate” and “transformation,” along with the implication of a differentiation between the contending positions.

CHANG 常. Constancy, Stability, Sustainability, Staying Power, Reliability, Regularity, Normal, Common, Ordinary, Everyday. The more common translation— “constant” or even “eternal”—can be misleading, for the term also means “common, everyday, ordinary” and at the same time has a distinctive value implication, that is, “normal.” Bringing these senses together, it can be rendered as “sustainable” in the sense of what has the value of staying power, of what can be maintained over a long period of time without exhausting or destroying itself, particularly what can be maintained without special effort—hence a reliable and sustainable course of action. The term (or its cognate, in some versions, heng 恆) is very central in the Daodejing, appearing in the first two lines of the standard post-Han editions of the text: daokedao feichangdao, mingkeming feichangming 道可道非常道, 名可名非常名. These two lines are often translated to mean something like, “The Way that can be spoken is not the Eternal Way; the name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.” But in context, the meaning is arguably something more like, “Guiding courses can be taken as explicit guides, but then their guidance ceases to be sustainable. Named values can be explicitly named as values, but then what they name ceases to be sustainably valuable.” Or more succinctly, “Specifying a way to do things destabilizes that way of doing things. Specifying what is valuable about things destabilizes their value.”

{276} CHENG 成. Completion, Completeness, Coming to Be, Taking Shape, Accomplishment, Fullness, Maturity, Success, Formation, Fully Formed, Perfection, opposed to kui 虧, lacking, waning (of the moon), incomplete, or to hui 毀, to destroy. The term means “to form,” “to become fully formed,” “to come into existence,” “to succeed,” “to reach maturity,” “to accomplish or be accomplished,” “to be perfect,” “to be complete,” “to take shape.” The argument in Chapter 2 plays heavily on the various implications of this term.

DAI 待. To Depend On, To Wait, To Wait For, To Wait On, To Attend To, To Treat. The word means both diachronic “waiting for” and synchronic “dependence on,” as well as “to attend to” someone, as one does a guest. The theme of dependence and independence centered on this term has deep resonances through at least the first few chapters of the text. We are told that the rightness or wrongness of knowledge “depends” on something “peculiarly unfixed” (Chapter 6, p. 53 ), making it impossible to know whether we are correct when we call something “Heaven” or “human”—a claim that replicates verbatim claims made about the instability of the referent of any words, also called “peculiarly unfixed” (Chapter 2, p. 13), and questions about whether we can know if we are correctly calling something “knowledge,” illustrated by noting that what is named the knowing of right dwelling, right cuisine, or right sexual allure differs depending on who is doing the naming (Chapter 2, pp. 18–19). Bringing these together we have the suggestion that all judgments about what is right and what is so are “dependent” upon the perspective from which they are spoken. The value of one’s identity and the function of one’s distinctive virtuosity analogously “depend” on the environments that affirm and enable them, as Liezi “depends on” the wind (Chapter 1, p. 5)—and the same could be said of the great bird Peng, who depends on the wind just as Kun qua Kun depends on the water. The unresolvable questions about the “identity of the rouser” that calls forth all the varied sounds of the windstorm, or the genuine ruler governing all events, or the true self ruling one’s own body and mind (Chapter 2, pp. 12–13), are similarly understood as questions about dependence: the rouser or ruler or self is the basis upon which the varied sounds, the phenomena of nature, or our moods and actions are supposed to depend, and yet the identity of this basis can never be specified. But the same word is used in the crucial line of Chapter 4, stating that “the vital energy becomes a vacuity that waits for the presence of whatever thing may come” (p. 37). Similarly, the shadow “depends on” the physical form, and the penumbra on the shadow, so thoroughly that they have no way of knowing how or why they are what they are and do as they do, or what the thing they depend on might itself depend upon—but not knowing what to make of who or what either the dependent or the depended upon are, finding no specific identity anywhere that doesn’t depend on something else, appears to make the initial problem of dependence evaporate (Chapter 2, p. 21). Similarly, we are told that the sounds of the windstorm depending on something, or on each other, is no different from their not depending on anything or each other (Chapter 2, p. 21); the non-resolution of the question of what they depend upon, and their inability to ever be freed of {277} this thoroughgoing condition of dependence—but dependence on something that can be neither known to exist nor not to exist, something without any definite identity at all—is presented as resolving their problem of dependence. See “Zhuangzi as Philosopher” at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil for a fuller discussion of this point.

