To nobly take no action—this is the Way of heaven

Zhuangzi, Books 8-12

Today, we continue our read-along of Zhuangzi. Here’s the schedule for our readings:

The Inner Books

• August 11: Books 1 - 4

• August 17: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8-9:30 PM Eastern (we’ll discuss all the Inner Books)

• August 18: Books 5 - 7

The Outer Books

• August 25: Books 8-12

• September 1: Books 13 - 16

• September 8: Books 17 - 22

• September 12: Members-Only Zoom Call, 2-3:30 PM Eastern

The Mixed Books

• September 15: Books 23 - 25

• September 22: Books 26 - 29

• September 28: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8-9:30 PM Eastern

• September 29: Books 30 - 33

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This week’s installment marks a transition from the Inner Books of the Zhuangzi to the Outer Books. What exactly makes this transition significant? It turns out this is a matter of some scholarly dispute. For some, the Inner Books represent the ‘authentic’ Zhuangzi — that is, the texts that we know are written by the Zhuangzi himself. Chrs Fraser has argued against this in his monograph Ways of Wandering the Way, pointing out that the Inner Books have strange features that suggest parts were not written by Zhuangzi himself. For instance, Zhuangzi appears as a character and is presented in the third-person; this would be highly unusual for a text at the time; this suggests later authorship for this portion. But a concern about an authentic Zhuangzi is mostly irrelevant for my interests — I’m typically more interested in how some canonical text has been historically received rather than trying to determine its mysterious origins. What we do know is that the Inner Books represent an important selection of the Zhuangzi, that they are often held to contain a coherent philosophy that is contradicted in other books throughout the wider collection, and that they receive a disproportionate amount of attention from commentators. When my wife studied Zhuangzi and Laozi in Hong Kong, she read the Inner Books six or seven times; she read the Outer and Mixed Books just once.

Fraser recommends that we take each parable or pericope on its own, making this our primary unit of interpretation. If we cannot, then we should make the book our primary unit of interpretation. (That’s the model we’ve followed so far: I’ve written a commentary on each book rather than each pericope. The first few Outer Books are especially receptive to this sort of reading given their length and focus.) We don’t need to concern ourselves, necessarily, with the meaning of the Zhuangzi as a whole. That’s a frustrating prospect for someone like me, admittedly, but it may be what we need to do in order to do the text justice.

Book 8: Webbed Toes

[To] have webbing on one’s feet is to have grown a useless piece of flesh; to have branching on one’s hand is to have sprouted a useless finger; to append webs to and sprout branches from the inherent features of the five organs is to be corrupted and perverted by the practice of benevolence and righteousness and to encumber and divide the functioning of one’s hearing and eyesight. (8.1a)

Immediately preceding this passage is a mention of benevolence and righteousness – features of a Confucian morality – where the author explicitly states that they are not the correct approach to the Way and Virtue. Remember that ‘Virtue’ in this translation is not quite virtue in the more Confucian or Greek sense. Last week, commenting on Book 5, I wrote:

This is what I believe Virtue is for Zhuangzi. It is the achievement of a lack of perspective, freeing yourself from the various good/bad pairs in the world, freeing yourself from the view that there is a ‘this’ and a ‘that’ and a ‘not’ in the world.

And this may be correct for Book 5. Is it the same in Book 8? Well, there is at least one difficulty, and it comes right after the passage we began with.

The highest standard of correctness is not to lose the characteristic features of one’s nature and fate.

Is ‘the highest standard of correctness’ synonymous with ‘Virtue’? If it is, then it is tempting to say that in Book 8, there is a Virtuous good/bad pair. Coming to terms with your nature and fate is good, while failing to do so is bad. If we were seeking a systematic interpretation of the entire Zhuangzi, this would be a problem — but keep in mind the interpretive notes I shared above. Perhaps here we are finding a deviation in Zhuangzist thought.

Or, perhaps, the purpose of this pericope is different. Perhaps it is not meant to teach a doctrine. Perhaps it is a step along the way. Before we can make any progress, we need to free ourselves of the standards like benevolence and righteousness (which, if I am not mistaken, are partly matters of convention for Confucius) and remember who and what we are. ‘The benevolent people of today get bleary-eyed worrying about the world’s troubles,’ we read later. If one is bleary-eyed, of course, one cannot see well.

Moreover, to depend on the curve and line, the compass and set square to be correct is to slice away one’s nature; to depend on ropes and cords, glue and lacquer to be strong is to violate one’s Virtue. Bending and bowing in ceremonial propriety and music, urging and nurturing benevolence and righteousness to comfort all the world’s hearts—this is to lose what is constantly so of us…Then why do people continually impose benevolence and righteousness on the Way and Virtue like glue and lacquer, rope and cord, causing the whole world to become confused?

