MEDITATIONS: ZHUANGZI, CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Zeyang

We each ought beware becoming the two-dimensional man—my name for the kind of intellectual who falls afolly of his own frozen abstractions, who cannot operate on multiple levels of abstraction but instead collapses his thinking into a singular plain. In so doing, to him, shadows become indistinguishable from the things-in-themselves. His vision does not narrow so much as it broadens and shallows. He becomes blind to what lies behind his own conceptual filters. He believes his own lies, mistakes his model for reality. Chapter twenty-five of the Zhuangzi warns against this propensity for man to take a particular way for the Way itself.

Wang Guo, in a conversation with Zeyang, recommends the latter seek Gong Yuexiu to commend him to the king of Chu. Wang Guo, describing Gong Yuexiu, describes a sage thus:

“A sage is someone who gets through the intertwining of things, so that everything forms a single body around him, yet without knowing it to be so, without knowing it to be right: it is just his inborn nature. Whether communing with his allotted fate or shaken into activity, he takes the Heavenly as his only teacher. Others follow him, pinning labels on what he does, but soon afterward they get caught up by the understanding of theirs and thus can never walk his walk for very long—how then can they ever stop? . . .

It is only someone who transforms every day together with all things who can remain always one and unchanging.” (Zhuangzi 209)

It is unavoidable to rely on words and labels. Without them, we cannot think or communicate. Even sensory perception is like this. When we see, hear, smell, taste, or feel something, it automatically becomes categorized in our minds whether we intend it to or not. In his commentaries on the Tao Te Ching, Takuan Soho describes these sensory experience as indistinguishable from desires (Lao-tzu & Takuan 3). Takuan ends his commentary on the same subject explaining that because of this, “there must be desires.”

That is all to say that the categorization is inevitable and therefore not the problem in and of itself. The problem is an unwillingness to let go when it is time for one’s precepts and conceptions to change. We feel, when we have fallen into the trap of the two-dimensional man, that our conceptions are the very world itself. We take as axiomatic that our conscious understanding is correct and therefore the reality that contradicts us must be incorrect. When that reality is something true about ourselves, we have merged with our concepts—identified with a Persona, as Jung might call it. This is quite the opposite of being a sage who, “just moves along with the world without replacing anything, going through every kind of activity without getting stuck in any ruts. So how could he have any thought of ‘merging with them?” (Zhuangzi 209)

This is a matter of knowing when to stop, or rather, knowing where we end and our ideas begin—to delineate between our intrinsic virtuosities and what our conscious understanding believes our virtues to be—what we believe our self-worth to be: I describe it this way because we cannot change or adapt if we mistakenly believe doing so would put us in peril. Ironic, considering it is the stultification of our notions of ourselves and the world which put us into peril in the first place:

“You must know when to stop” means that if names cannot be dispensed with, just know where to stop. If you know where to stop, even if there are names, you do not forget the nameless unworked wood, so you don’t get trapped in names, because you’re not in peril. If you don’t know where to stop, then you fall into danger and are imperiled. (Lao-tzu & Takuan 79)

So we know that we can take our conclusions too far, that we can collapsing our perception under our own arrogance, resulting in self-deception which ultimately leads to self-destruction—the inevitable result of any life-denying philosophy. Of course, how could it be any other way? To move in opposition to the transcendent Truth is to move in opposition to reality itself.

But that begs the question, “How do we know when to stop?”

To answer this, I want to call our attention back to the curious line quoted above. When the Zhuangzi describe the sage as one who “just moves along with the world without replacing anything,” what does that mean?

I believe the answer is contained within a proceeding paragraph of the same chapter:

Tang found his charioteer in Gateman Deng Heng and took him for his personal tutor. He ‘followed’ this teacher without being confined by him; he had learned from him how to complete himself by following after others. If he had similarly put him in charge of handling the names of things, the excess standards that would then belong to each name would have provided him with double-vision. It was in this way that Confucius treated as his private tutor even his own exhaustive thinking. (Zhuangzi 210)

The key in this section I believe to be the comment on double-vision. In the post-enlightenment western world, we are likely to interpret “double-vision” as negative. It is a blurring of boundaries and in impediment to precision. However, if our very thoughts are wrong, if our conceptual categories are what require reevaluating, then isn’t a blurring of boundaries necessary?

It seems to me that this double-vision is the realization that our conceptions contain elements that we were not formerly considering—or that they contain vacancies which are in need of filling. This double-vision may in fact be the engagement of our creativity, the introduction to the possibility that a thing is more or different than it seems.

I think this is at least one way to resist merging with our own ideas. We can know where to stop by realizing that reality goes on always longer than we can imagine. With that notion in mind, we can judge our distance not by the end—which is in fact never the end—but by how far we travel while following in accord with the “driving force of the chariot.” And we can free ourselves to do this by realizing that we are not at risk of self destruction, because we are not replacing anything. Things are already as they are, we were simply mistaken about them. We were seeing in “single-vision,” when a second, or third, or fourth spectrum of sight was necessary to incorporate the whole of that thing—even if that thing is us.

Lao-tzu and Takuan Soho. Tao Te Ching; Zen Teachings on the Taoist Classic, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambala Publications Inc., 2010

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