Commentary On the First two Sections of Chuang Tzu, The Book of Zhwangzi.

The Great Wind

He doesn't like mushrooms. Too temporary. To judge the sounds of the world, mainly the rhetoric, requires separating small and great, young and old. The whole complex of interactions is a failing, "like music from an empty tube, or mushrooms from the warm moisture. Day and night succeed one another and come before us and we know not whence they sprout (179). Mushroom is a word for dialectic that sprouts large and small, internal and external.

 

Opposite views produce each other, Republican and Democrat (182). He wants to stand in the center of the right (of thought) where he can respond without end to the changing views of the affirming and denying (183). He resolves it with the joke. What is a horse? Finally an answer to Salinger's Riddle. The universes of man will dispute. His sons will tell him what is a horse. It is different from what he said was a horse. They point that out, affirm and deny, horsing around. That's it. "Separation led to completion, then ensued dissolution" (184). He says give up this devotion to our own views and adopt the ordinary meaning of the simple use of things. Then stop (184). The ordinary is so arcane it can't be found among the immortals. Immortality, sagacity, the superior man are all synonyms for idiot. We will give everything to restore the commonplace world. I keep giving everything and taking it back.

 

All this is likened to breath blowing through a bamboo flute, the notes of Man, Earth and Heaven. The great Wind blows through their "myriad apertures." Search me O God and know my thoughts. The flute trees of forest earth, the caves, the Hopi blow hole are like the nose, mouth and ear. The sounds that issue from them are caused by wind. So the world and its people are a bamboo flute with nine openings.

"Given the body, with its hundred parts, its nine openings, and its six viscera, all complete in their places, which do I love the most?" (180). That there are nine openings by the way extends to the whole of the academy, science, philosophy, argument, affirmation and negation of the predetermined mind. These are all described by the saying, "he went to Yueh today and arrived at it yesterday" (180). This is more AfterZen (Van de Wetering), when  "nobody will have heard of Buddha tomorrow," which speech comes from a mind not made up. Or, if you wish, time equals distance in a math that makes the distance from the Roman Foundation stone of London, c. 43AD, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem equal1948 Nautical miles, the date that is of Israel's founding, courtesy of the English, all designed before the fact but known only after, a notion belonging to Sir Isaac Newton (See David Flynn, Temple, 100). Chirp.  And if it is made up it is predetermined soup. Ya can't win. Why don't cha jus' stop!

 

All the simple passionate events

I give to restore the commonplace year,

the ultimate security of innocence,

the it-can't-happen-to-me world.

So whether there is nothing or something (185), the subject of all Greek thought, the biology of abortion and the cosmology of Stephen Hawking are all decay of thought, wind, music. Even though "the scintillations of light from the midst of confusion and perplexity are indeed valued by the sagely man" (187) -- STOP -- Begin thought with, since Heaven and Earth "are spoken of as one, must there not be room for speech? One and Speech are two; two and one are three" (188) Sepher Yetzirah! --STOP--

"Let us abjure such procedure and simply rest" (188), he says. Otherwise "we have the saying, Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly" (189). Too late for me to offer my dispute of his numbering existence with no existence, that if one were to say there was no existence before the beginning of that and that no existence (187) would be one because it is named, that that not being proves existence is! Which fact has itself brought it to be! QED! --STOP-- When you name or not name you bring to be! QED. --STOP-- It's like a telegram. How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way... when I say, I know it, I really (am showing that) I do not know it... and when I say I do not know am showing that I do" (191)?

These result in leaving the real for dreams where "the stupid think they are awake" (195). Changeable beings, these shadows, penumbras: "The penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, formerly you were walking and now you have stopped...how is it that you are so without stability?" (196) Likewise the Butterfly Kau. "I, Kwang Kau dreamed I was a butterfly flying about and s uddenly I woke and was myself again, the veritable Kau" (197). So which is which in the "Transformation of Things?"

I want to say of this  metaphor that the ordinary is realer than dream that in all animals, butterflies, cicadas, centipedes, elk, fish, bird and plant, mugwort, bamboo, ailanthus, yarrow--lie the way the sounds the wind blows from the apertures are felt. This speaking however dissolves in affirming and denying. It is a reflection of this in the mirror behind and in our portrait. Animal mirrors, plant mirrors speak the thing to me,  AE

II.

"The first two sections of Chuang Tzu constitute one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults ever made not only upon man's conventional system of values, but upon his conventional concepts of time, space, reality, and causation as well" (Burton Watson, 5).

You might think anybody reading Chuang Tzu could catapult right out of the ordinary into the "unconventional." Conventioneers would sit cross legged on the ground, legs askew at their death, hair seasonably white amid the miniature green roses. Rows and rows would look like garden statues of flesh and blood. This is no assault, emptying as the wind blows. It should not be sought, that at least was my parting thought of Dear Dean Henry Burlage -Tzu.  In a man's last days a stillness comes and though he speak of other lives and more, he'll live to ninety, as his race is run the periods of stillness then grow more and more.

 庄子  The Wind, The Wind! Free Yourself From the World!

