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Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 BCE)

Zhuangzi located knowing in skilled doing. His craftsman stories — the cook whose knife stays sharp nineteen years because it follows the ox’s natural pattern, the wheelwright whose knack cannot be told even to his own son — make a considered position out of what the craftsmen cannot say: the deepest knowing runs in the performance itself, with nothing deliberative running behind the knife. Around that centre sits a philosophy conducted entirely in story, joke, and reversal: every judgment made from a perspective, language a tool to be dropped once it has done its work, death one more transformation among the transformations. He is, with Laozi, one of the two founding voices of philosophical Daoism — and by a wide margin the funnier one.

Life

Zhuang Zhou, “Master Zhuang.” The traditional dates — c. 369–286 BCE, the Warring States period — are genuinely uncertain; the only anchor is Sima Qian’s note that he was contemporary with King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi. Sima Qian’s Shiji (c. 100 BCE) gives the only biography, a few lines: a native of Meng in the state of Song, a minor official in the lacquer garden there. Its one anecdote is in character, and the Zhuangzi itself tells the fuller version: the king of Chu sent two officials to offer him the government while he was fishing on the Pu river. Zhuangzi kept hold of his rod and did not turn his head — asking only whether the sacred tortoise in the king’s shrine, dead three thousand years and venerated in a box of silk, would rather be so honoured or be alive dragging its tail in the mud. The officials allowed that it would rather be alive. Then go away, said Zhuangzi; I mean to keep dragging mine.

The man and the text need separating. The received Zhuangzi has thirty-three chapters, redacted from a longer version by Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE), whose commentary became the standard. Scholarly consensus holds the seven Inner Chapters to be substantially Zhuang Zhou’s own; the Outer and Miscellaneous chapters are composite, the work of later strands of his school.

Key ideas

The skill stories. Cook Ding carves an ox for Lord Wenhui in a dance-like flow. By his own account what he cares for is the Way, which goes beyond skill; he no longer follows the ox with his eyes — perception and analysis have fallen away, and something deeper, he calls it spirit, moves the knife along the animal’s natural pattern. An ordinary cook hacks and changes his knife monthly; a good cook cuts and changes it yearly; Ding’s blade is nineteen years old and fresh from the whetstone, because at the joints there are spaces, and a blade honed to no thickness enters where there is room. At the complicated tangles he slows, takes stock, and proceeds with care — attention persists in the flow, but it is not discursive deliberation — until the work falls apart like a clod of earth and he stands, looks around, and wipes the blade. Lord Wenhui’s response gives the story its turn: from watching his cook carve an ox, he says, he has learned how to nourish life. Wheelwright Bian, interrupting his duke’s reading and challenged to justify the insolence on pain of death, answers from his own craft: the knack of wheel-making — not too slow, not too hurried — cannot be put into words; he cannot give it even to his own son, which is why he is still cutting wheels at seventy; the books of dead sages are therefore only their leavings. The knowing is in the doing; what can be told is not the knack.

Wu-wei. Effortless action — not inaction but action without forcing, the responsive, unselfconscious attunement the skill masters exemplify. Zhuangzi does not argue it as doctrine; he shows it in the performances.

The equality of things. The Qiwulun chapter: every judgment is made from a perspective; “this” and “that” generate each other; disputers each affirm what the other denies, and there is no neutral arbiter to appeal to — the famous “who shall adjudicate?” passage. The chapter closes with the butterfly dream: Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, wakes, and no longer knows which dreamed which — the transformation of things, and the perspectival limit on knowing what one is.

The usefulness of the useless. The gnarled tree survives precisely because carpenters find it useless. What the useful is for, everyone can see; what the useless is for — surviving, among other things — almost no one sees.

Words as fish traps. A fish trap matters because of the fish, and once the fish is caught the trap can be forgotten; words matter because of their meaning, and once the meaning is grasped the words can be forgotten. Language is an instrument, not a repository — hence the goblet words, parables, and humour in place of treatise. Zhuangzi’s closing wish in the passage is for someone who has forgotten words, to have a word with.

Huizi. The logician Hui Shi is the recurring sparring partner — the big gourd, the useless tree, the fish-happiness debate on the Hao bridge. Passing Huizi’s tomb, Zhuangzi told his followers of a plasterer who could let a partner swing an axe at a speck of mud on his nose and take the speck off without breaking skin — a feat possible with that one partner only, and never performed again after he died; since Huizi’s death, Zhuangzi said, he had no one to work against, no one left worth talking to. And at his own wife’s death Huizi arrived to condole and found him sitting with his legs sprawled, drumming on a tub and singing. To Huizi’s rebuke — you lived with her, she raised your children, singing is too much — Zhuangzi answered that he had grieved like anyone at first, until he looked back past her life to the time before she had form, and saw the change that had brought her the way the seasons turn; to wail at this transformation would be to misunderstand it.

Where Zhuangzi stops

The refusal of system is his own stance, not a gap others found. He advances no doctrine, no method, no school platform; the Qiwulun’s scepticism about disputation is aimed at the Confucians and Mohists “each affirming what the other denies,” and at Huizi’s logic-chopping; language itself is provisional. He declined office and declined equally to legislate the Way. What that stance costs is exactly what it refuses: anyone wanting an account — of how the knack is acquired, of how perspectives might be weighed, of what the transformations amount to — is answered with another story. The stories have fed traditions he never built: Wei-Jin xuanxue, the sinicisation of Buddhism into Chan, and the modern discussions of know-how and effortless skill in which his craftsmen keep reappearing.

Key works

See also: Wittgenstein · Ryle · Polanyi · Abhinavagupta