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4.2 AVERAGE
4.2 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
funny
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Just a tad disappointed by this book. A classic of the Taoist tradition and second only to the Tao Te Ching it was supposed to be equally interesting as a work of literature. I found it to be incoherent and while sections were wonderful, others funny, and others fascinating the effect overall was rather diffuse and attenuated.
I had built up this book so much in my mind, perhaps it was inevitable that I would be disappointed in it. I really wanted to like it. I've felt for a long time that I had some affinity with Daoist ideas--mostly from reading Dao De Jing, Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent," and Le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven." I'm drawn to the attitude, similar to Hellenistic Skepticism, of withholding judgment on things going on around you, and I like the gentle but pronounced disdain for those things often held in esteem by the world--again something Daoism has in common with some Hellenistic philosophies. And, I had heard over and over that Zhuangzi was the earthier cousin of the gnomic Dao De Jing.
I'm sad to say that this whole book felt like a slog for me. I would have quit partway through if it weren't so widely seen as a classic. It's possible some of the blame is with the translation--it was hard for me to get a sense of what people thought of different translations, so I went for a safe choice with the Penguin edition. It's possible a different translator could do more to bring it alive for me. It's also very likely that some of the blame lies with me, and in particular, with my insistence on reading it cover-to-cover rather than keeping it around as something to dip into once in a while. But I also think some of the fault comes from the text itself. With a couple of rare exceptions, I didn't find the "stories" in it to be earthy or accessible--indeed, I'd hardly characterize them as stories at all. A typical passage just involves a dialog between two characters where some ideas of Daoism are touched upon. Of course a dialog can be a great literary form, but I found these pieces too fragmentary to really develop ideas. (Perhaps that is just a non-Daoist form of communication!) But at the same time, they weren't at all memorable parable-type stories. About a month after having finished the book, it's hard for me to remember many specific stories from it.
So, I don't know. Four stars for the ideas, but two stars for the style, maybe? The most memorable idea for me, which reappears often in slightly different forms, is the following. Things that are "useful", particularly exemplary individuals of a certain form, are the first to be destroyed, while weak or flawed individuals are more likely to be left alone. For example, a woodcutter going into a forest is likely to seek out the tallest, straightest tree and cut it down. So although we would commonly call this the "best" tree, it's certainly not best for the tree! At first the "moral" of this story might seem obvious, but I think it's actually pretty subtle and difficult to pin down, and therefore fruitful. For example, occasionally this story will be accompanied by a side comment that, actually, the "worst" instances are also likely to be destroyed (because they are wasting space or whatever)! So it's not as though there's some simple moral like "be a slacker." For me, these stories are meant to get the reader thinking critically about our concept of "usefulness," and what classes of things we do or don't apply it to. There's actually quite a bit of resonance with some of the ideas in Jemisin's "The Stone Sky," where she introduces but then subtly problematizes a civilization that is built around the channeling of biological energy, and the dichotomy of reverence and instrumentalization.
I'm sad to say that this whole book felt like a slog for me. I would have quit partway through if it weren't so widely seen as a classic. It's possible some of the blame is with the translation--it was hard for me to get a sense of what people thought of different translations, so I went for a safe choice with the Penguin edition. It's possible a different translator could do more to bring it alive for me. It's also very likely that some of the blame lies with me, and in particular, with my insistence on reading it cover-to-cover rather than keeping it around as something to dip into once in a while. But I also think some of the fault comes from the text itself. With a couple of rare exceptions, I didn't find the "stories" in it to be earthy or accessible--indeed, I'd hardly characterize them as stories at all. A typical passage just involves a dialog between two characters where some ideas of Daoism are touched upon. Of course a dialog can be a great literary form, but I found these pieces too fragmentary to really develop ideas. (Perhaps that is just a non-Daoist form of communication!) But at the same time, they weren't at all memorable parable-type stories. About a month after having finished the book, it's hard for me to remember many specific stories from it.
