Zhuangzi: A New Translation of the Sayings of Master Zhuang as Interpreted by Guo Xiang

"I absolutely love this commentary. The Daodejing is cool, but Zhuangzi was always my favorite. It’s a series of parables, often involving animals that have a non-sequitur quality to them. So it’ll be a story about a bird or a fish that leaves you hanging at the end. You never really know what he’s talking about. The classic Zhuangzi story is the tale of the butterfly. One day Zhuangzi is sleeping, and he dreams that he’s a butterfly flitting about. Then he wakes up and he doesn’t know whether he’s the butterfly dreaming it’s Zhuangzi or he’s Zhuangzi dreaming he’s a butterfly. He says, “There must be some difference between these two. I call this the transformation of things.” That’s all he gives you. What do you do with that? Again, much ink has been spilled throughout the Daoist tradition of commentaries on the Zhuangzi . My favorite one, the classic, quintessential commentary is that by Guo Xiang, who wrote it in the third century CE. Not only did he write the commentary, but the version of Zhuangzi we have is the Guo Xiang redaction. Prior to him, the Zhuangzi was almost twice as long. He pared it down to 33 essential chapters and wrote commentaries on all of those. A similar thing happened with Plato in the same time period. Plato’s writing was pared down by Thrasyllus, giving us the Platonic corpus that we have today. Zhuangzi and Plato were almost contemporaries. They both wrote in dialogue format in very ambiguous ways. There are lots of remarkable similarities between how they were produced and how the texts were transmitted. It almost seems like someone made up this history because it’s so close. It’s kind of wild. Yes. Formally, they’re very different. The Daodejing has this poetic, aphoristic quality, whereas the Zhuangzi is parables and stories. It’s almost like Aesop’s Fables . The most prominent facet of Daoism in its Western reception has been this idea of ‘go with the flow.’ And while this is absolutely resonant with a very central feature of the Daoist historical tradition, there has been a tendency in its western reception toward reducing Daoism to this simple cliché, while it is just one theme among so many. I found this kind of countercultural Daoism, ‘go with the flow’ vibe very cool when I was a teenager in high school, which I viewed as being in prison. I wanted a philosophy to be able to cope with having to sit in one place bored to tears for eight hours a day. My trivial teenage understanding of Daoism I found really useful in that context. More importantly, Daoism has a very specific aesthetic—of lightness, of immortals flying on clouds, of wild spirit realms. It’s this aesthetic that came into the American counterculture and transformed into the comics and cartoons I was watching and reading in the 1980s and 90s that really resonated with me. That’s why one of the books I chose today is a book on Daoist art. It has this vibrant, aesthetic tradition and I don’t think you’re really engaging with Daoism unless you’re aware of that or tapped into it. There’s also the praxeological tradition, which is to say Daoism as a form of practice. And though this is very far from being representative of traditional Daoism in Chinese society, in the western reception of Daoism, its actual practice has become inextricably linked with the martial arts, most notably Tai Chi. This elevation of martial arts discourse in terms of Daoist philosophy and aesthetics appears to have really taken off about 400 years ago in China, and Tai Chi has been a huge part of the western reception of Daoism since the counterculture. So it wasn’t so much Daoist theology or philosophy that appealed to me as its aesthetic and practical traditions I thought were very cool, and that’s what drew me to China in 2008 when I entered a Daoist temple. It was living there that I became conversant in all these multifarious and very different ways of talking about Daoism. The philosophy of the school I encountered in China was almost the exact opposite of ‘go with the flow.’ It was alchemical Daoism that was like a form of Daoist existentialism. I recently wrote an article on this . You’re actually extricating yourself from the flow and cultivating the elixir of immortality. You’re by yourself in a cave, you’re pushing away society, the temples, everything, and just being a hermit. So the things within Daoism that have appealed to me have changed over time. But the basic Western engagement with Daoism, which was really a proxy for aesthetic anti-formalism in the 1950s and 60s—a.k.a. go with the flow—was definitely what turned me on at first. And that is a legitimate pillar within the Daoist tradition. It is a vast tradition. At the end of the day, it doesn’t have a founder, it doesn’t have a central scripture. There are all these different streams and different lineages. They often use aquatic metaphors. So the Dao itself is seen as this ocean. Then it has major rivers that come off of it, which are the major lineages, like the “Complete Perfection” and the “Orthodox Unity.” Those then have smaller channels that go off of them, like the “Dragon Gate” lineage. And then those have tiny canals going off of them, like my own, the “San Feng” lineage. Every lineage is a sub-lineage of a sub-lineage of a sub-lineage, and they all lead back to the ocean of the Dao. Their manifestations have changed through the ages, but they usually have some reference to these classical texts. But, again, this obsession with texts is something we’re pasting from Protestantism. There is no Daoist Bible. In Western Daoism, people view it as the Bible, and I think that’s perfectly fine. But if you get specific and engage with the historical tradition, there is no Bible, and most Daoists throughout history have probably never