DAO 道. Course, Coursing, Courses, A Course, Some Course, Some Courses, The Course. To Guide, Guidance. Often translated as “Way,” the term originally designates a roadway. From this literal meaning it takes on the early ethical meaning of a course of study or activities that lead to some desired result, that is, a program of emulation and practice by means of which a particular set of skills could be cultivated (“the course of the sage kings, the course of humankindness, the course of archery”), or a process by which a particular type of valued result was produced (“the course of Heaven/Sky,” which produces the seasons and thus the growth of all things). Used as a verb, it means “to put someone on or to lead someone along such a course of study and practice,” that is, “to guide.” In this usage it is cognate with the character 導. This sense of spoken indication as directive is implicit also in the word’s extended meaning of “to speak.” In pre-Daoist thought it thus has a highly normative and ethical flavor: deliberate activity directed toward a preconceived goal. Putting these implications together, it can be translated, following Chad Hansen, as “Guiding Dis/course.” Daoist use of the term, beginning with the Daodejing, ironically plays on this original meaning, reversing it to signify precisely the opposite of a normative course, but one that has the expected effect of a normative course (that is, to produce something deemed valuable). In this ironic sense, Dao means not the deliberate pursuit of a consciously valued goal but the non-deliberate and indiscernible process, a nondoing both unvaluing and unavailable as an object to be valued, that is claimed to be the real source of value and being. Expanding on a growing naturalization of Heaven’s Course, pushed to the total denial of any consciousness or intention in the formerly deified Heaven, Dao comes to mean the nameless unhewn raw material from which are carved out all particular named and culturally valued objects, conceived as entailing their emergence and return in the manner of a shapeless fluid whose very instability produces specific shapes in its ripples and waves, and into which these shapes again submerge. In this translation, the term “course” is used in preference to the more prevalent English translation for this word, “way.” There are two main reasons for this: (1) to highlight the originally highly normative sense of the term and its reversal into a critique of normativity: “course” in English can be used in both an explicitly and emphatically normative sense (“course” as in syllabus or prescribed program) and also in a neutral sense, for example, in “a course of events,” or “the course of time”; and (2) to emphasize the new meaning of not only “road” but “the process of traveling a road,” and even “that which travels,” in keeping with the dimension of radical immanence and the watery imagery associated with the term in Daoist texts. In English “the course of the water” means not just the channel through which the water flows but also the traveling of the water, and thus this word, unlike “way,” can function also as {278} a verb, as in “the blood of kings courses through my veins.” We can say “when in the course of human events,” referring to the actual events, as opposed to “the way of human events,” which is only the manner or style of their going, not their going itself. “Course” seems to be broad enough to imply dao all at once as normative, anti-normative, roadway, or empty channel through which something goes, what goes through that channel, process of going through, immanence of channel and process and what undergoes process to each other, and manner or style of doing all at once, and for this reason is to be preferred to “way.” This dynamic implication seems to be forefronted in the locus classicus of the explicit repurposing of the word dao for its new “metaphysical” meaning, that is, Daodejing 25: “There is something undifferentiated and complete, prior to the generation of heaven and earth, standing alone but unchanged, circulating everywhere but unendangered, which can be considered the mother of the world. I don’t know what its name is; I nickname it Dao.” That it itself circulates everywhere, going all around (zhouxing 周行), seems to be a key consideration in choosing the strange name “Dao” for this vague something, for although this line is not found in the Guodian or Mawangdui versions of this chapter, the rest of the chapter singles out precisely this dynamic dimension as what is most notable about Dao: not its priority to heaven and earth, not its standing alone, not its changelessness, not its motherhood of the world, but its motion: its “vastness, which means going away, which means distancing, which means returning” (da 大, shi 逝, yuan 遠, fan 反). Dao is something that goes and returns, like a course, not merely the channel upon which or through which something else goes and returns, like a road (though “course” is able to cover that meaning as well: the peculiarity of Dao is that it is both the formless openness through which all goings pass and also the definite goings themselves, both the named and the unnamed, both immanent and transcendent). This persistent semantic nuance informs the much later adoption of this character as a measure-word when referring to rays of light or jets of water through empty space, to “courses” of food at a restaurant, or even to instances of going through processes and procedures like washing or applying paint: one “dao” can mean one ray of light, one bolt of lightning, one jet of water, one course of food in a meal, one time through a process of washing or painting something—and even one of the resulting coats of paint itself. In all cases, these refer not merely to the paths traversed by certain items but also to the very processes of traversing and the items that traverse: one can be struck and killed by a “dao” of lightning, one can be swept away by a “dao” of water. “Way” comes a little closer to including this dynamic implication than “road,” but still falls short of fully marking it. Unlike “way,” “course” can be used as synonymous with words like “process,” evoking richer implications of motion than “way” does—something that moves or even is itself the process of moving. Hence “course” is used as the translation for Dao. In the Inner Chapters dao is used both in its older normative sense (as an object of critique) as well as in its new ironic sense, and it is here that we see the intricate dialectic of these two senses of the term played out most forcefully. What is really distinctive to the Zhuangzi, especially the Inner Chapters, is the further elaboration of the ironic sense of Dao to mean the process of {279} producing not only valued things but also value perspectives, and hence all the diverse valuations themselves. See the Preface and “Zhuangzi as Philosopher” at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil for a fuller discussion. The Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters present a wide variety of new and innovative repurposing and syntheses of the various senses found in the Inner Chapters and in the Daodejing.

