Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings

"Well, I took a class with P J Ivanhoe when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, and it was an amazing class and I fell in love with some of the Chinese authors, especially Zhuangzi, but not only Zhuangzi. And then I went to Berkeley and Kwong-Loi Shun was there, another amazing scholar of ancient Chinese philosophy. He was excited to find that rare PhD student who actually knew some Chinese philosophy. I started working with him right away and he is wonderful. So, my excitement about Chinese philosophy was nurtured and I’ve just continued to be in love with it. About then, but it didn’t get its current form until several centuries later. There’s a lot of scholarly dispute about exactly how much can be traced back to the historical figure of Zhuangzi. Exactly. The butterfly dream passage is a wonderful example of dream-doubt. Another wonderful doubt Zhuangzi has is about life after death. He says, how do I know that in loving life and in hating death I’m not like someone who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back? He tells the story of Lady Li, the daughter of a border guard. Lady Li was captured and taken far away from her home. She wept and wailed at her plight. But instead of being taken to a terrible place, she was taken to a palace. She enjoyed the fine meats and all the luxuries, and eventually she wondered why she had wept so much for home. Zhuangzi says maybe the dead wonder why they ever longed for life. Maybe we’ll wake up to something even more wonderful than our lives as they are now. It is. It’s lots of fragments. The Inner Chapters, which is probably the most ancient core, is conventionally divided into seven chapters, but really, they are seven bunches of fragments, some very short, others more extended. “He’s got an egalitarian spirit, in a way that’s almost anachronistic.” One of the things I also really love about Zhuangzi is how his heroes have such a humane vision. His heroes are usually people you wouldn’t normally think of as heroes. He’s got an egalitarian spirit, in a way that’s almost anachronistic. One of the most famous passages is this lovely passage about the skill and artistry of a butcher. Butchery is traditionally seen as a lowly occupation and an ugly thing to do, gory, messy, not something anyone with literary skills would normally admire. But Zhuangzi’s butcher turns carving up oxen into a dance of fluid beauty. There’s this moment at the end where he does the subtle little turn of the knife and the ox comes falling to the ground in pieces, hitting the ground like clods of earth. A lot of scholars interpret this passage as expressing the idea that you should react to the world with a kind of spontaneous skilfulness like that of a skilled artisan or athlete. One common interpretation of Zhuangzi is that his central idea is to move past words and conceptual thinking to spontaneous skilful almost unthinking responsiveness. I actually don’t take that message from the passage. The passage concludes with the king saying, “I’ve heard the words of a butcher and learned the secret of caring for life.” One of the things I haven’t mentioned about this passage so far is that the butcher talks about how he never needs to sharpen his knife. He says, “ordinary people hack away and they need to sharpen their knife every month. A skilled butcher might have to sharpen his knife once a year. But I’ve been carving oxen now for 19 years and my knife is still as sharp as when it came off the whetstone. That’s because inside an ox there are huge empty spaces, and the knife follows through the empty spaces, and it doesn’t even need to touch anything really.” That’s such an interesting and weird way of thinking about an ox. In a way it is true that an ox is mostly empty spaces. I mean from a contemporary physical point of view, there’s a lot of space between those elementary particles. So, the knife has lasted 19 years by basically just following through the empty spaces and doing nothing. Well, here’s the issue. Most people celebrate the butcher and think the butcher is the ideal. And he’s certainly being celebrated in the passage, but I’m inclined to think that it’s the knife that’s really the ideal. The knife doesn’t do anything. The knife has no skills. Well, one thing Zhuangzi recommends is dozing beneath trees and taking naps. There’s a phrase in ancient Chinese that scholars often give heavy interpretation, “ wu wei” . It literally means “doing nothing”. And there are these interpretations of wu wei or doing nothing that treat it as spontaneous skillful responsiveness. Maybe the ideal here would be the super skilled basketball player who just responds instantly to whatever is going on in the court and does all those amazing no-look passes and slam dunks all without any explicit thought. This is the idea of wu wei, doing nothing, as spontaneous skill. And that kind of skill is maybe what the butcher has. But there’s another, more straightforward way of thinking about doing nothing, which is more like what the knife does or what you do when you take a nap under a tree, a more common sense understanding of doing nothing. That’s the understanding I prefer and that I think is closer to what Zhuangzi favors in the Inner Chapters. Right. One thing Zhuangzi does is challenge the main value sets and dogmas of his day. The Confucians were into ritual and benevolence and propriety, and Zhuangzi challenged that. The Mohists were into the value of productive labor. He criticizes that. The Yangists were into extending your life as much as possible. Zhuangzi has all these passages where he suggests that sages should celebrate their own deaths or not be so worried about death. So I think part of what Zhuangzi wants is for us to relax about all of these things that we might care about so much, and take it a little easier. So, my interpretation of this famous phrase, wu wei , is more literal, doing nothing in, shall we say, the lazy sense. Like the knife. But I also like the celebration of the butcher, that it’s a butcher being put forward as a hero. If the knife is you, then the butcher is the Dao or the Maker of Changes, turning and twisting you through the empty spaces while you ride along. And another thing I really love about Zhuangzi is that he’s constantly undermining himself. He puts his words in the voices of all kinds of people, including amputee criminals and others in the lowest parts of society. Sometimes he puts his words in the mouth of Confucius, although Confucius would definitely not agree with any of this stuff, and then in other passages he has Confucius say things like, “Oh, I’m so stupid.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Zhuangzi asserts things and then he raises doubts about what he just asserted, and then he doesn’t resolve those doubts. He contradicts himself. He says things that are plainly absurd that he knows the reader is not going to take at face value, and it’s sometimes hard to tell where the absurdity begins or ends and where he’s starting to get serious. He works hard to frustrate the reader’s normal reaction to a philosophical text. Normally when we read a philosophical text we want to be able to say, “Okay, here’s the author’s view.” He’s a genius at frustrating that impulse and preventing the reader from saying, “Here’s Zhuangzi’s theory about what’s right and what’s wrong and here’s how he defends it.” Probably. He’s constantly undermining his own authority. He is, in a way, the ultimate anti-authoritarian philosopher. Yes. His writing is beautiful, and that shines through in the English translations. This is one of the reasons I like Watson’s translation. I love Watson’s voice, although there are more recent translations, too, that have some advantages over Watson in other respects. But then, of course, if you go back to the original Chinese, it can be even more beautiful."