Here is the authentic voice of the Taoist. Here is the debunking of human pretensions and the re-assertion of the natural as the highest order. Here is the Tao of Chuang Tzu in the mouth of a twelve-year-old.
By stressing the abuses that have happened to our innate natures, Chuang Tzu constantly calls us to look with our heads on one side at what is ‘normal’. He uses humour, shock tactics, silly names, the weirdest characters (such as Cripple Shu or Master Yu) and totally unbelievable scenarios (such as the ‘willow tree’ incident in chapter 18) to make us look again at what we hold to be true. He uses contradiction to explode convention. Take these exchanges from chapter 2:
There is the beginning; there is not as yet any beginning of the beginning; there is not as yet beginning not to be a beginning of the beginning… I have just made a statement, yet I do not know whether what I said has been real in what I said or not really said.
Under Heaven there is nothing greater than the tip of a hair, but Mount Tai [the greatest of the mighty sacred mountains] is smaller; there is no one older than a dead child, yet Peng Tsu [who, according to mythology, lived thousands of years] died young.
So where does all this leave Chuang Tzu in his understanding of life and his relationship to the rest of creation – the ‘Ten Thousand Things’, as it is put in Chinese? The next line in this quote from chapter 2 spells it out. If Chuang Tzu could conceivably be imagined uttering any kind of credal statement, perhaps this would be it:
Heaven and Earth and I were born at the same time, and all life and I are one.
This is the understanding that Chuang Tzu wishes us to return to.
The uselessness of language is the other key point of Chuang Tzu’s discourses. He wants us to break beyond words and to realize how they imprison us. This is captured in a quote from chapter 2 which echoes the opening of the Tao Te Ching:
The great Way is not named,
the great disagreement is unspoken,
great benevolence is not benevolent,
great modesty is not humble,
great courage is not violent.
The Tao that is clear is not the Tao,
speech which enables argument is not worthy,
benevolence which is ever present does not achieve its goal,
modesty if flouted, fails,
courage that is violent is pointless.
I want to move on now from this glance at some of the key threads in Chuang Tzu’s writings, to his place within ‘Taoist’ thought and belief. What was his relationship to the book we now know as the Tao Te Ching? Traditionally, the chronology of the three ‘classics’ of Taoism has been, first Lao Tzu with the Tao Te Ching, second Chuang Tzu, third Lieh Tzu.
Lao Tzu has been ascribed to the sixth to fifth centuries BC, while Chuang Tzu has always been known to be around the 330–290 BC era. It would thus seem that Chuang Tzu must have known of the book by Lao Tzu. However, as I have mentioned earlier, it is highly unlikely, even if such a person as Lao Tzu existed, that he wrote more than a few of the chapters of the Tao Te Ching. This book dates from around 300 BC at the earliest, though it uses much much older material.
When Jay Ramsay and I with our colleague Man Ho Kwok produced our translation and exploration of the Tao Te Ching, we discovered that each chapter consists of two very different strata, clearly discernible in the original Chinese. The first layer is a proverb, wisdom saying or oracle which has been passed down through generations and has become rounded and smooth as a result of re-telling. In quatrains which each have an identical number of characters, the saying is preserved in the midst or at the start of each chapter. Around it, written in a totally different style of Chinese, is a commentary, which indicates the fourth– to third-century BC world of China.
In Chuang Tzu we can see a similar process at work. At no point is there a direct quote from the Tao Te Ching. This is hardly surprising if the dates given above are accurate. The Tao Te Ching was not written down when Chuang Tzu was writing, or if it was, it was being compiled at roughly the same time. But it is clear that both books relied upon the same stock of folk wisdom, wisdom sayings and oracles. What is distinctive is the different ways each book handled the same common material. For example, compare how they each use a series of sayings about babies.
In chapter 55 of the Tao Te Ching we have:
‘Those who have true te
Are like a newborn baby.’
– and if they seem like this, they will not be stung by wasps or snakes, or pounced on by animals in the wild or birds of prey.
A baby is weak and supple, but his hand can grasp your finger.
He has no desire as yet, and yet he can be erect –
he can cry day and night without even getting hoarse
such is the depth of his harmony.
It’s stupid to rush around.
When you fight against yourself, it shows in your face.
But if you