DE 德. “Virtuosity/Virtuosities,” “Intrinsic Virtuosities” (when speaking of human beings), “Intrinsic Powers” (when speaking of nonhuman entities), modified according to context. Virtue, Kindness, Moral Force. Often translated as “virtue,” “power,” “potency,” or the like, the original sense of this term is an efficacious power, “virtue” in the nonmoral sense (“by virtue of …” meaning “by the power of …”), which is closely linked with the idea of dao in the generic sense. If a dao is a course of study, de is what is attained by successfully completing that course: the perfected skill thereby acquired, the value gained by doing things that way. The term is thus often glossed in early texts with the homophone de 得, meaning “to attain,” or “to succeed.” Virtuosity is what one gets from following a course. Virtuosity in archery is what one gets from practicing a course in archery. Virtuosity in general living, in interacting with the world with maximum effect and minimum harm, is what one gets from the Course in general. This is the primary sense in the Inner Chapters, but a shift is already beginning to occur there, concomitant to the new Daoist ironic sense of “Dao.” It is the virtuosity of the nondeliberate Course of the world, and thus something like the innate skill, inborn virtuosity, which we might call one’s ownmost powers, what one can do without deliberate effort, just as a virtuoso can perform his art effortlessly (after finishing the efforts of learning and training). In the Daoist sense, it is the intrinsic powers constituting a thing’s distinctive being, where a characteristic is regarded not as a property inhering in a substance but as a virtuosity, an effortless skill in a particular kind of efficacious nondoing, the style of activity that any being consistently engages in without effort, which identifies it as that being and no other. From an early period the term is also used to mean “moral charisma” or “noncoercive persuasiveness,” and by extension leniency and kindness on the part of a ruler, as opposed to strict enforcement of penal law; here again this is looked at as a manifestation of the ruler’s mastery and virtuosity in his practice of the “Course” of true noncoercive rulership through moral influence, the course of humankindness and responsible conduct that he personally trains himself in. When the Inner Chapters’ usage of Dao comes together with the more explicitly “metaphysical” Dao of Daodejing and related texts, in the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters, the term takes on a key role in an emerging family of broader ontological and cosmological accounts. Here the term comes to imply the individual endowment or attainment of Dao in a particular being, the individuated form of Dao that constitutes one’s own nature and that allows one to live, the effortless operation of Dao in and as one’s specific ownmost character. This ownmost inborn individual character is still a kind of virtuosity, denoting the most distinctive powers of nondeliberate activity and effectiveness in the world, what {280} one can do without having to try: beat one’s heart, pump one’s blood, see and hear, but also exactly be who one is and none other, and have whatever mysterious unintended effects on others that one does. As before, this is thought to have power not only in the sense of ability to act but also to influence other beings noncoercively, through its fascinating charisma—much as virtuosity in the narrower artistic sense does.

JING 精. Purest Kernel, Purest Kernel of Vitality, Quintessential Energy, Seminal Energy, Semen. Pure kernel of energy within things, especially living beings. The word initially denotes refined or purified rice, that is, the innermost kernel of a grain of rice after the inert outer husk has been removed, the kernel being where the life-sustaining nutrition and also the germ of growth are located.

JINGSHEN 精神. Purest Kernel of Imponderable Spirit, Quintessence of the Imponderable Spiritlike Within Us. See jing and shen.

