Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics

IONCE TOOK a memorable class called “Liberation” with a teacher who was something of a Daoist sage. He could lecture to a class of sixty-five students and be attuned to each person in the hall. At times he would be passionately elucidating an abstract concept and would notice confusion—some scrunched-up faces, a few furrowed brows. And he’d respond: “Don’t fret about the words; just get the music.”¹ In other words, pay attention, but stay loose; don’t get tight with “muscular effort.”² Simone Weil contrasts such tightness with the “negative effort” entailed in attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.… Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”

I think of Weil’s essay on attentiveness whenever I teach Zhuangzi. I was reminded of my teacher when rereading the final words of Burton Watson’s edition³ of the work: “Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” (140). Words do matter for Zhuangzi—after all, he employs them—but the “music” matters more. Further, these final lines reprise Zhuangzi’s recurring note of paradoxical humor. Students laugh at passages like this and others in the text: they enjoy Zhuangzi the joker. But then they run the risk of not taking him seriously. If, however, they make an earnest effort to understand him, his persistent disruption of conventional wisdom may irritate them. Students can resist by asking questions and challenging his claims. “People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there?” (34); if words are dispensable, why attend to Zhuangzi’s? “Those who discriminate fail to see” (39); if the scholarly task of making precise distinctions is folly, why pursue academic study? When Zhuangzi’s wife dies, he is found “sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing” (113): how can he so cavalierly dispense with ritual (li), which is intrinsic to the Confucian conception of humanity? Why does he refer to a human being as “a thing [among other things]” (84)? If wisdom is to “leave the confusion and muddle as it is” (42), if the path to happiness lies in non-doing, why invest in studious effort, especially with a text as baffling as Zhuangzi’s? “The paths of right and wrong are hopelessly snarled and jumbled” (41); if Zhuangzi refuses to distinguish between them, isn’t he a moral relativist? Since Zhuangzi counsels indifference toward “likes or dislikes” (72), isn’t he advocating apathy?

Even for scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy, these remain legitimate, perennial questions.⁴ But Zhuangzi offers a way of pursuing them that relaxes the furrowed brow and invites a deep “breathing with [one’s] heels” (74). Indeed, he offers a way of life applicable to students grown cramped and anxious in their studies—especially when midterms and finals loom closer. “Relax,” counsels Zhuangzi—open yourself to the unexpected and inexorable mutations of reality. If you do, you may experience liberation (to hearken back to the college course I mentioned). Zhuangzi uses humor to humble his readers, to bring them down to earth, the “humus.” He baffles them with the aim of activating their “negative capability,” the state described by John Keats in an 1817 letter to his brother: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”⁵ Living in the fourth century B.C.E., in the thick of China’s hazardous Warring States period, Zhuangzi witnessed the irritable reaching after fact and reason among court scholars and advisors—and saw that it could cost them their lives. He saw people striving simply to be acknowledged, applauded, and rewarded. But “seekers of fame and gain” are destroyed (52). At the very least, the egocentric desire to impress and possess and to insistently assert one’s limited perspective blinds one to larger reality. Further, the insistent assertion of will, especially in reaction to situations in which the will meets its limits, only shrivels it and depletes the life force (qi). As Zhuangzi writes: “If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger” (46); “do not hobble your will or you will be departing from the Way!” (103).

One of the most memorable books we read in the “Liberation” class was Leslie Farber’s Ways of the Will, the themes of which cohere with Zhuangzi’s.⁶ As a therapist, Farber sought to free people of the anxiety wrought by willfulness. He observes the numerous states that we may desire but cannot will, situations with which we can only be in a receptive, open relationship. Farber distinguishes between “two realms of the will”: one “moves us toward a particular objective.… This could be said to be a utilitarian will, in that we do this to get that” (78), and is roughly equivalent to yu-wei action, a term familiar to the philosophers of Zhuangzi’s day, meaning “deliberate, analytic, and goal-oriented thought and action.”⁷ The other realm “moves in a direction rather than toward a particular object” (77) and is related to the Daoist emphasis upon wu-wei, “unpremeditated, nondeliberative, noncalculating, nonpurposive action (or, more accurately, behavior).”⁸ Farber offers helpful examples to illustrate the two realms of the will:

