Educated youth

One of the talented students in "Religion of Trees" designed this flyer for something we decided to do this week. We decided last week, but couldn't decide what to call it besides "gathering." ("Giving thanks" was sort of in the air.) I told the class today that we can't count on the same magic happening as happened last time. For one thing, the trees will be leafless and, given the enthusiasm of our resident leafblower, the ground beneath them will likely be bare, too. But they want it to be "spontaneous." No plan, no preparation. And so it will be! Even if it it doesn't measure up to the literally golden experience we had last time, it'll be a learning for us. And the trees? They won't mind.

To complicate things a little, the last assigned reading of the class was Chinese - a 1984 novella about "educated youth" sent to fell an ancient forest during the Cultural Revolution. It's full of Daoist resonances, but I didn't expect the class to pick up on them. I did half-hope some would look up "educated youth," though... 

But it's also the day after the Thanksgiving break, so I thought it better not to count on students having finished the reading, and fashioned a handout of three passages from Zhuangzi relevant to the book but meaningful on their own, too. Their common theme - the gnarled old trees which survive because human beings see them as useless, and, from this, the limits of human concepts of usefulness.

The longest, from Zhuangzi ch 4, is a little novella of its own. Here's the whole section, translated by Brook Ziporyn, but the most telling part for a class called "Religion of Trees" is the final bit. Carpenter Stony and his apprentice have been pondering a big tree around which humans have built a shrine. (Or perhaps it's being "used as the altar for the spirits of the land.") The apprentice thinks it would make good timber, but Stony tells him he can see it's old wood is useless. 

In a dream that night, however, the tree appears to Carpenter Stony, pities the "useful" trees humans work to death, wittily tells him it's been working on being useless for a long time ... I've finally managed it - and it is of great use to me, before challenging the capacity of a worthless man with one foot in the grave [to] know what is or isn't a worthless tree! Carpenter Stony awakens and recounts the dream to his apprentice, but the apprentice is nonplussed. If it's trying to be useless, he asks, what's it doing with a shrine around it?

Carpenter Stony said, "Hush! Don't talk like that! Those people came to it for refuge on their own initiative. In fact, the tree considers it a great disgrace to be surrounded by this uncomprehending crowd. If they hadn't made it a shrine, they could easily have gone the other way and started carving away at it. What it protects, what protects it, is not this crowd, but something totally different. To praise it for fulfilling its responsiblity in the role it happens to play - that would really be missing the point!"

I don't claim to know the point (worthless teacher!). But the image of a tree mortified by human devotions, though tolerating them as they're better than being cut down, may be enough to keep us from being overly sentimental. Full report on Wednesday!

Zhuangzi say

The Zhuangzi course is finished. We had our final meeting on Friday, and the papers (all but one) have been turned in. We got somewhere in our eight weeks, though I'm not sure if it's a sign of success or even greater success that each student found something different. We went in with the promise that this was a text which philosophers construed in widely varied and apparently incompatible ways - mystical, agnostic, perspectivalist, relativist, fatalist, nihilist, existentialist! Most of the students got that, whatever the Zhuangzi is saying, it says it by not saying only that.

For my part, I have a sense of it... lucky I didn't have to write a final essay, too! I'm partial to the view that the Zhuangzi is a playful pranksterish text, which works by the pitch perfect way it presents all sorts of different views and by the impossibility of saying just when they turn to parody.

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something. (ch 2, trans Watson)

I like Ziporyn's idea that the Zhuangzi works as a sort of "wild card" allowing one to participate fully in social life without taking it so seriously as to be damaged by it, what some other recent interpreters call "genuine pretending." But it's more than that, a cacophony of sounds from the Great Clump coursing through the hollows in things, an initiation into a world of ongoing transformation.

If I teach it again - and I'm thinking I'd like to - it will be a somewhat different format, but that may be for the best. Instead of seven meetings there will be ten. This should help me address the one big problem we had this time. Despite everything I know about the problems with reading texts as Great Books, presumed accessible without knowing anything about their context of emergence or reception, and about the red herring of a "philosophical Daoism" distinct from the rituals and myths of Daoist "religion," we wound up understanding it as a book, if an ironic and shifty one.