LI 理. Structural Coherence, Coherent Structure, Guideline, Coherence, Structural Configuration, Pattern, Perforations, the Way Things Fit Together, the Sense Made by Things, the How and Why of Things. “Principle” is the most common translation of this term, but that word has misleading metaphysical connotations in English that are best avoided. “Pattern” comes closer to the sense of the term, but this word in English usually implies a strictly and exactly repeating motif, and this sense of exact replication of some form or shape that is literally the same in each instance, however abstract, is lacking in this Chinese word, which is better understood as a not necessarily repeating way in which things fit together and together with which further things can then be fit. In its earliest usages, the term functioned as a verb meaning to divide something up in a way that made it valuable or useful, such as carving a raw piece of jade into a ritual pendant or dividing a field for agricultural purposes. (The word still functions as a verb in this sense in modern Chinese, for example when a haircut is called a “Li”-ing of the hair: cutting and dividing and recombining it to make it all cohere in such a way that it will further cohere with social expectations and fashions.) By extension, it came to mean the inherent lines or patterns in the raw material that might guide such cutting most easily and effectively, the places it was easiest to cut and that would also give it the greatest value by allowing its parts to fit together in such a way as to allow it to meet the needs of (that is, fit together with) the various domains of the wider world where it was expected to be put to use. The single occurrence of the term in the Inner Chapters, in Chapter 3, p. 30, where it is translated “unwrought perforations,” marks the first appearance anywhere in the tradition of the binome “Heavenly Li” (tianli), which would later name a central metaphysical category in Neo-Confucianism. But in Chapter 3 its meaning is more concretely related to the actual lines and configurations running through the flesh of the ox, the channels and gaps that serve as guides for the knife to effectively and easily cut through it. In later parts of the Zhuangzi, the word becomes a more general philosophical term, referring to the underlying structure of a thing conceived as {281} the way its parts cohere with each other and with the wider world, discernible as the natural guidelines that allow one to take worthwhile action with respect to it, such that acting in accordance with them (or dividing along those particular lines) will lead to a valued arrangement of things. Li is a “coherence” in the sense of something valued, something readable, or the lines according to which one may divide things up so as to make them cohere into a desired structure. As coherence, it can thus be equivalent to the sense made by things, the how and why of them, their structure, the conditions of their possibility inasmuch as they must coexist with other things, the way they fit together, what allows them to be discerned and identified, and a tracing of what configurations of action are workable with respect to them. It is translated differently in each case according to context.

MING 明. Illumination (of the Obvious). Clarity. Light. Understanding. The character is composed of a graph juxtaposing the sun and the moon; its most basic meaning is simply “light, brightness.” It also means to make manifest, or to understand, or what is manifest, the obvious. The distinctive phrase yiming 以明 “using ming, because of ming,” is repeated several times in Chapter 2 and is a crucial point of controversy for interpreters. The same term is contrasted to zhi 知 (see entry below) several times in the Daodejing (Chapters 10, 33; see also Chapters 16, 24, 27, 36, 47, 52, 55), and there, too, ming is some form of cognition approved of by the text while zhi is disparaged. In the Daodejing, it seems to refer to the type of awareness that does not cut names and identities entirely out of their unnamed contexts, thereby retaining a sense of their connection to the processes of the whole and their rootedness in the nameless. This is a type of non-knowing that is identified with the knowing of the sustainable (chang; see above). Chapter 2 does seem to share something of this contrast with zhi in its use of the term, but gives it a twist more in keeping with its own way of thinking. Some take the term, as used at crucial junctures in that chapter, to indicate a higher type of understanding, which transcends the relativism of perspectival rights and wrongs, a “Great Knowledge” that is intuitive rather than cognitive or logical. But this seems to be inconsistent with the relativist critiques that dominate the local context of this usage, a tension that some interpreters try to resolve by regarding the critiques as merely therapeutic and provisional, critiques of rational knowledge to make room for another, intuitive kind of knowledge. Understanding this term in its more basic sense of “obvious” provides an alternate way to resolve this tension, one that is in my view more satisfying on several levels—a usage closer to the so-called “Genuine Understanding” of Chapter 6, p. 53, which is clearly presented as no understanding at all, intuitive or otherwise. It then refers not to a deeper apprehension of the real transcendental truth lying beneath the surface of appearances but rather to attentiveness to the surface itself, the most obvious and undeniable feature of which is the disagreement between varying perspectives, but also their intrinsic inseparability and unavoidable mutual transformations, inhabiting and then forgetting the intrinsic rightness/thisness of each as it passes. As such it is related to other distinctive and seemingly paradoxical phrases in Chapter 2, notably “The Shadowy Splendor” (p. 18) and “The Radiance of Drift and {282} Doubt” (p. 16). Drift and Doubt are precisely what is obvious, and the radiance and illumination provided by this resolves the problems they seem to present, the uncertainty of multi-perspectivism. This is still positively contrasted to ordinary zhi and does all the work attributed to ming in the earlier Daoist sense of the Daodejing. (See “Zhuangzi as Philosopher” at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil.)

