Zhang Gu

上海古籍出版社, 2024.

Reviewed by: Shashwat Singh (PhD Candidate, National University of Singapore, HYI Visiting Fellow)

The Zhuangzi defies all attempts at neat categorization and classification. He has been variously understood and interpreted as a Daoist, an anti-rationalist, a critic of the limits of language and logic, an anti-empiricist, and so on to the point that everything that has been said about the Zhuangzi and buttressed by some passage in the text, one can equally easily say the opposite citing some other passage.

With that caveat, Kunio Hachiya’s book, ‘Zhuangzi: Towards a Realm of Transcendence,’ (translated from Japanese into Chinese by Zhang Gu) takes up on the Zhuangzi’s suggestion of free and easy wandering and follows the text in search of spiritual life that transcends the judgements of the secular realm and frees us from all kinds of worldly bondages by showing how to dwell in oneness with the Way of heaven and earth.

Hachiya offers a transcendental reading based on the Zhuangzi’s views about life, death, and the Way, as they emerge over a series of allegories and metaphors in dialogues with his interlocuters – Huizi, the Confucians, the Mohists, etc. – ending in a detailed “Discussion on Making All Things Equal”.

On Life, Death and the Way in Zhuangzi

The Zhuangzi refuses to recognize the distinctions of the secular world. It is critical of people who are satisfied with anthropocentric notions and take their ideals as supreme. Because for most people, the self is absolute, their minds cling hard to “their positions as though they have sworn before the gods, sure that they are the arbiters of right and wrong.”

The Zhuangzi shows that antagonisms of right and wrong, true and false, distinctions among myriad things, did not originally pervade. They arise from the limited perspective and points of view of the secular world. It reminds us that if we have “heard the human,” we have not “heard the earth,” and even if we have “heard the earth,” we have not “listened to the heavens.” For the Zhuangzi, human condition is not so dissimilar to “the morning mushroom that knows nothing of twilight and dawn,” or that of “the summer cicada who knows nothing of spring and autumn.”

The Zhuangzi sees our spiritual activities – joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, fickleness, modesty, willfulness, candor, insolence – in continuity with the natural movements of heaven and earth. As to the origin of these, no one know where they sprout from. Even life and death, too, are part of one ceaseless transformation of Qi, and for Zhuangzi, it is a mistake to cling on to life or fear death per se.

Speculating upon the heart and mind’s myriad activities is to become entrapped in one or other mistaken belief because they too arise in relation with the outside world. Arguments, too, are of little help in determining right from wrong. Just because someone or some stance is beaten in an argument, it does not necessarily mean that the winner is right, and the loser is wrong. Here, the Zhuangzi brings us face to face with the limits of life and the limitlessness of knowledge. Using the limited, one cannot pursue what has no limits. Therefore, he says, “follow the middle; go by what is constant (the Way) and you can stay in one piece, keep yourself alive, and live out the years accorded to you by the heavens.

Hachiya discusses the Zhuangzi’s views about life and death in a sense of spiritual preservation unperturbed by the dilemmas of the world, not to get caught up in false dichotomies born from ignorance. It is in this context that he moves on to “Discussion of Making All Things Equal”.

Discussion on Making All Things Equal

The Zhuangzi’s inner chapter on Discussion on Making All Things Equal (齐物论), which might also be translated as resolution of contradictions or dichotomies, or the adjustment of controversies is the heart of Kunio Hachiya’s book. Zhuangzi’s approach, Hachiya argues, allows one to transcend human-centric values and judgements of the secular world to find the non-distinguishing and non-discriminating state of inner peace by bringing man’s heart and mind in correspondence with the Way of the heaven and earth.

It is an essentially Daoist position which one also finds in the Laozi that all distinctions arise together, and therefore, the Laozi says, as soon as one speaks of the good, the beautiful, one has also given rise to the bad and the ugly. Hachiya sees the opening passages of the Zhuangzi about the flight of the bird Peng from the Northern Darkness towards the Southern Brightness as an allegory for transcendence from the secular realm to the realm of the Heaven.