Calmed from the worry his three created universes had caused, this simpleton too sat beside Zhuangzi and detached. It is necessary that universes spin out. Don't worry about the corn or sleep outside in September. Breathe in, breathe out. The Bein' Not Bein' democrat outside existence says, "anybody sometime sums it up they kill it." Burton Watson felt it good to say, "free yourself from the world" (Basic Writings, 3), then he killed. The greatest impediment to Zhuangzi is wu-wei. Is that a hije? Kill Buddha if you see him on the road. Kill zen koans. Kill interpreters of meaning. Only Yeshua you cannot kill. He's really the only one of these characters that I know.

We-Wei Aplenty

Poetry or drivel, Legge or Burton, flop wu-wei back on Chuang Chou and judge his conformity to their abstract. Was Yeshua HaMashiach a Christian? You belong to this group if you point and say we-wei plenty and in the Sermon on the Mount get close and closer accounts of a seeker reading theology.  'Backstracted original don't fit. Tolkien proved this done with is Beo(wulf). Monsters of porridge with elbow patches and paychecks know all the dialects, but not the Geowulf.

I. In I. we combat a moth: Mr. Phang wing cloud! A flyin' mountain fish changed to a bird "rouses itself," and transports to the pool of heaven, meaning South Ocean. Look inside, it's a bird or a man or a plant. It's a yarrow tree with breeze fields that quiver in its beams. It's a horse. It's a tortoise!  Molecules of dust crackle with crocs that inhabit the other worlds but come here when other species lose.

Cedar branches shoot right up out of my hands when I learn that "the first two sections of Chuang Tzu constitute "one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults."   I couldn't sit still. At the back, in Vol. II,  my friends were waiting, not just the crocs, but the tortoise and yarrow, the skull and mugwort stump, sheep, cicada, the singing goose, and pastures of spring shells of luminous unembodied multi-form white Elderica colts. Weigh that pig, paunch and hoof, you weasel. Know the kind, the jack of all trades that mastered the mind.

Mr. Big Phang  figured Wind among the first suspects. We confirmed this through independent study. Wind like water (I, 2). In the matter of their contention wind is greater than water! The argument that if it "be not great it will not support great wings," bears the blue sky on the back of Mr. Phang. He flies south. Offended cicada and little dove think it super how Phang flew. But Phang didn't have to pound grain at night for dinner like them. I'm only giving here the facts as they are known.

Zhuangzi leaves no union moot. Union is onion. We learn the onion moot when we reach the age of no consent. That then was 70 when they took you out to plant. When we get there we think maybe it has been raised. Then we learn it will come, it will come. Mayhap older, youthful age says, "if you're not 70 what can you know." What can cicada and little dove know? What can small know of great, youth of age? Just wait till you are empty yourself, poured out on the ground.  "The experience of a few years does not reach to many." Offensive talk in a democracy. The nut. Crack it. Then mushroom clouds of dew morning sprout.

There is a mature tree in all this called Ming-ling. Five hundred years or so. To  it spring and fall are the same. This tree is like the tortoise that lives longer than a man. One old man, though, Takhun, lived 8000 years. Have grasshopper, cicada, little dove lived long enough to see the fruition of the promises of God? Phang Bird, Ming-ling Tortoise, Man Phang Zu lived 700 years in vigor. It is out of this long life that Zhuangzi wrote. It comforts me to know he thought it was worth writing.  Quail sees on Phang's mountain back those wings of sky. In the difference of small and great, youth and age, Yung-tze of Sung laughs. He has come of age. His universes, a universe is his own child, spin their desire as he thinks, "though the whole world praised him he would not have done more, and though all condemned him he would not have done less." Say what you will. That is the way I feel. They are all praising and blaming, Yung-tze stopped the piety of the condemning quail. What is that, daughters in law?

The proper measure of Chuang Tzu is "still he had not planted himself firmly in the right position." What is the right position? Lieh-tze also rode the wind, but with indifference against the external, "for though he had to walk, he still had to wait." This walk-wait-stop-go-come is the crux. Along the road where the fire is out the owls of last night sleep, three men patrol, I pass them, the driver looks diseased.

Legge tickets Chaung Tzu for audacity for his "extravagant style," as if, in the old view of the Book, "Kwang-tze intended himself by the Great Phang" (I, 128). Conditioned by Whitman and Rambo The French we accept such fantastics, but the end of Book I smarts with some talk of "a Spirit-like man whose flesh and skin are as smooth as ice and white as snow" (171). Division of  small and great ends up with the old time honored question, what to do about the calabash. What use is it, or, what use is the Ailantus or Phang for that matter, or mountain hellebore, so large and useless to quail, or for that matter, what use am I? The good news in Section II is that a great wind that blows through  these apertures. The wind blows, nothing but the wind blowing and blowing.

You can read Part II, here

So what is the first element? Shall we call up Anaxagoras and have him run the numbers. How does one become two? Zhuangzi actually says the first element is wind. I am one with him in this. The wind parted the sea. Once there was a large geographical giant, a man of the south suburb who fell asleep on his stool. He lost consciousness, they say. Neither he nor we know what. "I just lost myself" (176). Even though all the western mystics know exactly what he didn't, he don't. Compared to slaked lime, what comes up?

Chaung Tzu (360 BC) is that early humorist of China who did  stand up in the third century where the almond tree blossoms and desire no longer stirred.

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