The Realm of Freedom: Zhuangzi's Metaphysical Taoism

In the episode we will explore one of the earliest narratives that attempts at capturing the essence of wisdom, freedom and happiness. It was 375 BC when Plato was writing the Republic, the same time when Zhuangzi wrote his eponymous work in the warring states of China. This episode will explore how Zhuangzi’s philosophical narratives convey their ethical and political meanings and how intellectuals played their roles in the pre-modern society of the East.

Recommended readings :
The Complete Works of Zhuangzi
Chapter 10 “The Third Phase of Taoism: Chuang Tzu” in Fung Yu-lan's Chinese Philosophy

This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
Start for FREE

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Thanks for tuning in. I'm Claire Hennessy. Today we will explore one of the earliest narratives that attempt at capturing the essence of wisdom, freedom and happiness.

It was 375 BC when Plato was writing the Republic, the same time when Zhuangzi wrote his eponymous work in the warring states of China. This episode will explore how Zhuangzi’s philosophical narratives convey its ethical and political meanings and how intellectuals played their roles in the pre-modern societies of the east .

We will start with a brief introduction of the author, zhuangzi. Zhuangzi is born as Zhuang Zhou Zhuang is his family name and Zhou is his given name. This particular naming customs of ancient chinese philosopher may throw many beginners of sinology a bit off. But it’s pretty easy to understand once you get to know this: Zi is often assigned to the end of a philosopher’s family name, like kongzi, laozi, Mozi, Hanfei zi, etc. It is kind of equivalent of the Western use of Saint in front of a religious philosopher, like, Saint Augustine, St Peter, or St Paul, to name a few. However, when reading a classic chinese text, in which a certain philosophical narrative begins with “zi yue”, meaning the Saint says, it often refers only to Confucious, not to be confused with other Chinese saints.

Zhuangzi was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BC during the Warring States period, a period corresponding to the summit of Chinese philosophy, called the Hundred Schools of Thought. He is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name, called the Zhuangzi, which is one of the foundational texts of Taoism. Zhuangzi has influenced thinking far beyond East Asia. 

The German philosopher Martin Buber translated his texts in 1910. In 1930, Martin Heidegger asked for Buber's translation of Zhuangzi after his Bremen speech "On the Essence of Truth".[13] In order to explain his own philosophy, Heidegger read from chapter 17, where Zhuangzi says to the thinker Hui Shih:

"Do you see how the fish are coming to the surface and swimming around as they please? That's what fish really enjoy."

"You're not a fish," replied Hui Tzu, "so how can you say you know what fish really enjoy?"

Zhuangzi said: "You are not me, so how can you know I don't know what fish enjoy." 

The historian of ideas Dag Herbjørnsrud concludes: "It may therefore be difficult to say where the philosophies of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi end and where the most influential German thinking of the twentieth century starts [...]"

FREE AND EASY WANDERING

In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is Kun.1 The Kun is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose

name is Peng. The back of the Peng measures I don’t know how many thousand li across, and when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea

begins to move, this bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven.

The Universal Harmony records various wonders, and it says: “When the Peng journeys to the southern darkness, the waters are roiled for three thousand li. He beats the

whirlwind and rises ninety thousand li, setting off on the sixth-month gale.” Wavering heat, bits of dust, living things blown about by the wind—the sky looks very blue. Is that

its real color, or is it because it is so far away and has no end? When the bird looks down, all he sees is blue, too.

If water is not piled up deep enough, it won’t have the strength to bear up a big boat. Pour a cup of water into a hollow in the floor, and bits of trash will sail on it like boats. But set the cup there, and it will stick fast, for the water is too shallow and the boat too large. If wind is not

piled up deep enough, it won’t have the strength to bear up great wings. Therefore when the Peng rises ninety thousand

li, he must have the wind under him like that. Only then can he mount on the back of the wind, shoulder the blue sky, and nothing can hinder or block him. Only then can he set

his eyes to the south.

The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, “When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don’t make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is

anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!”

