Week 6 ICLP

Free and Easy Wandering: 逍遙遊 Story 1

I’ll admit, translating the Zhuangzi has not been easy by any measure. One difference from the Daodejing is that sometimes it’s not as intuitively clear what the author is getting at through a particular passage. But thankfully, my teacher is super kind and patient as I work through different translation strategies and I believe I’ve been able to pick up many things quickly.

This week the story I want to highlight from the first chapter of the Zhuangzi is the story of how “little understanding cannot come up to great understanding”. Zhuangzi talks about how the morning mushroom doesn’t understand anything of nighttime, and how the summer cicada knows nothing of the other seasons. They do not live long. In comparison, however, he talks about a caterpillar and a rose that once lived for hundreds and thousands of years. The understanding that the morning mushroom and summer cicada has pales in comparison to the accumulated wisdom of the caterpillar and the rose. What I take this to mean is that this story is not just a reminder of our human mortality but about how many holes there might be in our understanding of things and of the world. We tend to think that as human beings, we have understood many truths that other creatures can’t comprehend, yet all of us live very short lives, how much could we possibly know about all there is to know? Hence, this is a call by Zhuangzi for us to be more humble, and not flaunt our wisdom and knowledge. This is a common message throughout the Zhuangzi and is often directed against the Confucianists and Mohists who’d often, according to Zhuangzi, brandish their pride, wisdom and moral virtue.

There are many more stories to share, and the Zhuangzi is a very deep and comprehensive text, so here’s to learning much more over the next few weeks!