MING 命. Fate, Destiny. Literally “a command,” originally linked to Heaven in the term tianming 天命, the “mandate of Heaven,” which was used as a moral justification for the Zhou overthrow of the Shang dynasty in the eleventh century BCE. This term undergoes many of the same modifications that affect the term “Heaven” in subsequent Chinese thought. In the Inner Chapters it is not a preexisting plan inscribed in advance in some other, transcendental site, determining what will happen, but rather a word for the unknowability of the agent who makes things happen. That fate is not to be thought of as an agent that does something or a positive law with determinate contents somewhere, an actual grounding principle that accounts for anything, is already implied in the much more conservative usage of the term by Zhuangzi’s contemporary Mencius, whose conception of Heaven retained a much more normative tinge than Zhuangzi’s, but who nonetheless states, “What comes upon us although no particular agent brings it about is what we call ming, Fate” (Mencius, 5A7). Mencius perhaps meant only to disavow a human agent here, not literally to disavow all agents and identifiable determinants, human or divine, seen or unseen; but the Zhuangzi of the Inner Chapters can be understood to be literally dismissing all of the above. In the Zhuangzi, the term is sometimes explicitly disassociated even from “Heaven” (see the final story in Chapter 6, p. 63), underscoring the sense of “what happens although I can find no one who makes it so,” or more simply, a synonym for “what cannot be stopped,” that is, what no conscious purpose or activity, of any one particular agent divine or human, can change.

QI 氣. Vital Energy, Atmospheric Conditions, Breath, Air, Energy, Life Force. A key term in Chinese cosmology, sometimes speculatively traced to a root meaning of the mist that forms into clouds, or (on the basis of the rice radical in the character) even the steam rising from rice, in either case suggesting a vapor that takes various shapes and provides life (as rain or as food). It refers to air in general, but more specifically to the breath, and by extension the life force, the absence of which constitutes a living creature’s death (referred to as “cutting off the qi”). It has no one fixed form and is composed of no fundamental building blocks such as atoms or particles; rather, it is constantly in a process of transformation, congealing and dispersing. It also refers to weather conditions and to the general feeling of a particular atmosphere either physically or stylistically. These implications are to be kept in mind when considering the various uses of wind imagery in Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapter 4 it is presented in an “empty” condition, contrasted to the ear and the mind, with which one hears when practicing the “fasting of the mind,” and that is “a waiting for the presence of whatever thing may come.” {283} Having no fixed form or identity of its own (“empty”), it is able to adapt itself to any condition. Cosmologically it eventually comes to be regarded as the substance of which all things are composed, which is by nature biphasic, tending to expand into impalpable vapor and condense into palpable objects, spanning both the material and the spiritual, which is one moment undetectable and the next felt by the hand or face as wind, or by the lungs as nourishing breath, seemingly producing something from nothing, life from empty space. This expanded cosmic meaning is often encountered in the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters of the Zhuangzi. In slightly later Chinese texts, particularly those concerned with meditation and religious practices, or with constructing a universal theory of the origin and constitution of the world, its relation to Dao becomes so close that the two terms often verge on synonymity.

REN 仁. Humankindness; Kindness; Humaneness; Kind; Humane, Being Good. See Renyi.

RENYI 仁義. Humankindness and Responsible Conduct. Being Good and Doing Right. Kindness, Responsibility. Kind and Responsible. Humane and Dutiful. Goodness and Rightness. The cardinal virtues of Confucianism, sometimes translated as “Benevolence and Righteousness” (Waley, Watson) or “Goodwill and Duty” (Graham). Functionally often a synecdoche for “morality” or “ethics” in general. Ren is originally the adjectival form of “human” (人), initially used especially of the noble class as opposed to the common masses (referred to as min 民). Hence the term means the demeanor of a true member of the nobility, someone who displays the character proper to a noble, or adjectivally, “to be noble.” Confucius expands on this implication, using the term to mean something like “truly human” (note that David Hall and Roger Ames translate the term as “authoritative humanity”), applicable to a virtuous member of any social class. The term comes to have the implication especially of kindness and humanitarian love, and the sense of “kindness” in our translation “humankindness” should be taken here in its original English etymological sense (encoded also in the “two” component of the character 仁), as a feeling of “kindredness” or “kinship”—either the feeling of kindness as kinship among humans (or as in Chapter 14, the kindredness between tigers and their young, p. 119) or in some later Confucian thought even the (human) feeling of kindredness with all things in the universe. Yi has a range of meanings that no single English word exactly covers: “responsible conduct” is deployed here as a blanket term meant to cover on one side “Justice” and on the other “Duty,” and in the middle a sense of Decency or a particular sense of what is right and wrong in general, and what is right and fitting in any situation. It is focused more on conduct than on feeling, without excluding the latter—which is why a Confucian thinker like Mencius felt the necessity to refute the seemingly commonsensical idea that it was “external” as opposed to the innerness of humankindness, allowing its ordinarily deemphasized dimension of a felt sense of responsibility to be brought into focus. “Appropriateness 宜 [to one’s official position or temporary situation],” is its standard gloss in early texts, which gives us perhaps {284} its central connotation, but it carries a bit more normative gravitas than “appropriateness” bears in English (though the scolding use of “not appropriate” is gaining ground in English). The term can mean “justice” both in its sense of a readjustment of an existing situation to make it fit together in a way that is fair to all its participants, and in its severe sense of meting out deserved punishment or imposing a restriction, saying no to something, refusing to do something because it is just not done (Mencius sees its source in the feeling of “shame and dislike” of certain states or acts, the need to negate or eliminate them); it can mean “duty” in the sense of fulfilling the obligations that come with being in a certain role or situation. It can thus mean doing right, rightness, justice, or duty, the doing of what one’s particular role or rank requires. Mencius says he likes both life and yi, but likes yi more than life, and thus it is something he might be willing to die for. The Shuowen defines it in terms of “one’s personal dignified demeanor,” ji zhi weiyi 己之威儀, relating it to honor and self-respect, which also connects to the meaning of “decency.” “Appropriate” is also the root meaning of the English word “decent,” rendering a core meaning of “doing the decent thing, acting appropriately in each context,” but in English this perhaps does not convey the life-or-death dignity of the term. The extended meaning of “meaning” itself is also not irrelevant here, denoting also the role a word properly plays in its context, like the conduct that duty requires of a person in his social position and temporary situation. The “meaning” of a word is also an instance of the word doing its duty by appropriately playing its semantic role, and understanding a meaning is “doing what one should in response” to the word, the “appropriate response” to the use of that word, or perhaps the proper function of a word in response to its context, the role to be played by a word in a sentence. The word basically means “responding appropriately,” whether to one’s position and role (duty), to the needs of the moment (appropriateness), or to the need for the tempering or elimination of some unfitting factor in the adjudication of alternatives (justice). Here it is translated “responsible conduct” (with the full sense of “responding” in the forefront) when part of the set pair “humankindness and responsible conduct,” taken as a binome indicating the whole of moral virtue in general. But when used alone it is translated variously according to context, covering the range from Justice to Duty.

