In the Human World

Zhuangzi opens Chapter Four with a conversation between the sage Confucius and his student, Yan Hui who desires to go and serve as counselor to an unruly tyrant. Yan Hui hopes to put into practice what he has learned from his master and improve the conditions of the oppressed peoples. However, Confucius warns his student that he ought not go. He is not ready.

“Ah! You will most likely go and get yourself executed! if you’re following a course, it’s better not to mix anything extraneous into it. Mixing in the extraneous you wind up with multiple courses, which leads to mutual interference, which means constant anxiety. And yet all your anxiety will not save you.
“The Utmost Persons of old made sure they had it in themselves before they tried to put it into others. If what is in yourself is still unstable, what leisure do you have to worry about the conduct of some tyrant?” (Zhuangzi 34)

Zhuangzi, through the mouth of Confucius, goes on to explain that the virtue of the Utmost Persons is something undermined by both the desire for fame and recognition as well as the desire to master the universe through conscious understanding. Yan Hui is not yet firm enough to resist corruption by these temptations. However, even if he was, Confucius continues by explaining that, without understanding how to properly connect with others, his disciple will surely meet with disaster.

“Your high-handed display of regulating words about humankindness and responsible conduct in the face of such a tyrant would just be a way of showing off your beauty at the expense of his ugliness. This is called plaguing others—and he who plagues others will surely be plagued in return. So you are in danger of being plagued, are you not? . . .

“On the other hand, if you just accept everything anyone says, the princes of the state will surely take advantage of you in their jostlings with one another. Your eyes will be dazzled by it, your countenance will be flattened by it, your mouth busied with it, your face expressive of it—and finally your heart and mind will be completely formed by it . . . you’re certain to end up dead at the feet of the tyrant.” (Zhuangzi 35)

Their argument continues, but eventually Yan Hui gives in and asks what he should do. Confucius implores him that he should engage in a “fasting of the mind.”

Yan Hui said, “What is fasting of the mind?”

Confucius said, “You have so single-mindedly focused your will that you have been constantly hearkening to it, not with your ears but with your mind, and not only with your mind but even your vital energy. Instead let your hearkening stay positioned at the ears, your mind going no further than meshing there like a tally. The vital energy is then a vacuity, a waiting for the presence of whatever thing may come. The Course alone is the gathering of this vacuity. This vacuity is the fasting of the mind.” (Zhuangzi 37)

In the human world, the world of our conscious experience, we—like Confucius’ disciple Yan Hui—become deafened and blinded by our own preconceptions. We ignore that which to look upon makes us uncomfortable, and we project untruths onto those claims and arguments which we do not like. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche summarized this proclivity in aphorism 544, “Seeing poorly and hearing poorly. He who sees little, always sees less; he who hears poorly, always hears something more” (Nietzsche 242). This very human proclivity is a detrimental side-product of our conscious minds’ necessary interpretation of the world. It is what allows us to perceive and think in the first place, but the means by which it translates the indeterminate infinium of a constantly changing universe into something orderly and predictable is imperfect.

In short, our consciousness makes mistakes that are normally invisible to itself, so full is it of its own preconceptions—hence the need to, “empty one’s cup,” for those of us familiar with the popular Zen Buddhists story.

Zhuangzi, using his own version of a Confucian dialectic, teaches us the same with his concept of “fasting of the mind.” The “mind” in this case is our conscious interpretive organ—for lack of a better word. It is the part of us we normally associate with I, or the ego. This ego sometimes renders us unable to discern what truly is. It blinds us to “the Course,” the Way, the Path, the Road, and the Tao. Worse yet, our preconceptions make us think we know where we are going when we don’t. It is one thing to be lost, but it is far more perilous to exhaust one’s time and resources sprinting off in the wrong direction. And yet, this is exactly what happens to us.

This is the deeper, darker message behind the common adage, “The road to Hell is paved with good intensions.” Yan Hui wants to help, but he has yet to learn how he can engage with the world and other people and actually succeed in helping. Without acting in accordance with the way the world actually is, he will inevitably make a mistake—the consequences of which may be minor, or they may be grave. Likewise, we wish to make our wills manifest in our lives. Also likewise, if we take our ignorance for knowledge and our preconceptions for truth, then we are likely to run headlong into catastrophe after catastrophe. At best, we live our lives this way through trial and error.

But Confucius / Zhuangzi suggests a remedy. He gives us a means of remaining open, of listening to others as though they know something we don’t—to borrow a line from Dr. Peterson. That is what his fasting of the mind really is. If one actively listens and actively allows what one’s ears hear to impress upon him, then he is more likely to hear what was really said and not just what he expected. It is the letting down of mental and ideological barriers. It is the letting go of control and the trusting of oneself to be able to adapt to the unknown without one’s identity being destroyed by it.

This is the concept of No-Mind, of Mushin, of Wuxin, of Wu Wei. It is, “just to fulfill what’s mandated to you, your fate—to go be what you can’t help being.” (Zhuangzi 39). It is Bruce Lee’s, “Fighting without fighting.”

Instead of trying to listen and trying to help, it is best that we begin with ourselves. But even that is not enough. We ought to go further and abandon even our concerns for ourselves, our success, our failure, or our status. We ought to stop fearing being useless and instead listen with an open mind as Confucius says, “Absorb yourself in the realities of the task at hand to the point of forgetting your own existence. Then you will have no leisure to delight in life or abhor death” (Zhuangzi 39).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human, 1878, translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Penguin Books, 1994.

Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi; The Complete Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn, Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2020