So, I don't know. Four stars for the ideas, but two stars for the style, maybe? The most memorable idea for me, which reappears often in slightly different forms, is the following. Things that are "useful", particularly exemplary individuals of a certain form, are the first to be destroyed, while weak or flawed individuals are more likely to be left alone. For example, a woodcutter going into a forest is likely to seek out the tallest, straightest tree and cut it down. So although we would commonly call this the "best" tree, it's certainly not best for the tree! At first the "moral" of this story might seem obvious, but I think it's actually pretty subtle and difficult to pin down, and therefore fruitful. For example, occasionally this story will be accompanied by a side comment that, actually, the "worst" instances are also likely to be destroyed (because they are wasting space or whatever)! So it's not as though there's some simple moral like "be a slacker." For me, these stories are meant to get the reader thinking critically about our concept of "usefulness," and what classes of things we do or don't apply it to. There's actually quite a bit of resonance with some of the ideas in Jemisin's "The Stone Sky," where she introduces but then subtly problematizes a civilization that is built around the channeling of biological energy, and the dichotomy of reverence and instrumentalization.
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5 ⭐
”To be questioned about the Tao and to give an answer means that you don’t know the Tao. One who asks about the Tao has never understood anything about the Tao.” - No Beginning (aka. Zhuangzi)
“When it comes to comprehending the Tao I am about as significant as a fly in vinegar!” - Confucius (Zhuangzi claims)
Walking a frayed and weathered tightrope between transcendental enlightenment and radical idealistic fancy, many will find the works of Zhuangzi in ’The Book of Chuang Tzu’ to be unrealistic and impractical in our modern times (perhaps in Zhuangzi’s time [396 BCE – 286 BCE] as well), and in many ways I would agree, however, if you’ve an open mind and a good sense of humour, there is a lot to love about this particular Chinese Philosopher and his ideas.
Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu – I’ll mainly use Zhuangzi but it’s the same guy FYI) is the most significant of Daoism’s interpreters to have followed the enigmatic, and likely fictional, Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu’s ’Tao Te Ching’ and ‘The Book of Chuang Tzu’ are the 2 most important works in the Daoist canon and couldn’t be further separated by their stylistic approach.
Where the ‘Tao Te Ching’ is organised into brief chapters/passages containing short, poetic and often paradoxical statements that encourage contradictory interpretations, ‘The Chuang Tzu’ is a hilariously eccentric anthology of anecdotes and allegory, filled with vibrant personalities (both fictional and non) including but not limited to Emperors, Sages and “uptight Confucians”. Zhuangzi yo-yos back-and-forth between a tongue-in-cheek, mocking tone and endearing sincerity, but an iron wit and undeniable wisdom is evident regardless of the mood you find him in. This seems an odd thing to say about Zhuangzi, but he also offers lucidity to many of the ambiguous metaphysical concepts found in Lao Tzu’s work.
Zhuangzi is a dreamer, who baulks at convention and rejects the over-governance, ritual propriety, materialism and self-indulgent nature of the people so prevalent during his lifetime. He appeals, overwhelmingly, to my meek, but nevertheless existent, anti-authoritarian side, but more importantly, this work regularly gave me pause and corralled my feeble mind into a state of humbling introspection. It’s like being taken out of your body and examining yourself, and society, from an alien perspective, and realising the true absurdity of our current state of being.
Zhuangzi believed that in order to live by the Tao (extremely rough and hesitant translation: The Way of Heaven/True Virtue), we humans must only follow our innate nature which I take to mean our basic instincts or intuition. We should not seek knowledge, skill, fame, wealth, admiration or any other such external things and we should not strive to be good or bad, kind-hearted or righteous to meet standards of propriety and ritual set by the state or our peers. One should only act as one’s innate nature compels them to, taking the path of least resistance.
Against the State Cult of Confucianism and rejecting the, almost fascist, teachings of the Legalists and the Mohists, Zhuangzi’s teachings are directly opposed to the over-governance of the state and the pushing of moral standards and ritual practices on the people. His belief is that people, as a whole, are inherently good but when strict laws are put in place, to determine how one should behave, proper ritual protocols, what is good/bad, right/wrong etc. then, certainly, people will be righteous and kind, and display agreeable traits because that is the law, however, whether consciously or sub-consciously, they will resent doing so because their behaviour is being, if not enforced then at least, heavily scrutinised under the eye of the law. Over governance replaces virtue and unity with righteousness and compliance. “Ruling by decrees and grand plans [pollutes] the purity of nature and [destroys] simplicity”.
”take a monkey and dress it up to look like the Duke of Chou and the poor monkey will struggle and bite until he has got rid of the clothes.”
