Chuang Tzu

1. Chuang Tzu Prof. Frederick Hok-ming CHEUNG

2. “Equalizing things” (ch’i-wu) “Heaven and earth co-exist with me; all the myriad thing and I are one.” Each thing has its distinct reason for being as it is; each thing has its individual appropriateness. There are no things that are not so; there are no things that are not appropriate.” Ch.2 “Ch’I-wu lun”

3. This principle once established, all distinctions of things and the self, of noble and humble, then lose their absolute boundaries, and all the inequalities of things bring themselves into positions of relative equality and unity. Bigness? Smallness?“Relative only!”

4. “When we understand that heaven and earth are but as tiny grains of rice, or that tip of a hair is as a hill or a mountain, then all the rankings and distinctions have become equal.” “Dust in the Wind.”

5. When we recognize that east and west are relative opposites, and that neither can exist except in relation to the other, then their separate shares of achievement can be established.

6. According to Burton Watson, (Columbia University) (Chuang Tzu) “the central theme of the Chuang Tzu 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 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 the individual, to reform society, and eventually to free the world from its ills.

7. Chuang Tzu’s answer, however, is radically different,….. It is the answer of a mystic, ….. Chuang Tzu’s answer to the question is: “free yourself from the world.” It is the baggage of “conventional values” that man must first of all discard before he can be free!

8. Chuang Tzu saw the man-made ills of war, poverty, and injustice. Chuang Tzu saw the natural ills of disease and death. But Chuang Tzu 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, will 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.

9. Thus, in Chuang Tzu’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. Chuang Tzu employs every resource of rhetoric in his efforts to awaken the reader to the essential meaninglessness of conventional values and to free him from the bondage: • paradoxical anecdote/remark • pseudo-logical discussion/debate • humor

10. In Chuang Tzu’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 remains within society but refrains from acting out of the motives that lead ordinary men to struggle for wealth, fame, success, or safety.

11. He maintains a state that Chuang Tzu refers to as wu-wei or inaction, meaning by this term not a forced quietude, but a course of action that is not founded upon any purposeful motives of gain or striving. In such a state, all human actions become as mindless as those of the natural world. Man becomes one with Nature, or Heaven, and merges himself with Tao, or the Way, the underlying unity that embraces man, Nature, and all that is in the universe.

12. 忍 patience

13. Discussion: What is Weak / strong? Coward / Brave? Cf.Christianity “When a man hit you on the cheek, offer him the other cheek, too.” Cf.Kenny Rogers, “The Coward of the County”

14. Discussion: “Desire” Can “desire” be satisfied? To the Taoists, “NO!”— The “crave for desire” is never-ending! Cf. D.H. Lawrence’s short-story: “the Rocking Horse Winner” • “more is less • & less is more”