Zhuangzi · Philosophy
Zhuangzi’s vision of spiritual freedom - <em>xiaoyao you</em>, ‘free and easy wandering’ - soars with the vast Peng bird beyond every narrow measure, and completes itself in his serene acceptance of death, most famously when he drummed on a tub and sang at his own wife’s funeral.
The Zhuangzi opens not with an argument but with a myth of the immense. In the northern darkness lives a fish called Kun, so huge that no one knows how many miles it measures. It transforms into a bird called Peng, whose back is equally vast and whose wings, when it rouses itself to fly, are like clouds hanging across the whole sky. This monstrous bird beats the water and mounts ninety thousand miles into the air, riding the wind southward toward the great ocean of heaven. And on the ground, a cicada and a little dove watch it and laugh: why go up ninety thousand miles to travel south? We flit from tree to tree, and sometimes don’t even make it, and that is quite far enough. The small creatures cannot imagine the great flight, and mistake the limits of their world for the limits of the world. The chapter is called ‘Free and Easy Wandering’ (xiaoyao you), and its subject is the size of the soul.
What would perfect freedom actually be? Zhuangzi works up to it by degrees. There are people whose talents fit them for one office, one village, one prince - small birds. There is the wise Song Rongzi, who is not moved by the whole world’s praise or blame, a great advance - yet he still, Zhuangzi notes, has not planted himself firmly. There is the sage Liezi, who could actually ride the wind and travel through the sky in cool mastery - marvellous, and still he depended on the wind; take away the wind and he falls. True freedom, Zhuangzi suggests, would depend on nothing at all. It belongs to the one who can mount the very axis of heaven and earth, ride the changing energies of nature, and so wander through the boundless - needing no particular condition to be in place, because they have accorded themselves with the whole course of things. Such a person, he says, has no fixed self to defend, seeks no merit, craves no name. Freedom is measured by how little you must depend on.
Zhuangzi explains himself to the horrified Huizi. When my wife first died, he says, how could I of all people not be grieved? But I looked back to her beginning, before she was born; and not only before she was born, but before she had a body; and not only before she had a body, but before she had even the vital breath. In the vast, mingled flux, a change took place and there was breath; another change, and there was a body; another change, and there was life; and now there has been yet another change, and there is death. This whole sequence, he says, is like the turning of the four seasons - spring to summer, autumn to winter. She is now lying at peace in the ‘Great Chamber’ of heaven and earth. If I were to follow her with sobbing and wailing, I would be showing that I did not understand what is destined for all things. So I stopped. His serenity is not coldness; it is the fruit of seeing a single death inside the immense rhythm of transformation that produced her and everyone. To wail against it would be like weeping because winter follows autumn.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that xiaoyao you (‘free and easy wandering’) is Zhuangzi’s ideal of spiritual freedom - roaming beyond narrow perspectives and dependence, like the vast Peng bird - and that it completes itself in equanimity toward death, seen as a natural transformation (Zhuangzi drumming on a tub at his wife’s death). Ex…
Leads to Friedrich Nietzsche.
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