If you go off to the green woods nearby, you can take along food for three meals and come back with your stomach as full as ever. If you are going a hundred li, you must grind your grain the night before; and if you are going

a thousand li, you must start getting the provisions together three months in advance. What do these two creatures understand? Little understanding cannot come up to great

understanding; the short-lived cannot come up to the longlived.

How do I know this is so? The morning mushroom knows nothing of twilight and dawn; the summer cicada knows nothing of spring and autumn. They are the shortlived.

South of Chu there is a caterpillar that counts five hundred years as one spring and five hundred years as one autumn. Long, long ago there was a great rose of Sharon

that counted eight thousand years as one spring and eight housand years as one autumn. They are the long-lived. Yet

Pengzu alone is famous today for having lived a long time, and everybody tries to ape him. Isn’t it pitiful!

Among the questions of Tang to Qi we find the same thing. In the bald and barren north, there is a dark sea, the Lake of Heaven. In it is a fish that is several thousand li across, and no one knows how long. His name is Kun.

There is also a bird there, named Peng, with a back like Mount Tai and wings like clouds filling the sky. He beats the whirlwind, leaps into the air, and rises up ninety thousand li, cutting through the clouds and mist, shouldering the blue sky, and then he turns his eyes south

and prepares to journey to the southern darkness.

The little quail laughs at him, saying, “Where does he think he’s going? I give a great leap and fly up, but I never get more than ten or twelve yards before I come down fluttering among the weeds and brambles. And that’s the

best kind of flying, anyway! Where does he think he’s going?” Such is the difference between big and little.

Therefore a man who has wisdom enough 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, has the same

kind of self-pride as these little creatures. Song Rongzi would certainly burst out laughing at such a man. The whole world could praise Song Rongzi and it wouldn’t make him

exert himself; the whole world could condemn him and it wouldn’t make him mope. 

He drew a clear line between the internal and the external and recognized the boundaries of

true glory and disgrace. But that was all. As far as the world went, he didn’t fret and worry, but there was still ground he left unturned.

Liezi could ride the wind and go soaring around with cool and breezy skill, but after fifteen days he came back to earth. As far as the search for good fortune went, he didn’t

fret and worry. He escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around. If he had

only mounted on the truth of Heaven and Earth, ridden the changes of the six breaths, and thus wandered through the boundless, then what would he have had to depend on?

Therefore I say, the Perfect Man has no self; the Holy Man has no merit; the Sage has no fame.

The beginning of the allegory is based on the baffling and perplexing fable of the Great Wilderness,  through the comparison of the peng bird, the centipede, and the learning dove,to point out their differrence in the realm of life. The big peng bird can “beat the whirlwind and go straight up for 90,000 miles" and fly to Nanming. And a bird such as a phoenix can fly only a few thousandths. By this point, the “small wisdom is not as good as the big wisdom, and the short lived is not as good as the long-lived.” To trranscend beyond such a dichotomy lies in hoping for nothing, that is, to surpass the burden of external things and in this context, social norms and expectations imposed upon individuals.

In the rest of the alleogory that we did not read long, Zhuangzi also points out the view that "the saint is nameless" by using Yao's fable to give way his rulership to Xu You. It should be noted that the saint here refers to Xu You rather than Yao. Zhuangzi admires Xu You's attitude of ignoring fame and contribution to the society, and covertly criticizes Yao, as the spiritual idol of Confucianism, who put the name first and used it to match the most virtuous people. Finally, through the big gourd gifted to Huishi by the king of Wei, Zhuangzi points out that the worldly people are trapped in the useful and useless scheme of thinking, but cannot see the true essense of life, and their concept of “big use” is only an ideological imposition.