SHEN 神. Spirit, the Spiritlike, Spiritlike, the Imponderable, Imponderable Spirit. The word originally means the spirit of a deceased person, an ancestor, or the invisible entity presiding over some part or process of nature like a river, a mountain, or the growth of crops. In the period during which much of the Zhuangzi text was probably written, the term was undergoing a partial expansion and demythologization, without losing its original animistic application. It comes to be used as an adjective describing anything mysterious, incomprehensible, incalculable, miraculous, as well as sometimes indicating a faculty within the living human being, associated with the higher aspects of conscious life, including but not limited to thought and imagination. But the implication of full transparency and lucidity, of maximal intelligibility, which might be associated with {285} “consciousness” or “spirit” in English, should be avoided, since the term connotes just the opposite: the mysterious, the incomprehensible. Moreover, as the universal application of cosmological theories of Qi (vital energy; see above) begin to take more definite shape during this same period, shen comes to be understood as a highly refined form of Qi, made of the same stuff as, and functioning on a continuum with, all other phenomena, including physical objects. Prior to this time, while no theory is explicitly put forth, shen may well have been assumed to be an ontologically distinct category of existence, surviving the death of the physical body because it was of an entirely different nature, as is commonly believed in many pre- and even postliterate societies. This situation sometimes makes it difficult to pinpoint which of these senses is intended in some of the usages in this text; the judgment calls in the translation are determined by local context, but whenever the term is used, all the possible meanings should be kept in mind.

SHENG 生. Becoming, Birth, Life, the Life Process, the Process of Life, the Flow of Life, the Life in Us. The term means both “birth, becoming, coming into existence,” whether of a state or condition or of a living entity, and “life” in the sense of being alive. Hence “life process” is sometimes used as a translation, sometimes “generation,” “production,” and the like. In the opening lines of Chapter 3, in accordance with the “shoreline” imagery used, it is translated as “flow of life.” In most places when it is something to be preserved or nourished, the vitality that animates a living body, it is rendered “the life in us.” “Nourishing life” should not be understood as, say, feeding living creatures but as supplying the life in us with what it needs for optimal flourishing and sustainability.

SHI / FEI 是非. Right/Wrong. Literally “that’s it/that’s not” (A. C. Graham), implying, “right/wrong.” Shi by itself, or coupled with bi 彼 (“that, other”) can mean simply “this.” The double meaning of “this” and “right” are key to Zhuangzi’s argument in Chapter 2. For a full discussion, see “Zhuangzi as Philosopher” at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil.