I can will knowledge, but not wisdom; going to bed, but not sleeping; eating but not hunger; meekness, but not humility; scrupulosity, but not virtue; self-assertion or bravado, but not courage; lust, but not love; commiseration, but not sympathy; congratulations, but not admiration; religiosity, but not faith; reading, but not understanding. I would emphasize that the consequence of willing what cannot be willed is that we fall into the distress we call anxiety.⁹

Like Farber, Zhuangzi seeks to free us from the life-depleting anxiety wrought by an overwrought insistence upon you-wei action. Zhuangzi offers an alternative to yu-wei, a path of open willingness as opposed to rigid willfulness, and the promise that we might—like the sages—harmonize our will with the Dao, the Way. Yet the Way—represented by the Yin/Yang image—is protean, flowing, contrary, often confusing; “‘this’ and ‘that’ give birth to each other” constantly (35). Thus, receptive immersion within the Dao necessitates uncertainty if one is to make peace with the chaos. But through a contemplative “fasting of the mind” (54) and the paradoxical practice of wu-wei, one can recover the freedom found in forgetting oneself and the negative capability of being receptively alive in the Dao.

To sense that such an experience might occur in one’s own life is to take Zhuangzi seriously. And through attentive reading, discussion, and writing, students do come to take Zhuangzi seriously. They sense the ways in which his counsel can move them more toward an excellence of effort, in even their most ordinary activities, than they thought possible. In essays and discussion, students can apply Zhuangzi’s wisdom to their activities of writing, acting, musical performance, athletic contest, friendship, and love. In this way, among the many classic works, Western and Eastern, that I have been privileged to teach, Zhuangzi stands out as one of the most potentially transformative.

“There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning” (38). Nevertheless, I will begin with Zhuangzi’s beginning, section 1, “Free and Easy Wandering,” in which he describes the huge fish Kun, who “becomes a bird whose name is Peng” (23–26). Hearing this, the cicada, little dove, and little quail laugh in derisive disbelief, providing Zhuangzi’s first examples of “little understanding [which] cannot come up to great understanding.” These three find their human counterpart in an emblematic court official “who has wisdom to fill one office effectively, good conduct enough to impress one community, virtue enough to please one ruler, or talent enough to be called into service in one state, [and] has the same kind of self-pride as these little creatures.” From the start, Zhuangzi links “little understanding” not simply (or, perhaps, at all) to the exercise of “good conduct” and “virtue” but, rather, to the quest to “please” and “impress” and to be marked by “self-pride” and “vain show” (34) in acting virtuously. Song Rung-zi also laughs with derision—but his criticism of this petty man reflects his great understanding, as Zhuangzi relates: “The whole world could praise Song Rung-zi and it wouldn’t make him exert himself; the whole world could condemn him and it wouldn’t make him mope.” He is Zhuangzi’s first example of the sage, one who “doesn’t fret and worry,” who “has no self,” “has no merit,” and “has no fame.”

These opening pages, taken as they are from the first of the seven “inner chapters” traditionally ascribed to the hand of Zhuangzi himself, can be usefully read alongside the story of the frog in the caved-in well, from one of the “outer chapters” included by Watson: section 17, “Autumn Floods” (107–109). Here we meet the proud logician Gong-sun Long, who brags about his achievements to the Daoist Prince Mou of Wei. One need only count the number of times that Gong-sun Long uses the word “I” to see how ego ridden and driven by the praise of others he is:

When I was young I studied the Way of the former kings, and when I grew older I came to understand the conduct of benevolence and righteousness. I reconciled difference and sameness, distinguished hardness and whiteness, and proved that not so was so, that the unacceptable was acceptable. I confounded the wisdom of the hundred schools and demolished the arguments of a host of speakers. I believed that I had attained the highest degree of accomplishment. But now I have heard the words of Zhuangzi and I am bewildered by their strangeness. I don’t know whether my arguments are not as good as his, or whether I am no match for him in understanding. I find now that I can’t even open my beak. May I ask what you advise?