Xiao yao you/“Free and Wandering” is the general outline of Zhuangzi's philosophy. "Xiaoyao" was originally a combination of words, but some scholars interpret "Xiaoyao" as "eliminate and shake", which means to dissolve. The allegory points towards the idea of "there is no self, gods and men have no merit, and saints have no name." It takes issues with the so-called ideal way of living endorsed Confucianism, Mohism and even Laozi, and at the same time demonstrates the epistemological realm and craftsmanship of "Zhuangxue", based on " working towards the state of "selflessness", "reactive power" and "namelessness" so as to dissolve the shakles of the body and the world, and achieve  transcendence.

Freedom is viewed as the ultimate happiness. In particular, Zhuangzi uses "the righteousness of the heaven and the earth, the defense of the six qi, to swim in the infinite, and not to follow the confucian doctrine of ritual or propriety.  "The Saint of Gushe Mountain" crystalizes such a lofty image.

what does this mean for people of China at the time of warring states?

When the Zhou people of western China conquered and replaced the Shang or Yin dynasty around the eleventh century BCE, they enfeoffed the descendants of the Shang kings as rulers of the region of Song in eastern Henan, in order that they might carry on the sacrifices to their illustrious ancestors. Though Song was never an important state, it managed to maintain its existence throughout the long centuries of the Zhou dynasty until 286 BCE, when it was overthrown by three of its neighbors and its territory divided up among them. It is natural to suppose that both the ruling house and many of the citizens of Song were descended from the Shang people and that they preserved to some extent the rites, customs, and ways of thought that had been characteristic of Shang culture. The Book of Odes, it may be noted, contains five “Hymns of Shang” that deal with the legends of the Shang royal family and that scholars agree were either composed or handed down by the rulers of the state of Song. Song led a precarious existence, constantly invaded or threatened by more powerful neighbors, and in later centuries its weakness was greatly aggravated by incessant internal strife. The ruling house of Song possessed a history unrivaled for its bloodiness, even in an age of disorder. Its inhabitants, as descendants of the conquered Shang people, were undoubtedly despised and oppressed by the more powerful states that belonged to the lineage of the Zhou conquerors, and the “man of Song” appears in the literature of late Zhou times as a stock figure of the ignorant simpleton.

All these facts of Song life—the preservation of the legends and religious beliefs of the Shang people, the political and social oppression, the despair born of weakness and strife—may go far to elucidate the background from which Zhuangzi’s thought sprang and to explain why, in its skepticism and mystical detachment, it differs so radically from Confucianism, the basically optimistic and strongly political-minded philosophy that developed in the Zhou lineage states of Lu and Qi. 

The central theme of the Zhuangzi may be summed up in a single word: freedom. Essentially, all the philosophers of ancient China addressed themselves to the same problem: how is man to live in a world dominated by chaos, suffering, and absurdity? Nearly all of them answered with some concrete plan of action designed to reform the individual, to reform society, and eventually to free the world from its ills. The proposals put forward by the Confucians, the Mohists, and the Legalists, to name some of the principal schools of philosophy, all are different but all are based on the same kind of commonsense approach to the problem, and all seek concrete social, political, and ethical reforms to solve it. Zhuangzi’s answer, however, the answer of one branch of the Daoist school, is radically different from these and is grounded on a wholly different type of thinking.  Zhuangzi’s answer to the question is: free yourself from the world.

What does he mean by this? In section 23 he tells the story of a man named Nanrong Zhu who went to visit the Daoist sage Laozi in hopes of finding some solution to his worries. When he appeared, Laozi promptly inquired, “Whydid you come with all this crowd of people?” The man whirled around in astonishment to see if there was someone standing behind him. Needless to say, there was not; the “crowd of people” that he came with was the baggage of old ideas, the conventional concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, life and death, that he lugged about with him wherever he went.

It is this baggage of conventional values that man must first of all discard before he can be free. Zhuangzi saw the same human sufferings that Confucius, Mozi, and Mencius saw. He saw the man-made ills of war, poverty, and injustice. He saw the natural ills of disease and death. But he believed that they were ills only because man recognized them as such. 