Next time, students will get that this is more then a general shiftiness and irony. They'll know that the "Confucius" of the Zhuangzi isn't the Confucius of tradition, for instance! Or that this text isn't just about the paradoxes of language and consciousness, but is about life bobbing in streams of 氣 qi. But I also don't want to present it as a culturally inaccessible text, one one could not hope to understand without years of specialist training or insider knowledge. Context and reception will come in installments. So here's how I'm thinking I might proceed, building around the current structure.

Week 1: Welcome, with an activity - perhaps calligraphy

Week 2: Inner Chapters 1-3

Week 3: Inner Chapters 4-7, film about Daoist ritual

Week 4: Some Daodejing and Analects, with an activity

Week 5: Presentation on a passage from Inner Chapters, using commentaries and Laozi or Confucius, as relevant; Outer Chapters 8-10

Week 6: Remaining Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters in Ziporyn

Week 7: Introduction to the cosmology of Yijing, with an activity

Week 8: Reread Inner Chapters; choose text for final presentation

Week 9: Zhuangzi beyond words; in class read together Chapter 20

Week 10: Presentations of process and outcome of final papers

不知周

Some gleanings from the Zhuangzi in our final session:

The seeds of things have mysterious workings. (ch18)

Let yourself be carried along by things so that the mind wanders freely. (4:16)

This human form is merely a circumstance that has been met with, just something stumbled into, but those who have become humans take delight in it nonetheless. (6:28)

When it came time to arrive, the master did just what the time required. When it came time to go, he followed along with the flow. Resting content in the time and finding his place in the flow, joy and sorrow had no way to seep in. (3:7)

Shun said, "If my body is not my own possession, whose is it?"
Cheng said, "It is just a form lent by heaven and earth. Life is not your own possession; it is just a harmony lent by heaven and earth." (ch22, p87)

Hui Shi's talents were fruitlessly dissipated running after things and never returning to himself. He was like a man trying to silence an echo with shouts or to outrun his own shadow. How sad! (ch33, p125)

So neither you nor I nor any third party can ever know how it is - shall we wait for yet some "other"? (2:43)

When the smaller is hidden within the larger, there remains someplace into which it can escape. But if you hide the world in the world, so there is nowhere for anything to escape to, this is an arrangement ... that can sustain all things. (6:27)

Go as far as whatever you happen to get to, and leave it at that. (2:22)

Fools imagine they are already awake. (2:42)

The blackboard image above works the characters 不知周 into a butterfly. I'd asked students to try writing these character a few times and then write them on the board, maybe like butterflies, but only later disclosed the meaning of the characters and the reason for the exercise. The text is full of frustrating claims that sages and the "genuine men of old" got things right by not trying to, not aiming to, perhaps not even knowing they were. Can one learn from such a book?

Once Zhou [Zhuangzi] dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhou 不知周. (2:48)

Great belch

Stunning work by one of the students in the Zhuangzi class. Ch. 2's piping of the earth resulting when the Great Clump belches forth its vital breath (Ziporyn, 9), sending the wind through the endlessly varied orifices of the world, is evoked exquisitely by film randomly sprinkled with water or ink, with altered sounds of the artist whistling.

Ever untimely

I noticed yesterday that my watch battery had entered that capricious stage that marks the end of its efficacy, stopping for stretches of time, then starting up again.

This anomaly came in handy in this morning's Zhuangzi class, which began as scheduled at 10:00. But my watch said 6:18 and I told the class so - and why, and that I didn't know if this was 6:18am or 6:18pm. As the class progressed I looked to my watch reflexively, as I usually do, monitoring the unfolding of our discussion over our allotted time. 6:51! 7:10! Sometimes I checked my laptop for EST time but sometimes I also announced the time on my watch. 7:40! As we had knock-down-drag-out discussions of passages like

   Huizi said to Zhuangzi, "Your words are useless."
   Zhuangzi said, "It is only when you know uselessness that you can understand anything about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and wide, but a man at any time only uses as much of it as his two feet can cover. But if you were to dig away all the earth around his feet, down to the Yellow Springs, would that little patch he stands on be of any use to him?"
   Huizi said, "It would be useless."
   Zhuangzi said, "Then the usefulness of the useless should be quite obvious." 