Hachiya argues that the Zhuangzi unsettles the ordinary perspectives and creates the corresponding conditions for us to transcend it. It is in dialogue with his interlocutors – through uses of imagery, metaphors and paradoxes, Hachiya writes, that the Zhuangzi’s approach finds its fullest expression.

Zhuangzi’s Interlocutor and Methods

There is, Hachiya acknowledges the problem of historicity in the Zhuangzi. Many of the dialogues are clearly fictional creations. But their historical accuracy notwithstanding, the point of these dialogues is to offer an aesthetic counterpoint to the views and opinions of different schools and philosophers. It is in this context that he discusses the role Huizi plays as a partner and interlocutor in the Zhuangzi. Hachiya highlights that the two philosophers are driven by different concerns and operate at different levels of analysis. Thus, in his dialogues with Huizi, Zhuangzi makes a distinction between internals and externals.

Whereas Huizi’s logic is applicable to the external world, Hachiya elaborates, it is not of prime interest to Zhuangzi who highlights the limits inherent in logic and language. Thus, when Huizi questions how Zhuangzi can claim to know if the fish is happy or not given he is not fish, Zhuangzi turns the problem on its head by posing how Huizi can claim he does not know since Huizi is not Zhuangzi. The point is not so much as to outright negate logic, Hachiya writes, but to offer a counterpoint highlighting the limits of logical thinking. By doing so, the Zhuangzi dismantles the shackles of common sense by relativizing the concepts of size and length.

Aside from Huizi, Confucians, including Confucius himself, make frequent appearance  in the Zhuangzi and these dialogues find adequate mention in Hachiya’s book. Whereas for Confucians, benevolence is shown to have immanentist connotations – family, humaneness, etc. – rooted in human proclivities, for Zhuangzi speaking from the point of view of Heavens, benevolence and sageliness are not moored to conceptions of family and filial piety.

It is “ordinary men,” the Zhuangzi says, who “discriminate and parade their discriminations,” the sage “embraces things,” and even when he theorizes about the things within the six realms, he does not debate. In Zhuangzi’s words, then, “great benevolence is not benevolent because the sage has no relatives,” meaning that the Way of heaven and earth perceives the transformation of all things without favor or disfavor.

Moreover, the Zhuangzi is least convinced of the utility of Confucian moral persuasion. Even if you move the ruler’s heart for the time being, Zhuangzi says, it is still impossible to have a realistic influence. Therefore, he refuses to be recruited in the affairs of the state. Zhuangzi considers power a dirty thing and argues that one should not allow power to defile oneself.

Hachiya’s Zhuangzi

It is an expansion of horizon in the Zhuangzi, Hachiya thinks, that leads to the opening of the mind, and reveals the underlying processes of change, and transformation of all things under heaven. His book is a neat introduction to some of the major ideas in the Zhuangzi and how they might open a way for individual spiritual freedom, but it tends to exaggerate the transcendental aspects of the Zhuangzi to a fault.

In Hachiya’s reading, all of Zhuangzi’s interlocutors are assigned strictly immanentist positions to which then the Zhuangzi offers a transcendentalist critique. It is a reductionist approach to both the Zhuangzi and its interlocutors and fails to do justice to either of them fully.

There are immanentist aspects of the Zhuangzi’s philosophy that do not find adequate elaboration in Hachiya’s work. After all, the Zhuangzi does not flee from the secular world like Laozi on his ox but instead engages with it in aesthetically transformative ways. The Zhuangzi implores its readers to recognize the shaky foundations of their beliefs and offers an aesthetic encounter with another mode of being, one that is not only more aligned with the natural way of heaven and earth but also engages deeply with the absurdities of the world to interesting results.

Hachiya does not engage fully with the lively, mischievous and outright slanderous aspects of the Zhuangzi’s thought and personality. He is often reduced as an aloof, escapist figure. One is left wanting for a deeper exploration of the implications of the Zhuangzi’s critique of language as a means to knowledge, and how aesthetic philosophy – allegory, metaphors, imagery – can serve as an alternative to symbolic logic.