The imposition of artificial standards confuses us all. We commend someone who dies for benevolence and condemn someone who dies for greed, but ultimately, they both meet the same end: death. The amorality of the Inner Books makes an appearance at the end of Book 8 as well:

What I call good is not benevolence and righteousness but simply excellence in one’s Virtue. What I call good is not what’s called benevolence and righteousness but simply going along with the characteristic features of one’s nature and fate. What I call acute hearing is not being able to hear other things but simply being able to hear oneself. What I call keen sight is not being able to see other things but simply being able to see oneself.

Book 9: Horses’ Hooves

In Book 9, we see a similar emphasis on the imposition of artificial standards. Bó Lè brings his horsemanship – which, if you recall, is an example Plato loves to use when discussing virtue – to horses, and the horses are starved, left to go thirsty, and forced to live artificially. While before they could run, jump, and thrive in accord with their genuine nature, the imposition of artificial standards (making them run in a line, prance about, and so on) is to their detriment. The potter treats clay in the same way, as does the carpenter.

I admit I have more sympathy for the point about horses than the point about potters and carpenters.

While in previous books, sages were treated with reverence, in Book 9 we see a shift. The ‘age of ultimate Virtue’ is described in Edenic terms, with ‘the myriad things [living] together, their homes side by side.’ The sages arrive, ‘striving to be benevolent, straining to be righteous, and the world started to have doubts.’ (These sages are treated, again, like Confucians, with an emphasis on music and ceremonial propriety — just what Yán Huí forgets in Book 6.) They cast aside the Way and Virtue, abandoned their inherent nature and features. The sages eventually led to the coveting of knowledge and the seeking of profit:

In the time of Hè Xū, when people were at home, they didn’t know what they were doing; when they went out, they didn’t know where they were going. They enjoyed themselves by chewing on food and amused themselves by drumming on their bellies. This was all people were able to do. Then arrived the sages, rectifying the bodies of all the world with the bowing and crouching of ceremonial propriety and music and comforting the hearts of all the world by hanging benevolence and righteousness up high. Then people started standing on their toes in coveting knowledge and turning to contend for profit, and this couldn’t be stopped. This too was the sages’ mistake. (9.4)

But unlike, say, Greek and Roman condemnation of profit as a sign of greed, the critique here seems to be that people sought profit which made them forget the Way and Virtue. Profit is a distraction, but so is knowledge.

Book 10: Breaking Into Chests

The critique of typical moral virtues is continued in Book 10, illustrated well in this comical exchange:

So a follower of Robber Zhí asked him, ‘Do robbers too have a Way?’ Zhí said, ‘How can you do anything without a Way?* Guessing there’s loot in a house is sageliness; entering first is courage; exiting last is righteousness; knowing whether it can be done is wisdom; dividing the shares equally is benevolence. Without these five, no one in the world could ever become a great robber’.

The Way of the sages benefits the world less than it harms it, the writer says, because even someone like Robber Zhí can follow their guidance while doing what it is that we would all consider immoral. The subtext seems to be: sagely knowledge and moral virtues are a farce. To insist that virtues must only be good for all, thus meaning that the robber can’t be practicing those virtues, would be to make an ad hoc modification to the theory to avoid the problematic cases. This hypocrisy is reflected in ordinary practice: ‘Those who steal belt buckles are executed, but those who steal a state become feudal lords, and the gates of feudal lords are where benevolence and righteousness are maintained.’

I’ve tried to resist comparing Zhuangzi (or at least Zhuangzi-as-the-author-of-the-whole-Zhuangzi) to any single Western philosopher, but in Book 10 (and the early Outer Books) there is a strong Nietzschean flavor. But this Zhuangzi is almost an anarcho-primitivist Nietzsche, saying that we should cast down slave morality (or in this case, conventional morality) and return to a simpler life where we are closer to the Way. This could be a time of ‘perfect order’ as described in 10.2a, but this perfect order is a much simpler order.

Book 11: Leave It In Its Place

The simple order described above can be easily disrupted. Even when the sage Yáo governs the world, which led to gladness and gleefulness, we see a disruption. The balance of yáng and yīn is disturbed; harmony is lost; the bodies of the people suffer. There is a particularly striking passage in 11.1:

Moreover, do they delight in eyesight? This is to be corrupted by beauty. Do they delight in hearing? This is to be corrupted by sounds. Do they delight in benevolence? This is to disorder Virtue. Do they delight in righteousness? This is to contradict the patterns of things. Do they delight in ceremonial propriety? This is to contribute to artifice. Do they delight in music? This is to contribute to debauchery. Do they delight in sageliness? This is to contribute to artfulness. Do they delight in knowledge? This is to contribute to fault-finding.