TIAN 天. Heaven, Heavenly, the Heavens, Sky, Skylike, Celestial. The first thing any non-Chinese reader should understand about tian is that no one in the history of Chinese thought ever doubts its existence. Even the most skeptical thinker would not deny the existence of tian; rather, he would say that tian exists and that it is simply that blue sky above us. This makes the term very unlike “God” and its equivalents in Western traditions, and perhaps closer to “Nature,” which similarly is something the existence of which is never contested. In both cases the only issue is not whether it exists but what its character is: personal, impersonal, deliberate, nondeliberate, spiritual, material, moral, amoral, conscious, unconscious. This primary meaning of “sky” is never absent in the word, in its most rudimentary and undeniable sense: what is up there above the reach of human beings, where weather comes from, which changes through the seasons and thus sets the conditions for all human activity but is beyond human manipulation. That contrast to purposive human activity remains the core element in the idea {286} of tian no matter what further content is added: tian is what is not accomplished by any deliberate human actions, but which conditions human actions. But “sky” also functioned as a metonym for whatever deity or deities may be living in the sky, much as the “White House” is sometimes used to refer to the president of the United States, or “Hollywood” is used to designate a complex collective conglomerate entity like “the movie industry.” It was so used to designate the ancestral deity or deities of the Zhou imperial house, whose moral “mandate” underwrote the Zhou overthrow of the Shang dynasty in the eleventh century BCE. Tian in this usage tended to function as a patriarchal sky-god of the kind typical of many ancient cultures. With the rationalizing tendencies of the Spring and Autumn Period (770–475 BCE), however, including the early Confucian movement, the naturalistic association with “sky” began to grow more pronounced as the anthropomorphic and morally retributive aspects of the term were dampened. In the Analects, Confucius sometimes uses the term with clear but possibly rhetorical anthropomorphic implications, but elsewhere in the same work he states that Heaven “does not speak [that is, issues no explicit commands], and yet the four seasons proceed through it, the hundred creatures are born through it” (Analects 17:19). The naturalistic sense of Heaven as the plain process of the sky seems to be present in this pronouncement. Interpretive hedgings continued in the work of Zhuangzi’s contemporary Mencius, representing what would later be deemed the mainstream Confucian tradition. Mencius sometimes reduced the meaning of Heaven explicitly to simply “what happens although nothing makes it happen” (Mencius, 5A6). This is the sense of the term that emerges front and center in Zhuangzi’s usage: the spontaneous and agentless process that brings forth all beings, or a collective name for whatever happens without a specific identifiable agent that makes it happen and without a preexisting purpose or will or observable procedure. This is “skylike” in the sense that the sky is conceived as the ever-present but unspecifiable open space that “rotates” tirelessly and spontaneously, bringing the changes of the seasons and the bounty of the earth forth without having to issue explicit orders, make or enforce “laws” or directly interfere: the turning of the sky makes the harvest without coming down and planning and planting, its action is effortless and purposeless. The Heavenly in all things is this “skylike” aspect of all things. The term “Nature” has been used by some early translators, but the implication of Nature as an ordered and knowable system, running according to “Natural Laws,” which are rooted in the wisdom of a divine lawgiver, is profoundly alien to the early Chinese conception of spontaneity, which excludes the notion of positive law as an externally constraining force. Since the term no longer refers to a particular agent but to a quality or aspect of purposeless and agentless process present in all existents, it is here often translated as “the Heavenly” rather than the substantive “Heaven.” But the English “Heavenly” should not be taken in its loose colloquial sense as an exclamation of praise meaning something like “simply marvelous!” Similarly, the English term “Heaven” should be stripped of any implications of a pearly-gated place of reward to which people go when they die.

{287} WUWEI 無為. Non-doing. Often translated into English as “nonaction,” “effortless action,” “non-striving,” “non-contending,” “non-purposive action,” and the like. The term first appears in Analects 15:5, where Confucius uses it to describe the effortless ritual efficacy of the sage-ruler Shun; the Daoist use can be seen as expanding upon that sense of effortlessness to the point of stripping it of its ritual substratum, taking the literal implication of the term more seriously. Wei, which is what wuwei negates, can mean “to do,” “to be,” “to become,” “to make,” “to endeavor,” “to deem or regard [something] as [having some particular identity],” and “for [the purpose of],” and all these senses should be kept in mind when considering this term. What is denied here is not motion or action per se, but the doing of deeds in the sense of consciously taking action “for” (wei) some specific purpose, deliberate and intentional teleological action, such that one would deem oneself and other things as having, or make oneself and others have, specific definite identities relative to that purpose.

XIN 心. Heart, Mind, Heart-mind, Heartmind, Heart and Mind. The term is famously inclusive of both cognitive and affective aspects of human experience, as well as the physical organ of the heart. Thus the connotations of the English “heart” are sometimes too gung-ho and sentimental, and the connotations of “mind” are sometimes too cerebral and abstract. Instead of the neologism “heart-mind” to address this problem, I prefer to use “heart,” “mind,” or “heart and mind,” depending on the relevant aspect stressed in each context.

