The Zhuangzi course proceeds apace, which means we expansively limp and stagger along with the Course hoping eventually to float and drift within the ancestor of all things, which makes all things the things they are, but which no thing can make anything of (chs 18 and 20; Ziporyn 72 and 84). More easily done than said!We've moved beyond the seven 内篇 "Inner Chapters" which are all most folks in these parts read - there's plenty of limping and staggering there! The remaining twenty-six chapters, of which we're reading the selections Brook Ziporyn includes in his Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, add complexity in part by being less complicated. Road signs, though pointing in different directions! Ziporyn suggests we approach them as efforts of earlier readers of the Inner Chapters to make sense of them. We're in a conversation - though we don't know with whom!
I framed the class with words from chapter 10:
Everyone in the world knows how to raise questions about what they don't know, but none know how to raise questions about what they already know. (Ziporyn 66)
I had the students give presentations on sections they were confident they understood. We soon lost our way.
To try to govern the world by doubling the number of sages would merely double the profits of the great robbers. If you create pounds and ounces to measure them with, they'll steal the pounds and ounces and rob with them as well. ... And if you create Humanity and Responsibility to regulate them with, why, they'll just steal the Humanity and Responsibility and rob with them as well. (ch 10, Ziporyn 64)
When a drunken man falls from a cart, he may be hurt but he will not be killed.. ... Having been unaware that he was riding, he is now unaware that he is falling. (ch 19, Ziporyn 78)
Man's life between heaven and earth is like a white stallion galloping past a crack in a wall. (ch 22, Ziporyn 88)
Beginningless said, "Not knowing is profound; knowing is shallow. Not knowing is internal; knowing is external."
At this, Great Clarity was provoked to let out a sigh. "Not knowing is knowing! Knowing is not knowing! Who knows the knowing of nonknowing?"...
Beginningless said: ... "If someone answers when asked about the Course [Dao], he does not know the Course. Though one may ask about the Course, this does not mean one has heard of the Course." (ch 22, Ziporyn 90)
Image above from the TV version of Tsai Chih Chung, 莊子說