One might see humility in Gong-sun’s admission of bafflement and in his seeking of Prince Mou’s counsel. But he will use this advice to become Zhuangzi’s “match” and, once again, assertively open his “beak.” His opening words emphasize the way that he employs his knowledge to “confound” and “demolish” others. Thus Prince Mou’s sigh and his laughter when he thinks of Gong-sun’s similarity to “the frog in the caved-in well.” The frog relishes his diminutive dwelling because he believes that “none of [his fellow creatures] can match [him].” Like Gong-sun, the frog’s language is “I”-ridden. His solipsism keeps him from seeing the reality that transcends him; he insists that he can “command” and “monopolize” all he sees. But confronted by the great turtle of the Eastern Sea, the frog soon finds himself “dumfounded with surprise, crestfallen, and completely at a loss.” The great turtle never says “I.” He simply describes the “greatness,” depth, and constancy of the Eastern Sea, in which he abides. The turtle, like Zhuangzi, dwells “in utter freedom” and “dissolves himself in the four directions and drowns himself in the unfathomable.” In contrast, Gong-sun seeks “victory” and has “come niggling along [to] try to spy [Zhuangzi] out or fix some name to him,” to assert power through linguistic labeling. Prince Mou warns that he had better leave immediately, that his egocentric attempt to will the unwillable will cripple him:

“You’d better be on your way! Or perhaps you’ve never heard about the young boy of Shou-ling who went to learn the Han-tan Walk. He hadn’t mastered what the Han-tan people had to teach him when he forgot his old way of walking, so that he had to crawl all the way back home. Now if you don’t get on your way, you’re likely to forget what you knew before and be out of a job!” Gong-sun Lung’s mouth fell open and wouldn’t stay closed. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and wouldn’t come down. In the end he broke into a run and fled.

The joke is on Gong-sun, especially as he reveals that his biggest fear is to lose his job. Employment is the source of his amour propre (Rousseau’s term for self-love bound by social anxieties), to which Gong-sun clings through victory in intellectual combat.

Holding a job is not high among Zhuangzi’s priorities. He sees it as almost inevitably leading to the kind of psychic entrapment exemplified by Gongsun. Nevertheless, Zhuangzi does not simply advise that one quit work, withdraw from society, and take up a solitary existence in the forest (although he himself refuses to “wear himself out over the affairs of the world” [27] and would rather “drag his tail in the mud” [109]). He positively depicts characters who are employed but who go about their work in such a manner that they are not distracted by the desire for approval or fame. Through the practice of wu-wei action—a way of doing that is “not doing anything,” that “let[s] things be” (39)—these characters accomplish work that the blunt assertion of yu-wei cannot achieve. Zhuangzi’s first example is Cook Ding, whose task of butchering an ox teaches “The Secret of Caring for Life” (section 3, 46–47). Observing the cook, Lord Wen-hui is astounded by his “skill.” But, in a typical reversal of hierarchy, Cook Ding corrects his Lord:

What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

In nineteen years, Ding has never needed to change his knife. But he is no magician. He simply takes care to go along with the Way. Even now he must be careful to keep his ego out of the way:

However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until—flop!—the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.

I agree with Burton Watson’s interpretation that “the extreme care and caution which the cook uses when he comes to a difficult place is also part of Zhuangzi’s ‘secret of caring for life.’” (47, n. 4). In this sense, wu-wei holds a place for you-wei. (And vice versa: recall Mencius’s story of the farmer from Sung who impatiently pulls up his rice plants in order to make them grow. Here, Mencius’s Confucian emphasis upon you-wei makes room for wu-wei— an understanding of you-wei purposive action that must always be guided by practical wisdom [zhih] and thus remain receptive to the real).¹⁰ Furthermore, Cook Ding is careful not to rest complacently in his moment of achievement. He may be tempted to reify the moment as a tableau for the sight of others (notice the way he looks around), but, without fuss, he resists it, cleans his knife, and moves on.

Woodworker Qing carved a piece of wood and made a bell stand, and when it was finished, everyone who saw it marveled, for it seemed to be the work of gods or spirits. When the marquis of Lu saw it, he asked, “What art is it you have?”

Qing replied, “I am only a craftsman—how could I have any art? There is one thing, however. When I am going to make a bell stand, I never let it wear out my energy. I always fast in order to still my mind. When I have fasted for three days, I no longer have any thought of congratulations or rewards, of titles or stipends. When I have fasted for five days, I no longer have any thought of praise or blame, of skill or clumsiness. And when I have fasted for seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a form and body. By that time, the ruler and his court no longer exist for me. My skill is concentrated and all outside distractions fade away. After that I go into the mountain forest and examine the nature of the trees. If I find one of superlative form, and I can see a bell stand there, I put my hand to the job of carving; if not, I let it go. This way I am simply matching up ‘Heaven’ with ‘Heaven.’ That’s probably the reason that people wonder if the results were not made by spirits.”

