Zhuangzi

Zhuang Zhou

A cook is butchering an ox for his lord, and the work looks like a dance. Every stroke lands in rhythm, the blade seems to sing, and the carcass falls open as if it had been waiting to. When the lord marvels, the cook explains that he has not sharpened his knife in nineteen years, because he never really cuts. He lets the blade find the gaps that are already there between the joints and slides it through them, so the edge never meets bone. When he began, he says, he saw the whole ox; after three years he no longer saw the ox; now he works with the spirit and not with the eye, and the work does itself. This is Zhuangzi, the wildest and funniest of the great philosophers, and the little story is doing serious work. It is about what happens at the very top of any skill, when conscious effort dissolves into pure responsiveness and the doer all but vanishes into the doing. He has handed you, in a butcher's shop, one of the best things ever said about mastery.

Thinking in stories. A word on how to read him, because he does not read like anyone else. Where the Daodejing whispers in compressed aphorisms, the Zhuangzi roars and jokes and spins tall tales: a fish the size of a country that turns into a bird whose wings darken the sky, a friendly argument about whether fish are happy, a roadside skull that lectures a traveler on the underrated pleasures of being dead, a parade of cripples and monsters whose inner freedom makes the beautiful people around them look like prisoners. The stories are not sugar wrapped around a doctrine. They are the philosophy, because Zhuangzi distrusts doctrines on principle. A fixed position, to him, is a single perspective frozen solid, and the whole aim is to keep thought moving and supple. So he argues by tale, by analogy, by setting two views loose on each other, and by cheerfully undercutting whatever he has just seemed to claim. He is the patron of every thinker who refuses to be pinned to a card and labeled.

The butterfly and the equality of perspectives. The most famous thing he ever wrote is only a few lines. He dreamed he was a butterfly, content and fluttering, with no notion that he was Zhuang Zhou; then he woke, unmistakably himself, and found he could not say whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or was now a butterfly dreaming he was a man. It reads like a charming riddle, but it sits at the close of his most demanding chapter, "On the Equality of Things," whose argument is genuinely radical. Every distinction we draw, right and wrong, true and false, useful and useless, this and that, depends on the standpoint from which we draw it; move the standpoint and the line moves or disappears. And here is the turn that lifts Zhuangzi clear of ordinary relativism: he aims the argument at itself. If every perspective is only a perspective, then so is the perspective from which all perspectives look equal, and even his own conclusion cannot be the final word. He knows this perfectly well; the self-undermining is the point. He is not selling you the doctrine that all views are equally true. He is loosening your grip, finger by finger, on the deeper assumption that there is one correct place to stand and survey the rest.

The useless tree. One of his favorite jokes carries one of his sharpest points. A carpenter passes a vast old oak, so gnarled and knotted that he does not give it a second glance: the wood is good for nothing, useless. That night the tree appears in his dream and sets him straight. Everything useful, it points out, gets used up. The straight tree is felled for timber, the fruit tree is stripped and broken, the fine ox is led to the altar; in a hungry and violent world, being useful is exactly what gets a thing consumed. The old oak has lived for centuries precisely because it is good for nothing anyone wants. Out of this Zhuangzi draws a quietly subversive ethic of strategic uselessness. In an age of warlords combing the land for every exploitable talent, the wise move may be to become the kind of person no tyrant can find a use for, to slip out from under the world's measuring-stick entirely and, by being good for nothing it values, keep yourself free.

Riding the transformations. Under all the stories runs a single deep current, and its name is transformation. For Zhuangzi, change is not something that happens to otherwise stable things; it is the basic fabric of what is. The giant fish becomes the giant bird; the dreaming man becomes the butterfly and back; one form flows into the next without rest or remainder. The Dao is just this ceaseless transforming, seen whole, and the sage is simply the person who has stopped struggling against it and learned to ride the changes the way the cook's knife rides the joints. This is where Zhuangzi is at once most bracing and most consoling, because he turns the thought, without flinching, on the change we dread the most. A person's end, to him, is not an annihilation but one more turn of the same wheel, a wave sinking back into a sea it never actually left, the borrowed materials of a life returning to the great stock of things to be lent out again. He found that funny and freeing rather than grim, and a surprising number of his readers, twenty-three centuries later, have found that they agree.

What the comedy is for. The room reads the Zhuangzi in Herbert Giles's old translation, cited by chapter, with the seven Inner Chapters as the philosophical core. It is worth knowing who the comedy keeps targeting: Confucius himself strolls through these pages, now as the straight man Zhuangzi teases, now as a character who delivers perfectly Daoist wisdom, a sage half on Zhuangzi's side without quite admitting it. The teasing is fond as often as it is barbed, and it began a long Chinese habit of reading the two great schools as partners rather than enemies. And what does the reader walk away able to use? The cook's lesson, that the highest skill is the one that has sunk back below thought into instinct. The butterfly's lesson, that you think better the moment you can let go of the certainty that your standpoint is the only one. The tree's lesson, that there is a freedom in refusing to make yourself a tool. Taken together they are a training in mental suppleness, in flow, in holding your own convictions loosely enough that you can keep learning from the world instead of defending a position against it.

The Zhuangzi has been quietly rewiring minds for over two thousand years. Chan Buddhism, and the Zen it became, absorbed it so completely that the sudden story that shatters a fixed idea, the irreverent master, the koan that cannot be solved by thinking harder, are all in some sense Zhuangzi's children. Heidegger reached for his parables when his own language ran dry; Borges adored him; and modern philosophers keep rediscovering him, finding in the cook and the ox an early and exact description of what they now call flow, and in the equality-of-things chapter a perspectivism that anticipates Nietzsche by two thousand years and a self-aware skepticism that rhymes with the Greek Pyrrho's. He is the rare philosopher who is simply a joy to read, and the joy is not a coating on the thought. It is the thought, the living proof of his claim that a mind kept light and moving will always see more than a mind clenched around a system. Whether Zhuang Zhou wrote every word hardly matters. Somewhere in these pages a butterfly is still dreaming.