MEDITATIONS: ZHUANGZI, CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Gengsang Chu

From hence forward we explore what are referred to as the miscellaneous chapters of the Zhuangzi. First among them is titled “Gengsang Chu,” named after the Taoist sage of the Zigzag Mountains who discourses with his disciple, Nanrong Chu.

As always, the character names bear symbolic meaning. Roughly speaking, Gengsang Chu might be translated as something like “Overstorage Pain.” His disciple, Nanrong Chu, can be read as “Southbloom Longlife.”

Before diving into heir conversation, it would do to understand what each man represents. In the first case, Gengsang Chu—Overstorage Pain—suggests a superabundance of suffering. As a student of Lao-tzu and sage of the Way, his name makes perfect sense. To learn the Way requires accepting, embracing, and integrating (i.e. learning from) the suffering intrinsic to being itself. Gengsang Chu is the personification of the Equalizing Assessment of all things. What we judge as good is good, but also what we judge as bad is also good. Such a philosophical explosion destroys the division between the two; it goes beyond good and evil, collapsing them into life, being, and existence as they are.

The significance of Nanrong Chu—Southbloom Longlife—proves more elusive. We are told that the Zizag Mountains are in the north, and that Lao-tzu, who Nanrong Chu is eventually sent to visit, lives to the south of the mountains. In that context, “Southbloom,” suggests that the disciple comes to his enlightenment only once he journeys southward, down from the mountains. This is reminiscent of Peng’s flight from the northern to the southern Oblivion, and it corresponds with the Jungian concept that individuation proceeds from an elevation of ego-conscious heights to a plunging into the depths of the unconscious Shadow. As for the second half of the disciple’s name, “Longlife,” it is likely a reference to Taoist notions of immortality—meaning a release from the anxieties related to death—a consequence of achieving enlightenment.

Now, with our stage set in the northern Zigzag Mountains, we enter in the midst of a conversation between Gengsang Chu and his disciples:

“What is really worth praising about those two, Yao and Shun? All their debates and distinctions are like a man drilling a hole in someone’s wall and then stuffing it with a straw plug. . . . What benefit does all this meticulous scheming really bring to the world? Elevating the worthy only makes the people complete with each other. Putting the understanding in charge just makes the people loot one another. Such things can do nothing to enhance the lives of the people. Once they become diligent about their own advantage, the sons will end up killing their fathers and the ministers their rulers, burrowing through walls to rob each other in broad daylight. Mark my words, the root of the truly great disorder lies in people like Yao and Shun, and its branches read down for a thousand generations. A thousand generations of this and I guarantee it will end up with human beings eating one another for dinner!” (Zhuangzi 186)

A lesson from the over-stored suffering of the world: we are the manufacturers of our own problems. We drill holes so that we can fill them with solutions that are less effective than the structure before the holes were drilled. And we do this because we are obsessed with consequences—we desire fate to bend to our will. In each of us, this is our Will to Power. Possessed by such a will, envy and jealousy are bound to proliferate, the end result being the betrayal of kin and ken. Out of our bitterness and unchecked wont, we will inevitably destroy our inherited social institutions. All authority and hierarchy, including even the family, will become cannibalized in pursuit of perfect freedom of the will—the fulfillment of the unfilled Will to Power.

This might be the Zhuangzi’s clearest warning about the consequences of human desire left to expand in perpetuity, and it can be made even clearer passing over it with a Zen Buddhist lens. Because if all suffering stems from desire, than to cling to desire is to amass an over-abundance of suffering, an Overstorage of Pain—for which Gengsang Chu is named.

However, clear as the message may be, it is still a difficult lesson to put into practice (at the time of writing, I still struggle immensely). Nanrong Chu feels much the same way:

Nanrong Chu straightened up on his mat with a jolt, saying, “What then can someone like me, advanced in age, do to live up to what you are saying?”

Gengsang Chu said, “Keep your body whole, hold fast to the life in you, don’t let your thoughts get lost in busy calculations, and in three years you will have lived up to it.”