This story exemplifies the themes that run throughout Zhuangzi’s work. It enriches the reader’s understanding of three crucial dimensions of the spiritual life—an area that our students, no matter what their religious backgrounds, yearn to explore:¹¹ the need for the virtue of humility; the way humility opens up a place for receptivity; and the way in which such receptivity can foster a spirit of wu-wei—or, to move toward interreligious dialogue, a spirit of prayerful receptivity to the will of God—in any activity in which a person engages.¹²

First notice the parabolic structure of the story. As John Dominick Crossan and others have observed, parables overturn our expectations.¹³ Here the Marquis of Lu’s expectations are overturned: given the wonder of the woodcarver Qing’s artistry, he must have some secret or be employing some kind of magic! Qing teaches the prince humility: “I am only a craftsman.” Ch’ing is humble enough to admit that he does practice a process of preparation: he avoids distractions, he fasts, and, in the process, he learns to forget the distractions that feed the anxious quest for “congratulations or rewards, titles or stipends.” He even forgets to think about the prince and his court: “The ruler and his court no longer exist for me.”

Finally, he acts not as a subject acting upon an inert and reified object, not as an “I” willfully imposing his will upon an inanimate “it,”¹⁴ like the emperors boring holes in Hun Tun and, in the process, killing him (95). He is, rather, open to the particular reality of this tree—its haecceatis, “thisness,” to employ Duns Scotus’s Latin term. Thus he can perceive its “superlative form.” His action thus entails a receptive responding, a doing that is also non-doing.¹⁵

The three steps exemplified by the woodworker Qing—humility, receptivity, and action marked by wu-wei—offer an invaluable way for our students to not only understand Zhuangzi’s path of Daoism but to see the way that another religious tradition might deepen an understanding of their own. For example, if the words from Psalm 40, “Here I am Lord, I come to do your will,” are crucial to the Jewish and Christian traditions, the simple workman Qing has much to teach our students (and their teachers) as we face the many demands in our work and strive to sustain spiritual lives in the process.¹⁶ In addition, Zhuangzi is pointing to the possibility of finding in our work that which Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”:

Notice his emphasis upon participation, which suggests a willing cooperation with the way of things as opposed to an assertion of the subjective will.

“May I ask what the fasting of the mind is?”

Confucius said, “Make your will one! Don’t listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don’t listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits on all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.”

Yen Hui said, “Before I heard this, I was certain that I was Hui. But now that I have heard it, there is no more Hui. Can this be called emptiness?”

“That’s all there is to it,” said Confucius. “Now I will tell you. You may go and play in his bird cage, but never be moved by fame. If he listens, then sing; if not keep still.… But if you do not keep still—that is what is called racing around.”

(54)

Confucius—and Zhuangzi behind him—have no illusions about political life: most who serve in the court race around in egocentric quests, depleting their energy and truncating their lives. But if Yen Hui can sustain self-forgetfulness, if he can see court life as the “bird cage” that it truly is within the larger scheme of the Dao, and if he can keep still and offer counsel in the spirit of wu-wei, then he will succeed in the work he feels called to do and flourish.¹⁸

If readers can rest in “mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts,” Zhuangzi can orient them in the direction of Great Understanding, which is “broad and unhurried” (32). For “words are not just wind” (34), and those of Great Understanding speak words that are “clear and limpid” (32). These contrast with those of “little understanding,” “cramped and busy,” who employ words that are “shrill and quarrelsome,” who “cling to their position as if they had sworn before the gods, sure that they are holding on to victory,” and who “dwindle day by day” (32). Zhuangzi can enliven the dwindling spirit. He doesn’t reject language, but he recognizes its boundaries, which those engaged in the “Supreme Swindle” willfully ignore by labeling reality from a limited perspective (43). He is less an antirealist than a “perspectival realist,” advising that we become aware of our situatedness before insisting that we are absolutely right.¹⁹ He is not so much a deconstructionist as he is respectful of the ineffable, aware that “name is only the guest of reality” (26). He is not a moral relativist; rather, he accepts the “fate” of filial piety and the “duty” (yi) of obeying one’s ruler as the “two great decrees” (56). But he sees a more virtuous path in “leav[ing] off … teaching men virtue,” (63) “know[ing] what you can’t do anything about, and … be[ing] content with it as you would with fate” (66).²⁰ While resisting the rigidities of propriety, he doesn’t so much reject ritual as revise it: the “true man of old” “regarded rites as the wings” (75), but if attunement to the Way dictates singing in the presence of a friend’s corpse, he lets it be (82–83). Above all, while suspicious of the active life of employment, he recognizes the way that the spontaneity of wu-wei can be brought into the practice of work “in the world of men.” Even a king can be enlightened if he lets go of the desire for “promotion or praise” (91–92). Read attentively, Zhuangzi orients the will toward the Way. His words can engage his reader’s negative capability and her or his capacity to flourish.