read the Daodejing . That’s a super interesting historical project in itself. Daoism existed in China before Buddhism made its way to China. For a few hundred years there were these classical texts of the Zhuangzi and the Laozi , communities of alchemists and magical practitioners, people practicing what became the Daoist gymnastic traditions, as well as the dream, sleep, and sexological practices. But they don’t really coalesce until the arrival of Buddhism. When Buddhism arrived, the Buddhists had a really good ground game. It was the first missionary religion, really. They came to China and started establishing temples, getting tax-free status, etc. That galvanized the Daoist communities into a more solid self-identification. There’s this interesting way in which Daoism doesn’t really solidify itself until it has that external irritant of Buddhism arriving in Chinese society. Then Daoism and Buddhism exist in this space of both constantly stealing from each other for the rest of Chinese history. There’s competition, there’s back and forth. They don’t just fuse into one thing, which is what happened in the Western reception of Daoism and counterculture: Dao and Zen, it’s all the same. Alan Watts gives a beautiful voice to this way of receiving them as two sides of the same coin. When you zoom in, you see that the Buddhists and Daoists were viciously butting heads for a lot of Chinese history. There were about 600 years of Buddho-Daoist debates, from the 7th century until the 13th century, when the Mongols came in and were like ‘Enough is enough.’ They burned all the records of the Buddho-Daoist debates and declared them over. Of course that didn’t stop the Buddhists and Daoists from continuing to butt heads. My own teacher in China just loves to talk smack about Buddhists and Buddhism and vice versa from Buddhist teachers. For the most part, it’s been good-humored. There have been occasional periods of suppression where monks were beheaded. There was the Huichang Suppression of the 9th century, for example. I moved to China in 2008 and lived there until 2014 in a Daoist temple called YuXu Gong at the base of Wudang Mountain. It was informally granted to my teacher back in 2004. He ran a school out of there until about 2012 when the Bureau of Tourism completely renovated the temple, pumped millions of dollars into it, rebuilt everything, and turned it into a public tourist site. We couldn’t really train there anymore, so we stayed in an annex of the ancient temple which had been turned into a hospital and then became our dormitory. It was martial arts that drew me there. I was 21 and I just wanted a kung fu vacation. But I found this master who was the former head priest at Purple Cloud Palace, which is the main temple in Wudang Mountain. He did all the liturgical stuff, the ritual dance, the chanting, and offering incense to the deities. He was offering a Daoist studies program for foreigners for five years, from 2009 to 2014. So I stayed for that. It focused on three traditions: martial arts, what we call qigong, and the inner alchemical meditation tradition. But he also took us through a lot of Daoist philosophy, character by character, including the main philosophical texts. We had to memorize the entire Daodejing in classical Chinese. He loved Zhuangzi . We also went through “The Morning and Evening Prayers”, which my kungfu brother, Jake—who’s still living in China, he never left—and I are doing a translation and commentary on right now. It’s this massive compendium of Daoist lore and cosmology and theology and magical practice. It’s very cool. Newton was doing hardcore apparatus alchemy. He had an alchemical fire in his library for most of his life. That was happening in China in an earlier period. There’s a great scholar, Fabrizio Pregadio, who’s a historian of this early phase of Chinese alchemy, where people had crucibles and were mixing different kinds of substances and creating elixirs, different kinds of immortality medicines. What we were doing was not like that. Around the time of Cheng Xuanying, our Daodejing commentator, in the 7th and 8th centuries in the Tang Dynasty, there was a turn from apparatus alchemy to what’s called internal alchemy. There was actually a string of Tang Dynasty emperors who died from mercury poisoning, supposedly from taking these sketchy immortality medicines from not super-responsible Daoists. The Daoists view this history a bit differently. From their view, acting as a sort of shadow government, their bestowal of poisonous brews was a way of expediting the demise of particularly incompetent or demented emperors. I always loved this view. Rome could have really used a few Daoists advisors around whenever a Commodus or Caligula popped up. In any case, this precipitated this change in the tradition where you’re no longer taking external mercury and cinnabar. Instead, you’re engaging with mercury and cinnabar as symbolic renditions of substances or sensations within your own body. That’s the alchemy we were doing. It was about engaging with feelings in your body in dedicated meditative practice. There are multiple schools of thought on this. Another part of the transition between external and internal alchemy was a shift away from making your physical, real body immortal. With internal alchemy, you’re crafting an immortal self within your body out of psychosomatic energy and making that immortal. It can leave your body the way a cicada leaves its shell, to use a common metaphor in these Daoist texts. Our tradition didn’t really talk much about that. If you were to attempt to articulate the goal, it would be something like the creation of a little immortal being of light within, that can excarnate and travel to the next life, in a way that you can control it and not just be at the whim of the grand wheel of samsara."