(from the probably not Zhuangzi-penned "Miscellaneous" chapter 26; Ziporyn 112) my untimely timekeeping went from a jarring interruption to a joke to feeling like something more profound. (We did the same with that passage, reading it as profound and then as a SNL parody of profundity - and then it was profound. The profoundness of the faux-profound should be quite obvious.)

This was our last session just reading the Zhuangzi together and Huizi's question was on all our lips. It recaps a conversation which appears already at the end of ch. 1 when Zhuangzi's sophist friend fatefully compares Zhuangzi's words to a huge useless tree, setting up one of the text's abiding images. What better illustration of the Dao than a tree so useless that noone thinks to cut it down? An analogous tree actually says so in a carpenter's dream at 4.17: If I were useful, do you think that I could have grown to be so great? (Ziporyn 30).

But really: what use is any of this? I'm afraid the question was to more than this text, this class, extending to all texts and all classes, and beyond! What use is there in questioning usefulness? And in a wounded world of needy people, including ourselves, isn't it irresponsible to pursue such questions? It was a more frustrated discussion than our last ones, but productively (I won't say usefully!) so. Perhaps we're learning to recognize all words (and claims and texts and classes) as what in ch. 27 are called spillover goblet words 卮言 (explained by Ziporyn as hinged vessels that tip and empty when they get too full), giving forth [new meanings] constantly, harmonizing them all through their Heavenly Transitions (Ziporyn 114).

If we learn to expect and welcome that tipping we're back on Course! Our world is itself at a tipping point; might the Zhuangzi's end-run around usefulness disclose more sustainable ways of being part of it?

Mission drift

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

Thinking from the penumbra

Preparing for a class on the Zhuangzi in the midst of a more than usually frazzling week was, I admit it, impossible. So I started today's class asking a student, who'd missed the last class, to share his reflections on a fun little dialogue:

The penumbra said to the shadow, "First you were walking, then you were standing still. First you were sitting, then you were upright. Why can't you decide on a single course of action?"
The shadow said, "Do I depend on something to make me as I am? Does what I depend on depend on something else? Do I depend on it as a snake does on its skin, or a cicada on its shell? How would I know why I am so or not so?" (Ziporyn 20-21)

Things took their own course from there, from shadows and penumbras (the edges of shadows, which we decided must have penumbra of their own, and...) to dreams (and dreams in dreams, and...) to the "piping of the earth" as the "belching" of the "Great Clump" blows through landscapes and a symphony of sounds arise (or through our seven orifices, producing joy and anger, sorrow and happiness, plans and regrets, transformations and stagnations, unguarded abandonment and deliberate posturing) to the wisdom of loutish one-footed ex-cons and the dream teachings of huge ancient trees and finally to the power of one Huzi to confound a shaman whose ability to read destinies in faces makes people flee in terror, but runs for his life after seeing just a few of the aspects of the cosmic "reservoir" in Huzi.

Of course

Why is seminar pedogagy so rich? Because things like this happen. I asked each student in the Zhuangzi single text course to identify a passage from our reading (chapters 1-3) which they found particularly interesting. 10 students spontaneously identified 10 different passages.

It's just the setting you'd want for discussing perspectival Zhuangzi! Framing it all was one of my choices: Courses are formed by someone walking them. (2.19) "Course(s)" is Ziporyn's translation of dao 道 but I'm happy to claim this insight for seminar learning as well.