4. Especially helpful commentators on the perennial questions that Zhuangzi raises include Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), which I cite in this essay; as well as A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1989); Robert E. Allinson, Chuang-Tzu: An Analysis of the Inner Chapters (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1989); Joel J. Kupperman, Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Philip J. Ivanhoe’s “Zhuangzi on Scepticism, Skill and the Ineffable Dao,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 639–654. I am also grateful to Janet Lynn Kerr, my former colleague at Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso University. Before her untimely death on October 5, 1999, Janet introduced me and countless others to the riches of Chinese literature, including the work of Zhuangzi.

10. See Mencius 2A2. For another example of Confucian wu-wei, see the famous passage from the Analects in which Confucius describes his development (in a way similar to Cook Ting’s): “The Master said, At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right” (2.4).

11. See Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, and Jennifer A. Lindholm, Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), which is based upon a major study of college students by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. See also the essays in The American University in a Postsecular Age, ed. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

12. My reading of the Woodworker Qing story is influenced by the reading of Parker Palmer in The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999). In my discussion here, I have drawn on my discussion of Woodworker Qing in “Zhuangzi as an Exemplary Classic,” in Classics for an Emerging World: Proceedings of a Conference on Liberal Education and the Core Curriculum, January 19–20, 2008, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, Shang Wei, and Rachel E. Chung (New York: Columbia University Committee on Asia and the Middle East, 2008).

16. The interreligious dialogue of Thomas Merton is exemplary here. In 1965, Merton published The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1965), a selection of parables from Zhuangzi, based upon various translations. In his “Note to the Reader,” Merton denies that he will be pulling “Christian rabbits out of a Taoist hat” but makes clear that Zhuangzi’s thought has enriched his own, much as Augustine’s was enriched by that of Plotinus and Aquinas’s by Aristotle and Averroes—“(both of them certainly a long way further from Christianity than Zhuangzi ever was!)” (10–11). Merton was a longtime friend of the Zen Buddhist D. T. Suzuki and called Thich Nhat Hanh his “brother.” Appropriately, in 1996, almost fifty Buddhist and Christian monks and nuns, including the Dalai Lama, met in Abbey of Gethsemane, Merton’s home until his death in Thailand in 1968, to discuss commonalities and differences between Buddhism and Christianity.

18. In Confucius’ Taoist counsel to Yen Hui, I hear resonances with three classics from the Western tradition. “Make your will one”: Søren Kierkegaard famously titled one of his later works Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. “Go and play in his bird cage”: William Shakespeare’s Lear articulates his late found insight into court life when, on their way to prison, he promises Cordelia, “We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage” (5.2.9). And, finally, “keep still.” Long before the technological distractions we now face daily, Blaise Pascal wrote: “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his own room.” Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1995), no. 136.

19. Here I disagree with Joel J. Kupperman (cited in note 4, above), who writes that Zhuangzi’s work “is permeated with metaphysical anti-realism” (114). In suggesting Zhuangzi’s “perspectival realism,” I am employing a term coined by Susan M. Felch to distinguish the linguistic views of Mikhail Bakhtin from those of Jacques Derrida. Felch writes that perspectival realism “retains a correspondence view of truth—that is the world is a certain way regardless of our thinking about it—but it substitutes a realist epistemology (that the world is the object of our awareness) for a representational epistemology (that appearances and concepts are the objects of our awareness). It also gives up the modernist goal of exhaustive knowledge (that to have truth we must map out the isomorphic relationships of our perceptions to reality) for the promise of genuine knowledge (that our various perceptions do give us access to a real world).… Language, then, is seen not as an end in itself but as one of the media, or means, by which we respond to and act in the world.” See her essay “Words and Things: The Hope of Perspectival Realism,” in Faithful Imagination in the Academy: Explorations in Religious Belief and Scholarship, ed. Janet M. Curry and Ronald A. Wells (Lexington, 2008), 26.