If man would once forsake his habit of labeling things good or bad, desirable or undesirable, then the man-made ills, which are the product of man’s purposeful and value-ridden actions, would disappear, and the natural ills that remain would no longer be seen as ills but as an inevitable part of the course of life. Thus in Zhuangzi’s eyes, man is the author of his own suffering and bondage, and all his fears spring from the web of values created by himself alone. Zhuangzi sums up this whole diseased, fear-struck condition of mankind in the macabre metaphor of the leper woman who “when she gives birth to a child in the deep of the night, rushes to fetch a torch and examine it, trembling with terror lest it look like herself” (sec. 12).

But how is one to persuade the leper woman that disease

and ugliness are mere labels that have no real validity? It is no easy task, and for this reason the philosophy of Zhuangzi, like most mystical philosophies, has seldom been fully understood and embraced in its pure form by more than a small minority. Most of the philosophies of ancient China are addressed to the political or intellectual elite; Zhuangzi’s is addressed to the spiritual elite.

Difficult the task may be, however, Zhuangzi employs every resource of rhetoric in his efforts to awaken the reader to the essential meaninglessness of conventional values and to free him from their bondage. One device he uses to great effect is the pointed or paradoxical anecdote, the non sequitur or apparently nonsensical remark that jolts the mind into awareness of a truth outside the pale of ordinary logic—a device familiar to Western readers of Chinese and Japanese Zen literature. The other device most common in his writings is the pseudological discussion or debate that starts out sounding completely rational and sober and ends by reducing language to a gibbering inanity. These two devices are found in their purest form in the first two sections of the Zhuangzi, which together constitute one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults ever made, not only on man’s conventional system of values, but on his conventional concepts of time, space, reality, and causationas well.

Finally,  throughout his writings Zhuangzi uses that deadliest of weapons against all that is pompous, staid, and holy: which is humor. Most Chinese philosophers employ humor sparingly—a wise decision, no doubt, in view of the serious tone they seek to maintain—and some of them seem never to have heard of it at all. Zhuangzi, on the contrary, makes it the very core of his style, for he appears to have known that one good laugh would do more than ten pages of harangue to shake the reader’s confidence in the validity of his pat assumptions.

In Zhuangzi’s view, the man who has freed himself from conventional standards of judgment can no longer be made to suffer, for he refuses to recognize poverty as any less desirable than affluence, to recognize death as any less desirable than life. He does not in any literal sense withdraw and hide from the world—to do so would show that he still passed judgment on the world. He remains within society but refrains from acting out of the motives that lead ordinary men to struggle for wealth, fame, success, or safety. 

He maintains a state that Zhuangzi refers to as wuwei, or inaction, meaning by this term not a forced quietude but a course of action that is not founded on purposeful motives of gain or striving. In such a state, all human actions become as spontaneous and mindless as those of the natural world. Man becomes one with Nature, or Heaven, as Zhuangzi calls it, and merges himself with Dao, or the Way, the underlying unity that embraces man, Nature, and all that is in the universe.

To describe this mindless, purposeless mode of life, Zhuangzi turns most often to the analogy of the artist or craftsman. The skilled woodcarver, the skilled butcher, the skilled swimmer does not ponder or ratiocinate on the course of action he should take; his skill has become so much a part of him that he merely acts instinctively and spontaneously and, without knowing why, achieves success. Again, Zhuangzi employs the metaphor of a totally free and purposeless journey, using the word you (to wander, or a wandering) to designate the way in which the enlightened man wanders through all of creation, enjoying its delights without ever becoming attached to any one part of it.

But like all mystics, Zhuangzi insists that language is, in the end, grievously inadequate to describe the true Way, or the wonderful freedom of the man who has realized his identity with it. Again and again, he cautions that he is giving only a “rough” or “reckless” description of these things and what follows is usually a passage of highly poetic and paradoxical language that in fact conveys little more than the essential ineffability of such a state of being.

You’ve listened to the Global Novel, A podcast that shares a critical lens on the narrative features of world literatures from antiquity to modernity and aims to deliver free education in literature to the world. Please consider supporting us through theglobalnovel.com/donate  Thank you so much for listening.