The “perfect sage” has destroyed Zhuangzi’s Utopia with their, often well-meaning but, clumsy attempts to improve and/or reform society. He’s had enough! And nobody’s safe. Least of all Confucius. I should mention that you’ll probably want to have read both the ‘Tao Te Ching’ and ‘The Analects of Confucius’ before leaping into this one. The ‘Tao’, because you’ll want to know the Primary source material that Chuang Tzu is interpreting and ‘The Analects’, because you’ll want to know exactly what Chuang Tzu is rebuking so very often. And boy does he rebuke. Chuang Tzu burns Confucius so hard on so many occasions, the hardest part was picking which example to give you, but this one pretty much sums up how he feels:
“You, Sir, try to distinguish the spheres of benevolence and righteousness, to explore the boundaries between agreement and disagreement, to study changes between rest and movement, to pontificate on giving and receiving, to order what is to be approved of and what disapproved of, to unify the limits of joy and anger, and yet you have barely escaped calamity [Twice exiled from the State of Lu]. If you were to be serious in your cultivation of your own self, careful to guard the truth and willing to allow others to be as they are, then you could have avoided such problems. However, here you are, unable to cultivate yourself yet determined to improve others. Are you not obsessed with external things?”
To add further insult, Confucius is regularly portrayed as a curious but inferior thinker than the cast of simple Taoists throughout the book. Often found to be in awe of them, realising the error of his ways and requesting to become a student of these wise eccentrics. At other times, he is the one to offer up the wisdoms of the Tao to his disciples. Lionel Giles interestingly suggests, in ‘Musings of a Chinese Mystic’, that Chuang Tzu was likely using Confucius’ fame and influence as a means of spreading his own philosophy. This would go against everything that Zhuangzi stands for but it isn’t completely out of the question and would only be one more inconsistency among many within the text.
Zhuangzi, believes that the acquisition of knowledge and the expanding of ideas only breeds argument and confusion and is detrimental to our well-being. People are unable to simply receive ideas from outside, they have a tendency to cling to them and view other’s ideas as automatically wrong if they don’t marry up to their own. This concept is radical to say the least and suggests an unrealistic wish to return to primitiveness, but taken in a less extreme sense, I think Chuang Tzu is just trying to suggest that we are focusing too much of our attention on petty external (human) issues and neglecting the internal (heavenly)
"if sages and wisdom were abandoned, great robbers would cease; destroy the jade and shatter the pearls, then petty thieves would not appear; burn the accounts and rip up the contracts, and the people will return to simplicity; break up the weights and the measures and the people will no longer argue; obliterate the laws of the world the sages have made, then the people can begin to be reasoned with."
I feel like Chuang Tzu would go into cardiac arrest if he were to see the state of the world, today. Rarely looking internally, we focus all of our attention on external trivialities. Black and white, east and west, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, right and wrong, straight and gay; we argue and debate about race, gender, abortion, the legalisation of drugs, climate change and on and on and on and it’s a fire that’s perpetually stoked by a modern pandemic called outrage culture and self-conscious, self-aggrandizing social displays of false righteousness and virtue. Exactly what Zhuangzi said would happen when you Pidgeon-hole entire peoples and try to dictate what they should do and how they should act.
“Take care how you play with people’s hearts. People’s hearts should not be shoved down nor pushed up, for this yo-yoing up and down makes the heart either a prisoner or an avenging fury. It can be gentle and giving, moulding even the hard and sharp, or it can be sharp and pointed, tough enough to cut, carve or chisel. It can be as hot as a searing fire; it can be as cold as ice. So swift that in the nodding of one’s head it has twice roared over the four seas and beyond all boundaries. At rest, it is as deep as the abyss; when it is active, it is like a star in Heaven. It races beyond anything that seeks to bind it, for this is in truth the heart of humanity!”
Ultimately, like Confucius, I feel as significant as a fly in vinegar when it comes to comprehending the Tao and I have a feeling that even if I could grasp its true meaning, to follow it in our time would be all but an impossibility. Nevertheless, I’ve still found a lot of introspective value in reading these ancient Chinese texts and I look forward to reading just a couple more before moving onto the Western Canon. Mencius is next and he’s got some ground to make up after Zhuangzi tore Confucius a new one. I’m all in for the Confucionist vs. Taoist beef.
”Oh dear! I do so pity those who lose themselves. I also pity those who pity others. However, I also pity those who pity those who pity others, but that was long ago.”
