The Zhuangzi, the book that laughs

The book opens at maximum scale. A fish too big to measure becomes a bird too big to measure, and sets off on a ninety-thousand-mile flight to the far side of the world. Then the small birds laugh. Why would anyone go to all that trouble? You can get to the next tree on one hop.

The point is not that big beats small. It is that the quail genuinely cannot see what the great bird is doing. From the branch, ninety thousand miles is gibberish. "A small consciousness cannot keep up with a vast consciousness," Zhuangzi says, "short duration cannot keep up with long duration. The morning mushroom knows nothing of the noontide; the winter cicada knows nothing of the spring and autumn." Every creature mistakes the size of its own view for the size of the world.

There is a joke buried in the names, and Ziporyn keeps it. Kun, the world-spanning fish, is named with a character that means fish roe, a single egg, the tiniest speck in the sea. The biggest thing in the ocean is called Minnow. The chapter is titled, in his rendering, "Wandering Far and Unfettered." The bird that goes far is the picture of a mind that is not fenced in by its own scale.

Hui Shi, the logician, keeps arriving with the same complaint. He grew a gourd too big to use as a dipper, so he smashed it. He has a tree too gnarled to cut into planks, so it is worthless. Both times he is calling Zhuangzi's ideas the same thing: impressively large, and good for nothing.

Zhuangzi just flips the frame. Make the giant gourd into a boat and float around on a lake. Leave the useless tree standing and nap in its shade, because no carpenter will ever fell it, so it gets to live out its whole life. The useless tree is the only one in the forest that dies of old age.

To a Taoist, usefulness is a kind of danger. The straight tree is cut for timber. The tasty animal is eaten. "The cinnamon tree is edible, and thus it gets chopped down. The lacquer tree is useful, and thus it is cut down." Being good for something means being used up by someone. The chapter four version ends with the line the whole theme hangs on: "Everyone knows how useful usefulness is, but no one seems to know how useful uselessness is."

Chapter two is the hard one, and the center of the book. Its target is the little word "this." Everything you call "this" someone else calls "that." Every right has a wrong stuck to it like the other end of a stick. What counts as right depends entirely on where you are standing. In Zhuangzi's day the Confucians and the Mohists, the two great schools, spent their lives proving each other wrong, each affirming exactly what the other denied.

His move is not to pick a side. It is to step off the line. He calls the still point the axis of all courses. Stop being pinned to one position, and you can meet an endless run of rights and wrongs without being thrown by any of them, the way a door on its hinge swings open to whatever comes.

Then the monkeys. A keeper tells his monkeys he will give them three nuts in the morning and four at night. They are furious. Fine, he says, four in the morning and three at night. They are delighted. Same seven nuts. The only thing that changed was the order, and it flipped rage into joy. We are the monkeys: the facts hold still, and our verdict swings wildly with the framing. The sage, Zhuangzi says, "uses various rights and wrongs to harmonize," and stays put at the center of the wheel. He calls it Walking Two Roads.

It is four sentences, and it is the most famous thing in the book. Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, perfectly happy, with no memory of being Zhuang Zhou. He wakes, and he is Zhuang Zhou again. Then the catch: how does he know which is the dream? Maybe he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly. Maybe he is a butterfly, right now, dreaming it is a man.

It is not spooky for its own sake. It lands the chapter. If you cannot tell from the inside whether you are the dreamer or the dream, then the hard line you draw around "me" is softer than it feels. And here Ziporyn keeps the ending honest where gentler translators smooth it. He will not melt the man and the butterfly into a cozy oneness. Zhou and the butterfly, he insists, "count as two distinct identities, as two quite different beings." They really are different. And one becomes the other anyway. That becoming, one thing turning into another, is what Zhuangzi calls the transformation of things, and it is the note the whole book will end on.

This is the flagship. A cook butchers an ox for the king, and it is a dance: every cut lands on the beat, the knife rings like music. The king is amazed. The cook explains that it is not skill, it is the Course. A beginner sees a whole ox and hacks. After three years he stopped seeing "the ox" and started seeing the gaps, the spaces between the joints where a blade can pass without resistance. Now he does not even look. He goes by the spirit.