Nanrong Chu said, “All bodies are equipped with similar eyes and ears, and yet the blind and deaf cannot uses theirs to see or hear. All bodies are equipped with similar minds, and yet the mad cannot use theirs to get controls of themselves. All human bodies are basically analogous—is it external things that make them operate so differently, so that some of us, no matter how we may try, just can’t do what we set out to do? . . . I try to learn the Course, but it only reaches as far as my ears.” (186)

Gengsang Chu gives simple advice: tend to your health and don’t think about what will or might happen; just live your life as it presents itself to you, and it time you’ll have let go of those pathological desires that drive each of us toward envy and resentment.

But as simple as the sage’s wisdom is, Nanrong Chu question is valid. Is it not true that external factors, context and chance, affect the outcomes of our decisions—or even the decisions themselves? He is asking if human beings really have enough free-will to determine their attitudes toward fate, and thus enough free-will do change the course of their destinies. As he is, Nanrong Chu admits to being unable himself.

Gengsang Chu said, “There is no more I can say. A flitting bee cannot bring to term a moth larva on the leaves; the wee chickens of Yue cannot hatch a swan egg. . . . One is up to the task and the other is not. My abilities are meager, insufficient to transform you. Why don’t you go south to see Laozi?”

So Nanrong Chu set out shouldering his provisions, and after seven days and nights arrived at Laozi’s place. . . .

Laozi said, “Just looking at the space between your eyebrow and eyelash, I got the whole picture about you. . . . You’re all regulated and confined by your own schemes, like someone who has lost his parents and then brandishes a pole to seek them in the depths of the sea. You yourself are the goner! You want so desperately to return to your real dispositions and your inborn nature, but can find no way in. A pitiful sight!”

Nanrong Chu asked to be allowed to lodge there, trying to summon up what he liked about himself and get rid of what he disliked. After torturing himself like this for ten days, he went again to see Laozi, who said, “So you’ve been trying to rinse it all out of yourself, and it’s coming out ripe and thick. And yet there’s still plenty of the hateful stuff frothing over in there, eh? Indeed, when there are external things that entangle you, it's useless to come to grips with them by tying up your hands in them—that just connects them up with what’s entangling you within. And when something inside you is entangling you, it’s useless to get a grip on it by further tying yourself up in it—that just connects it up with what’s entangling you from the outside.” (187)

What Lao-tzu has identified in Nanrong Chu Miyamoto Musashi called, “the sickness of the sickness of the mind.” It is the desire to eliminate or change the desire which causes the over-storage of suffering. It is the natural reaction when one consciously tries to employ the teachings of Taoists, Buddhists, or Stoics—and it is the opposite action which one ought to take if he seeks to bring himself in accord with himself and reality. Archetypally, it is the impulse of the tyrannical king to squeeze ever tighter, even (especially) when the result is increasingly rebellion and loss of control.

This is the difference between conscious trying and unconscious letting-go. It is contrived action versus uncontrived wuwei. Remember that Gegsang Chu’s advice didn’t include a conscious release of desires, only an active living of one’s life. By pursuing one’s own particular, meaningful Ways or modes of being, one becomes engrossed in the moment and in what he creates. His mind seemingly evaporates, only reappearing when necessary for reevaluation but then vanishing again as the activity resumes.

Thus is Lao-tzu’s wisdom which he passes on to Nanrong Chu:

“Walk without knowing where you are going, stop without knowing what you are doing, slither along with all things, joining in their undulations. . . . This is what is called melting the ice and breaking through the freeze—but are you capable of it? As for the Utmost Person, he takes his food from the earth but his joy from Heaven, undisturbed by both people and things, by both benefit and harm. He joins in none of their extravagances, not in their plans or projects. Unfettered, he arrives. Oblivious, he departs. . . . He acts without knowing what he is doing, and moves along without knowing where he is going, his body like the branch of a withered tree and his mind like dead ashes. IN this state, neither good nor bad fortune can reach him. And if even good and bad fortune are nothing to you, how can anything human plague you?” (188)

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