”To be questioned about the Tao and to give an answer means that you don’t know the Tao. One who asks about the Tao has never understood anything about the Tao.” - No Beginning (aka. Zhuangzi)
“When it comes to comprehending the Tao I am about as significant as a fly in vinegar!” - Confucius (Zhuangzi claims)
Walking a frayed and weathered tightrope between transcendental enlightenment and radical idealistic fancy, many will find the works of Zhuangzi in ’The Book of Chuang Tzu’ to be unrealistic and impractical in our modern times (perhaps in Zhuangzi’s time [396 BCE – 286 BCE] as well), and in many ways I would agree, however, if you’ve an open mind and a good sense of humour, there is a lot to love about this particular Chinese Philosopher and his ideas.
Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu – I’ll mainly use Zhuangzi but it’s the same guy FYI) is the most significant of Daoism’s interpreters to have followed the enigmatic, and likely fictional, Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu’s ’Tao Te Ching’ and ‘The Book of Chuang Tzu’ are the 2 most important works in the Daoist canon and couldn’t be further separated by their stylistic approach.
Where the ‘Tao Te Ching’ is organised into brief chapters/passages containing short, poetic and often paradoxical statements that encourage contradictory interpretations, ‘The Chuang Tzu’ is a hilariously eccentric anthology of anecdotes and allegory, filled with vibrant personalities (both fictional and non) including but not limited to Emperors, Sages and “uptight Confucians”. Zhuangzi yo-yos back-and-forth between a tongue-in-cheek, mocking tone and endearing sincerity, but an iron wit and undeniable wisdom is evident regardless of the mood you find him in. This seems an odd thing to say about Zhuangzi, but he also offers lucidity to many of the ambiguous metaphysical concepts found in Lao Tzu’s work.
Zhuangzi is a dreamer, who baulks at convention and rejects the over-governance, ritual propriety, materialism and self-indulgent nature of the people so prevalent during his lifetime. He appeals, overwhelmingly, to my meek, but nevertheless existent, anti-authoritarian side, but more importantly, this work regularly gave me pause and corralled my feeble mind into a state of humbling introspection. It’s like being taken out of your body and examining yourself, and society, from an alien perspective, and realising the true absurdity of our current state of being.
Zhuangzi believed that in order to live by the Tao (extremely rough and hesitant translation: The Way of Heaven/True Virtue), we humans must only follow our innate nature which I take to mean our basic instincts or intuition. We should not seek knowledge, skill, fame, wealth, admiration or any other such external things and we should not strive to be good or bad, kind-hearted or righteous to meet standards of propriety and ritual set by the state or our peers. One should only act as one’s innate nature compels them to, taking the path of least resistance.
Against the State Cult of Confucianism and rejecting the, almost fascist, teachings of the Legalists and the Mohists, Zhuangzi’s teachings are directly opposed to the over-governance of the state and the pushing of moral standards and ritual practices on the people. His belief is that people, as a whole, are inherently good but when strict laws are put in place, to determine how one should behave, proper ritual protocols, what is good/bad, right/wrong etc. then, certainly, people will be righteous and kind, and display agreeable traits because that is the law, however, whether consciously or sub-consciously, they will resent doing so because their behaviour is being, if not enforced then at least, heavily scrutinised under the eye of the law. Over governance replaces virtue and unity with righteousness and compliance. “Ruling by decrees and grand plans [pollutes] the purity of nature and [destroys] simplicity”.
”take a monkey and dress it up to look like the Duke of Chou and the poor monkey will struggle and bite until he has got rid of the clothes.”
The “perfect sage” has destroyed Zhuangzi’s Utopia with their, often well-meaning but, clumsy attempts to improve and/or reform society. He’s had enough! And nobody’s safe. Least of all Confucius. I should mention that you’ll probably want to have read both the ‘Tao Te Ching’ and ‘The Analects of Confucius’ before leaping into this one. The ‘Tao’, because you’ll want to know the Primary source material that Chuang Tzu is interpreting and ‘The Analects’, because you’ll want to know exactly what Chuang Tzu is rebuking so very often. And boy does he rebuke. Chuang Tzu burns Confucius so hard on so many occasions, the hardest part was picking which example to give you, but this one pretty much sums up how he feels:
“You, Sir, try to distinguish the spheres of benevolence and righteousness, to explore the boundaries between agreement and disagreement, to study changes between rest and movement, to pontificate on giving and receiving, to order what is to be approved of and what disapproved of, to unify the limits of joy and anger, and yet you have barely escaped calamity [Twice exiled from the State of Lu]. If you were to be serious in your cultivation of your own self, careful to guard the truth and willing to allow others to be as they are, then you could have avoided such problems. However, here you are, unable to cultivate yourself yet determined to improve others. Are you not obsessed with external things?”