A clumsy cook wrecks a knife in a month, a good one in a year. His blade has carved thousands of oxen over nineteen years and it is still razor sharp, because it never hits anything. It only travels through the openings that were already there. That is the state the whole book is reaching for. It is not laziness, and it is not gritted effort. It is total absorption, the point where the deliberate self drops out and the work does itself.

The king gets it. "From hearing the cook's words," he says, "I have learned how to nourish life." Living well is finding the gaps and not forcing the rest.

The book has two famous instructions for the work you do on the inside, and both run the same direction, which is down. The first is the fasting of the mind. You fast the body by not eating; you fast the mind by not grabbing. Confucius (whom Zhuangzi loves to draft as a mouthpiece for distinctly un-Confucian ideas) tells his student to stop listening with his ears, then to stop listening even with his mind, until what is left is a kind of open emptiness, "a waiting for the presence of whatever thing may come."

The second is sitting and forgetting. The same student keeps reporting progress, and it is all subtraction. I have forgotten kindness and duty, he says. Good, says Confucius, but not yet. I have forgotten ritual and music. Good, not yet. Finally: "I just sit and forget." Forget what? The body, the senses, the whole machinery of the deliberate self, "dispersing my physical form and ousting my understanding," he says, "until I am the same as the Transforming Openness." The teacher, stunned, asks to become the student's student.

Both exercises empty out the calculating self to make room for everything else. Ziporyn elsewhere gives the cleanest image of the result: the realized mind "is like a mirror, rejecting nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing."

The Inner Chapters end on a small, grim joke. Two emperors are treated well by a third, the emperor of the center, whose name, Hundun, means chaos: the undivided lump before the world has any parts. To repay his kindness, the two notice he is missing the seven holes everyone else has, two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, a mouth, and decide to do him a favor. One hole a day. On the seventh day he is dead. That is the whole story.

It is the dark twin of Cook Ding: the same blade, used the opposite way. The two gods are certain they are helping. They are applying their obvious standard, everyone should have holes, to the one thing that was whole precisely because it did not. Every distinction you carve, every improvement you impose, kills a little of the wholeness it works on.

The book that opened with a fish turning happily into a bird closes its core on a warning about what happens when you cannot leave a thing alone.

Zhuangzi and Hui Shi the logician are back, leaning on a bridge. Look how happy the fish are, says Zhuangzi. Hui Shi pounces, because that is what logicians do: you are not a fish, so how could you know what a fish enjoys? You are not me, says Zhuangzi, so how do you know I don't know? Hui Shi springs the trap shut: exactly, I am not you and cannot know your mind, which proves my point, you are not a fish and cannot know its mind.

And then Zhuangzi cheats, beautifully. Go back to the start, he says: when you asked how I know, you had already granted that I know, and only asked where. I know it from right here, up above the Hao. It is a dodge and a real argument at the same time. He turns Hui Shi's own grammar against him.

But the deeper reply is the one he leaves unsaid. The same wall Hui Shi builds to keep Zhuangzi out of the fish's mind keeps Hui Shi out of every mind but his own. Take "you can't know another mind" all the way and you have sealed yourself in a box of one. Zhuangzi would rather just enjoy the fish.

The deepest place the book goes is death, and it goes there laughing. When Zhuangzi's wife dies, Hui Shi comes to mourn and finds him sitting on the ground, banging on a tub and singing. Hui Shi is appalled: she raised your children, grew old with you, and you are drumming? Of course I grieved at first, Zhuangzi says. But then he traced her backward, past her life, past her body, past the very energy a body is made of, to nothing at all, and watched the whole sequence run forward again and then turn one more time into death. She is not gone. She has turned, the way a season turns. To wail over it, he decides, would make him look "like someone without any understanding of fate. So I stopped."

This is going along with the transformation, the cure the whole book has been building toward, aimed now at the one change nobody wants. And he held himself to it at the end. Dying, Zhuangzi told his students to skip the funeral:

If the Tao Te Ching is the solemn manual, this is the laughter, and by the last page you see the laughter was the argument all along. A man who can crack a joke at his own funeral has already done the thing the book set out to teach. He has stopped clinging to being one particular thing, and gone along, lightly, with the turning of everything into everything else.