And Zhuangzi was waiting for us in one of his characteristic hijackings of a famous story, too, here a story of the sage king Yao, who first unified rule in China. When one day ten suns rose at once, "scorching the grains and crops, killing the plants and grasses" (as Ziporyn quotes from the Huainanzi in a note), Yao had nine of them shot out of the sky. Moral of the story: there must be only one ruler, one standard of rightness. But in Zhuangzi (2.37) Yao is advised a better course by Shun, the very person Yao chose to be his successor:

In ancient times, Yao asked Shun, "I want to attack Zong, Kuai, and Xu'ao, for though I sit facing south on the throne, still I am not at ease. Why is this?"
Shun said, "Though these three may continue to dwell out among the grasses and brambles, why should this make you ill at ease? Once upon a time, ten suns rose in the sky at once, and the ten thousand things were all simultaneously illuminated. And how much better are many Virtuosities than many suns?"

Confucius say

In the state of Lu there was a man called Wang Tai whose foot had been chopped off as a punishment. Yet somehow he had as many followers as Confucius himself. Chang Ji questioned Confucius about it. "Wang Tai is a one-footed ex-con, and yet his followers divide the state of Lu with you, Master. When he stand he offers no instruction, and when he sits he gives no opinions. And yet, they go to him empty and return filled. Is there really such a thing as wordless instruction, a formless way of bringing the mind to completion? What kind of man is he?"

This was the only part of the Zhuangzi I read to students in our first meeting today. Wang Tai is only the first of the cavalcade of maimed and mangled misfits of the 4th chapter, and this account actually goes on to a quite extensive articulation of what Wang Tai's wordless wisdom might be which I saved for another day. But I did quote the next lines:

Confucius said, "That man, my master, is a sage. Only my procrastination has kept me from going to follow him myself. If he is master even to me, how much more should he be so to you. I shall bring not only the state of Lu but all the world to follow him!"

(trans. Ziporyn, 32-33)

Gasping for air

I can sense that this upcoming semester's classes are going to pull me in different directions. The "Religion and the Anthropocene" class is about learning to look at, and see, climate change and its claims on us, its hard lessons about the far-reaching consequences of our actions and the vast interdependent systems which make possible our living and that of the rest of nature. Zhuangzi, on the other hand...

泉涸，魚相與處於陸，相呴以溼，

相濡以沫，不如相忘於江湖。

When the springs dry up, the fish have to
cluster together on the shore, gasping on
each other to keep damp and spitting on
each other to stay wet. But that is no match
for forgetting all about one another
in the rivers and lakes.  (6:24, trans. Ziporyn)

(No, I can't read the original, though I was able to find it in the text.)

Orific

Planning for my 7-session course on the Zhuangzi this gave me pause

Illustrating the final section of what are known as the Inner Chapters (1-7), this is from Zhuangzi Speaks (trans. Brian Bruya, 152) by Tsai Chih Chung, a cartoonist you've seen before bringing Confucius, Mencius (twice) and Zen to life. This one's even been animated!

Wilde Daoist

The ample Daoism section of the Norton Anthology of World Religions, which I gave a talk about a few years ago, has provided a perfect text for kicking off the single-text course I'll be teaching on the Zhuangzi. It's a review of a first English translation of the text by one Oscar Wilde in 1890, shortly before the appearance of The Picture of Dorian Gray!

He sought to destroy society, as we know it .... Of course it is sad to be told that it is immoral to be consciously good, and that doing anything is the wort kind of idleness. Thousands of excellent and really earnest Philanthropists would be absolutely thrown upon the rates if we adopted the view that nobody should be allowed to meddle in what does not concern them. ... It is clear that Chuang Tsu is a very dangerous writer, and the publication of his book in English, two thousand years after his death, is obviously premature, and may cause a great deal of pain to many thoroughly respectable and industrious persons. (2087, 2090-91)

Wilde likens Zhuangzi to everyone from Plato to Meister Eckhart to Darwin, finding he had summed up in himself every mood in European metaphysical or mystical thought (2087) and transcended them all, along with calling out the vanity of every attempt at economic, political or moral governance. Will we be ready to join him?