XING 性. Inborn Nature, Inborn Propensity, Human Nature, Innate Nature of a Thing. This term does not appear anywhere in the Inner Chapters (1–7) or in the Daodejing. It is very common in the rest of the Zhuangzi (Chapters 8–33) and in the vast majority of other Warring States texts dating from the time of Mencius (who made it central to his presentation of Confucianism) and thereafter, and indeed remains a topic of intense speculation and controversy in most Chinese philosophical speculation up to and including modern times.

YI 義. For usage in the stock pair renyi, see supra. When used alone, Right Conduct, Righteousness, Rightness, Doing Right, Justice, Duty, Decency, Responsibility, Role-appropriate Response, Appropriate Conduct, Conscientiousness, as required by conduct. See detailed explanation in the entry on renyi.

YINSHI 因是. Going by the Rightness of the Present “This.” A special term found repeated several times in Chapter 2 (pp. 14, 15, 16, 17) but rarely anywhere else, it sums up the “Wild Card” way of handling the perspectival nature of value judgments (see “Zhuangzi as Philosopher” at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil for a full account). Yin normally means simply “to follow,” or “to go along with,” but, as A. C. Graham has shown, it was also part of the technical vocabulary of the logicians of Zhuangzi’s day, used to mean “to take as a criterion for a judgment, to go by.” (See Shi / fei.)

{288} ZHENG 正. True, Right, Real, Correct, Straight, Aligned, Untilting, Unskewed. Normally translated simply as “true” or “correct,” sometimes as “real” in the sense of “a true specimen of a given type,” the term has special importance in Chapters 1 and 2 of Zhuangzi, where it is sometimes the object of interrogation but sometimes used in a positive sense. In the latter case, given the critique of normativity there, the term is translated in accord with its more basic etymological meaning of “straight, aligned.” Hence “true to” in the key line in Chapter 1, “to chariot upon what is true both to Heaven and to earth,” the term is translated as “true” but this is to be understood in the sense of “aligned with” (as a rifleman’s aim may be said to be “true”) rather than in the epistemological or moral sense. This means fitting in, well-aligned, not only with Heaven but also with earth, sky-fitting in the sky as well as soil-fitting in the soil, right for the depths of the sea as Kun and then right for the heights of the heavens as Peng.

ZHI 知. The Understanding, Conscious Knowing, Conscious Understanding, the Understanding Consciousness, the Mind Bent on Knowledge, Consciousness, Intelligence, the Intellect, Wisdom, Cleverness, Discernment, Knowledge, Know-how, Understanding, Comprehension. This is a crucial term in the Zhuangzi. The character can be pronounced in two ways, one being cognate with 智, usually translated as “wisdom.” It denotes not a store of information but rather a skill in making “correct” distinctions concerning the character, behavior, and value of things encountered and the successful know-how issuing from this recognition. Mencius, Zhuang Zhou’s contemporary, defines it as the fullest development of the innate capacity to distinguish shi from fei, the key terms in the Zhuangzi’s second chapter, meaning both the ability to approve and disapprove (and thereby to distinguish “right” from “wrong”) and also the faculty of judgment that identifies what is or is not a certain thing or a member of a certain class. Sometimes the Zhuangzi uses this positively charged term ironically, critiquing wisdom or “cleverness” in this sense. In its other pronunciation, the word means the faculty of cognition in general: what recognizes and understands on the basis of its knowledge, regards things as one way or another, and has opinions, views, and plans about things—the thinking mind. But the term also means consciousness in the sense of sentience or awareness as such. A few decades after Zhuang Zhou’s death, the Confucian philosopher Xunzi will say, for example: “Fire and water have vital energy but not life; plants have life but no consciousness (zhi); animals have consciousness but no sense of responsibility related to division into roles and duties (yi). Human beings have vital energy, life, consciousness, and also a sense of responsibility and duty to specific roles.” The same word was used in this period in posing the question about whether the ghosts of the dead had consciousness or not. So the term should in all cases denote consciousness and its thinking, conceived as intrinsically a skill in making judgments and discerning objects by dividing down from a larger whole, and the capacity for successful action derived therefrom. The whole, undivided, would be impossible to discern; one could not be conscious of it. Zhi is the capacity to make “correct” divisions and select particular parts from a larger whole. “The understanding” or “the intellect” {289} considered as a faculty of judgment, the capacity of the mind to identify and categorize things, is useful as a blanket translation for many of these senses. “Discernment,” “wisdom,” or “intelligence” is used as a translation when the sense of a skill in making correct distinctions is stressed. “Cleverness” is used when the sense of practical skill, or even cunning, is at the forefront. “Understanding,” “conscious knowing,” or simply “knowing” are used when the context implies a stress on the explicit holding of views about what is so and what is right. “The understanding consciousness” or simply “consciousness” is used when this process of knowing is viewed more substantively as the awareness that apprehends objects of experience about which judgments might be made.