To add further insult, Confucius is regularly portrayed as a curious but inferior thinker than the cast of simple Taoists throughout the book. Often found to be in awe of them, realising the error of his ways and requesting to become a student of these wise eccentrics. At other times, he is the one to offer up the wisdoms of the Tao to his disciples. Lionel Giles interestingly suggests, in ‘Musings of a Chinese Mystic’, that Chuang Tzu was likely using Confucius’ fame and influence as a means of spreading his own philosophy. This would go against everything that Zhuangzi stands for but it isn’t completely out of the question and would only be one more inconsistency among many within the text.
Zhuangzi, believes that the acquisition of knowledge and the expanding of ideas only breeds argument and confusion and is detrimental to our well-being. People are unable to simply receive ideas from outside, they have a tendency to cling to them and view other’s ideas as automatically wrong if they don’t marry up to their own. This concept is radical to say the least and suggests an unrealistic wish to return to primitiveness, but taken in a less extreme sense, I think Chuang Tzu is just trying to suggest that we are focusing too much of our attention on petty external (human) issues and neglecting the internal (heavenly)
"if sages and wisdom were abandoned, great robbers would cease; destroy the jade and shatter the pearls, then petty thieves would not appear; burn the accounts and rip up the contracts, and the people will return to simplicity; break up the weights and the measures and the people will no longer argue; obliterate the laws of the world the sages have made, then the people can begin to be reasoned with."
I feel like Chuang Tzu would go into cardiac arrest if he were to see the state of the world, today. Rarely looking internally, we focus all of our attention on external trivialities. Black and white, east and west, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, right and wrong, straight and gay; we argue and debate about race, gender, abortion, the legalisation of drugs, climate change and on and on and on and it’s a fire that’s perpetually stoked by a modern pandemic called outrage culture and self-conscious, self-aggrandizing social displays of false righteousness and virtue. Exactly what Zhuangzi said would happen when you Pidgeon-hole entire peoples and try to dictate what they should do and how they should act.
“Take care how you play with people’s hearts. People’s hearts should not be shoved down nor pushed up, for this yo-yoing up and down makes the heart either a prisoner or an avenging fury. It can be gentle and giving, moulding even the hard and sharp, or it can be sharp and pointed, tough enough to cut, carve or chisel. It can be as hot as a searing fire; it can be as cold as ice. So swift that in the nodding of one’s head it has twice roared over the four seas and beyond all boundaries. At rest, it is as deep as the abyss; when it is active, it is like a star in Heaven. It races beyond anything that seeks to bind it, for this is in truth the heart of humanity!”
Ultimately, like Confucius, I feel as significant as a fly in vinegar when it comes to comprehending the Tao and I have a feeling that even if I could grasp its true meaning, to follow it in our time would be all but an impossibility. Nevertheless, I’ve still found a lot of introspective value in reading these ancient Chinese texts and I look forward to reading just a couple more before moving onto the Western Canon. Mencius is next and he’s got some ground to make up after Zhuangzi tore Confucius a new one. I’m all in for the Confucionist vs. Taoist beef.
”Oh dear! I do so pity those who lose themselves. I also pity those who pity others. However, I also pity those who pity those who pity others, but that was long ago.”
1. it's spelled zhuangzi, you heathen westerners
2. to ascribe a numerical score with accompanying critiques to the tao is not to grasp the tao
2. to ascribe a numerical score with accompanying critiques to the tao is not to grasp the tao
adventurous
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
A slightly rough diamond but a diamond all the same. Much of why I picked up this book in the first place was to better acquaint myself with Taoism, specifically as it formed one of the key influences on Buddhism in China. Chuang Tzu I chose, I admit, in big part because he was one of the folks John Cage name-checked directly in his work, and I wanted to see the rest of what was there apart from the few snippets Cage quoted in "Indeterminacy" and "Silence". This particular edition is only a small part of Chuang Tzu's extant writings (hence the "rough), but they are the best preserved and most coherent part of it. It's not hard at all to see how many specific insights in it flow directly into similar insights in Zen, and for that reason I suspect a copy will end up on the same little shelf I have where I keep "The Zen Teachings Of Huang Po". And stay there for keeps.
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Amazing. The story about the "ugly" tree really stuck.