The message of the book: leave the world as it is. Leave it in its place. ‘If the gentleman-prince has no choice but to oversee the world, nothing is better than non-action. Attain non-action, and you will settle at ease in the features of your nature and fate.’

I expect this book to be especially controversial amongst readers here, as we have read through Aristotle together (and I have gathered many were sympathetic to Aristotle’s approach to virtue). On a generally Aristotelian view, the mind and one’s moral character need to be refined; we are not born with intellectual or moral virtues, but rather with the potential for these virtues. So, we need to be properly educated. For Zhuangzi, though, this education is a pressing up and down of the mind — a distortion, really. Perhaps Zhuangzi is responding to the world around him:

In the present age, the bodies of the executed lie piled up on each other, convicts in stocks and cangues bump up against each other, and sufferers of judicial mutilation are constantly within sight of each other, and yet the Ruists and Mohists strut about waving their arms among the fettered and manacled. Ah, this is too much! Their arrogance and shamelessness are beyond belief. (11.3)

When Cloud General seeks advice from Vast Ignorance on the governance of the people, Vast Ignorance does not want to give it to him. Finally, though, he says:

Nurture your mind. Simply dwell in non-action, and things will transform of themselves. Let your torso and limbs fall away, expel hearing and vision, forget about relations and things, and wholly identify with the vast boundlessness. Release your mind and free your spirit, becoming indifferent and soulless. The myriad things flourish and abound, each returning to its root. Each returns to its root without knowing it, their entire lives never separating from murky, formless primal chaos. For them to know of it is to separate from it. Ask not its name, nor try to discern its features. Things will indeed arise of themselves.

At the end of Book 11, we see something of a thesis statement, tying together all that we’ve read so far:

What is the Way? There is the Way of heaven; there is the Way of humanity. To nobly take no action—this is the Way of heaven; to burden oneself by taking action—this is the Way of humanity. The ruler pairs with the Way of heaven; the subject with the Way of humanity. The Way of heaven and the Way of humanity are far apart indeed—this is something we mustn’t fail to examine.

Book 12: Heaven and Earth

If I were putting on my textual critic cap, I would argue that Book 12 is a later addition to this text. There is more of an emphasis on the Way being a kind of unifying structure to the world — this is more like what I take Laozi to be saying about the Way in the Tao Te Ching. I suggested last week that this was a distinctive difference between the Zhuangzi and the Tao Te Ching:

I think that Zhuangzi is more radical than Laozi. Laozi says There is a Way, and I can come to know it, but I cannot speak of it. I do not know if Zhuangzi can even say that there is a Way, and more and more, I do not think that he can say that we can come to know about it. That is because Zhuangzi is a radical relativist.

What seems to be missing in this book, and in fact all the Outer Books we’ve read so far, is this relativism. (You could also call this perspectivalism.) The Way is being written of in these books as a singular thing, a norm we should all follow; we approximate it more closely through non-action, but there is this one thing that we must follow in order to avoid distorting or losing our inherent nature.

The later description of the ‘Supreme Beginning’ may be related to this point:

In the Supreme Beginning there was non-existence, without existence or name. From this non-existence arose a unity; the unity existed yet was unformed. What things obtain by which they live is called Virtue. What is unformed being divided yet still not separating is called fate. When things arise from stillness and movement and come to completion according to the patterns of life, this is called physical form. When particular physical forms contain spirit, each having their own standards and norms, this is called inherent nature. By cultivating the nature, one returns to Virtue, and through Virtue one attains identity with the Beginning. In identity, one is empty; through emptiness, one is vast. One merges with the chirping and singing; merging with the chirping and singing, one merges with heaven and earth. The merging dissolves into obscurity, as if stupid, as if muddled—this is called profound Virtue, or assimilating with the vast flow. (12.8)

But tell me: is Book 12 so different from the earlier Inner Books? Am I overstating the problem?

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Here are some of my favorite comments from last week.

From Ronald:

There is a difference between seeking and being. This can be seen between the effort made by the functionary and the effortless rule of the enlightened king. The king governs so naturally that nobody thinks to credit him for his actions. This, I believe, makes him "useless" in the sense that he can't be categorized or exploited because his actions are indistinguishable from natural process.

Tom asked a question about Cook Ding from the earlier Inner Books:

Fraser's text reads "Cook Ding put down his knife...". Would Ding be as skillful with just any old knife?

And Jaycel offered an answer:

The sense I get is that it’s the person rather than the tool. Ding would put any knife to his whetstone to get it where it needs to be for his purpose: what he is cutting, hence what angle to sharpen the tool to, etc.? It would be fun to track how upmost persons, sages, clubfoots, craftsmen, etc. interact with their contexts. There is even an instance of a named character returning to his life (after a sort of realization) at a stove, taking over for his wife.