MEDITATIONS: ZHUANGZI, CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Words Lodged Elsewhere

It is your attitude which determines how the world manifests itself to you. Such a lofty claim sounds like new-age woo, like pseudo-spiritual nonsense. To the post-enlightenment rationalist-empiricist, it is meaningless drivel. Of course, to such men, everything which they do not already understand is presupposed to be nonsense.

However, if one is willing to identify where his knowledge ends and reality begins—to distinguish between his experience and that-which-is—then it becomes apparent that when we use language to describe our conceptions, we are everywhere and always describing subjectivity. What then? What conclusion must be drawn from this realization?

Like I said, it depends on one’s attitude toward existence itself.

The ineffable is that-which-is irrespective of our experience of it, irrespective of our ability to describe, even to contemplate or speculate about it. It is that thing which we come to understand through categorization, that is through dialectic exclusion:

you create death when you decide what constitutes life
you create difficulties when you create ease
you create long when you decide what is short
you create a low tone when you sing a high one (Lao-tzu)

For a thing to be a thing to a human being, we must create its opposite category. However, these categories are human artifice. They are a matter of utility. They are intrinsically erroneous maps by which we navigate what would otherwise be a sea of chaos. That means that in reality, the dualistic nature of the universe is false. The source of the Tao that cannot be named is not one thing.

Then what is it? Everything? Nothing?

Again, it depends on your attitude. This is the confrontation with the Post-Modern problem. Beneath phenomena, is there something or nothing? Is there a backstop, something which one hits if he runs in the wrong direction? Or are the possibilities endless? Are we secretly gods of our own subjective universe?

It is here, at this precipice, where arrogance becomes most dangerous.

For if we forget here that we do not know, if we convince ourselves that there is nothing more fundamental than human experience itself, then we assume gnosis—we assume that nothing could possibly be unknowable. This, friends, is the death of new understanding, the division of one’s consciousness and one’s instincts, the cutting off from the source of the objective itself: for the Tao source of life is what shaped our ancestors; it is what those whose nature was selected by nature, who were in accord with reality itself. The Confucians suffered from this, became convinced that what they knew was all that there is:

Zhuangzi said to Huizi, “Confucius went along for sixty years and transformed sixty times. What he first considered right he later considered wrong. He could never know if what he presently considered right were not fifty-nine times wrong.”

Huizi said, “Confucius certainly devoted himself to the service of knowledge.”

Zhuangzi said, “No, Confucius had let go of such things! Did he not say so himself? Confucius said, ‘We receive our innate stuff from the Great Root, and we stay alive by returning always to its mysterious efficacy.’ But each of his crowings was taken as a measure, each of his words became a model. This was only because, when the choice between profit and responsibility was set before him, he would make a show of some likes, dislikes, rights, and wrongs to subdue the mouths of others. If they had yielded in their hearts as well, they would not have dared to stand against him, and he could have settled what the world needed to be settled. Enough! Enough! I certainly can’t compete with that!” (Zhuangzi 226)

But as Zhuangzi suggests, we do not need to succumb to the temptation of our own arrogance. If we remember that our knowledge is not that-is-which-is, is merely the shadow on the wall cast by the root of all things, then we can rejuvenate and reconstitute our understanding. One method of accomplishing this Zhuangzi describes as words lodged elsewhere:

Almost all of my words are presented as coming from the mouths of other people, and of those the better part are further presented as citations from weighty ancient authorities. But all such words are actually spillover-goblet words, giving forth new meanings constantly, harmonizing them all through their Heavenly Transitions. . . .

These spillover-goblet words give forth new meanings constantly, so that all are harmonized through their Heavenly Transitions. They extend on and on without break and thus can remain in force to the end of one’s years. (225)

These spillover-goblet words, describe the birth of new meanings from old wisdom. This is the Nigredo: the acceptance that one is actually ignorant about that which one previously believed himself wise. Through this acceptance, the old wisdom can be observed in a new light. New truths emerge, new wisdom, new ways which sustain the relevance of ancient authorities. It is real progress, not arrogant denial of that which is, but the admittance that there is something more worth understanding.

Lao-tzu. “Chapter 2”. Tao Te Ching; An Authentic Taoist Translation, translated by John Bright-Fey, Sweetwater Press, 2014. p.10

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