Zhuangzi： The Art of Flowing With Life

There is an old story about a man named Zhuangzi who lived in ancient China not long after Lao Tzu. When his wife died after many years of marriage, his old friend came to the house to mourn with him expecting to find him broken with grief. Instead he found Zhuangzi sitting on the ground tapping on a simple clay bowl and singing a quiet song. His friend was shocked and he scolded him. This woman had lived with him, raised his children and grown old at his side and here he was making music on the day of her death. Zhuangzi looked up and explained himself gently. Of course he said when she first died his heart was as heavy as anyone's. But then he began to think about where she had come from. Before her life there was no life and before her body there was no body. Out of the great quiet of things a change came and she was born. Now another change had come and she had returned to that same quiet, the way the seasons move from spring into autumn. She was resting now in the vast house of the world. If he were to chase after her crying and begging he felt he would only be showing that he understood nothing about the way life truly moves. So he chose to sing instead. Zhuangzi was one of the great teachers of Taoist thought and he taught in a way no one else did. While other thinkers gave rules and arguments he told strange and funny little stories that stay with you long after you hear them. Underneath the humor he was pointing at something serious. He believed that most of our suffering comes from fighting life instead of moving with it. This video is a gentle guide to Zhuangzi and to what his stories can still teach us about flowing with life instead of struggling against it. The first lesson Zhuangzi offers is that most of our anger is something we create ourselves. He told a story about a man crossing a wide river in a small boat. As he rose he sees another boat coming straight toward him about to crash into his own. He shouts at the other boat to move aside. If the boat keeps coming he grows angry and begins to curse the careless fool steering it. But then he looks more closely and sees that the other boat is empty. It has simply come loose and drifted out on its own. In an instant his anger has nowhere to go. He calmly steers around it and rose on. What Zhuangzi wanted us to notice is that the boat was the same in both cases. The danger was the same. The only thing that changed was the story the man told himself about it. When he believed a person was to blame he burned with anger. When he saw there was no one there the anger simply vanished. So much of our daily frustration works in exactly this way. The driver who cuts in front of us. The message left unanswered. The stranger who bumps us in a crowd. We decide almost without thinking that someone is doing something to us on purpose and then we suffer for it. Zhuangzi would gently ask us to look again and to see how often the boat heading toward us is really an empty one. The second lesson is that we do not always have to be useful. Zhuangzi told of a great old tree that grew beside a village. It was enormous with branches that shaded hundreds of people and it had lived for longer than anyone could remember. One day a carpenter walked past it with his students. The students stopped to admire the tree but the carpenter barely glanced at it. He told them the wood was worthless. It was twisted and full of knots. No good for making boats or beams or anything at all. And that, Zhuangzi explained, was the very reason the tree had been allowed to grow so old and so vast. The straight and useful trees had all been cut down while they were young. The useless tree was the one that got to live a long and peaceful life giving shade to everyone who passed. We live in a world that measures the worth of almost everything by how useful it is and slowly we begin to measure ourselves the same way. We feel valuable when we are producing, achieving, and being seen to work hard and we feel guilty the moment we stop. My grandfather Daiki, who spent his last years in a small house in Nagoya, kept an old plum tree in his garden that had stopped giving much fruit long ago. A neighbor once suggested he cut it down and plant something more useful. Daiki only smiled and said the tree had earned the right to simply stand there and be old. He liked to sit beneath it in the evenings doing absolutely nothing and he always seemed more at peace there than anywhere else. He understood what Zhuangzi was pointing at. A life is more than the hours we manage to turn into work. There is a quiet value in rest, in wandering, and in the parts of us that will never be useful to anyone. The third lesson is that we hold our certainties far too tightly. This brings us to Zhuangzi's most famous story of all. One night he dreamed that he was a butterfly. He fluttered happily from flower to flower knowing nothing of being a man, completely free and content in the warm air. Then he woke up and he was Zhuangzi again lying on his mat. But the dream had felt so real that it left him with a strange and lasting question. Was he a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or was he now a butterfly dreaming that it was a man? Zhuangzi was not trying to confuse us and he was not really asking us to doubt whether the world is real. He was pointing at something softer and more useful. We move through our days holding so many firm certainties. We are certain about who we are, certain about what other people meant, and certain about how our lives are supposed to turn out. We grip these beliefs as if our peace depends on them and when life refuses to match them we suffer. Zhuangzi invites us to loosen that grip just a little. Perhaps we do not understand everything as well as we think we do. Perhaps the person who upset us was carrying a burden we cannot see. When we hold our certainties more gently we leave room for the world to surprise us and a great deal of our quiet tension begins to fade. The fourth lesson is that there is always a softer path through if we are willing to look for it. Zhuangzi told of a cook who was famous for the way he carved an ox. His blade moved so smoothly that it made a kind of music and in 19 years of daily work his knife had never once grown dull. A nobleman watched him and asked how this was possible. The cook explained that an ordinary cook hacks and forces his way through and so his blade is always chipping against bone. But he had learned to look for the natural openings in the body, the spaces that were already there between the joints. He simply guided his knife into those open spaces and let it glide through where the ox already gave way. He never forced anything and so nothing ever wore him out. Life has a grain to it in the very same way. There are hard places where we meet real resistance and there are softer openings right beside them that we often fail to notice because we are so busy pushing straight ahead. We exhaust ourselves trying to force our way through difficulty by sheer effort when patience and good timing might carry us through the open space instead. Flowing with life does not mean giving up or doing nothing. It means working with the shape of things as they actually are, the way the cook worked with the shape of the ox, so that our effort goes where it can actually move and is not wasted against solid bone. When Zhuangzi sat singing beside that clay bowl, he was not being cold and he was not rejecting his love for his wife. He was choosing a different way of being inside his own life. He chose to see the empty boat so that he could let go of needless anger. He chose to honor the useless tree so that he could rest without guilt. He chose to hold his uncertainties gently so that the world could remain wide and full of surprise. And he chose to move with the grain of things so that his days could feel like flowing water rather than a constant fight. The freedom Zhuangzi spoke of was never something far away or hard to reach. It was always as close as the seasons turning from spring into autumn, quiet and natural and unafraid. You do not have to leave your life behind to find it. You only have to notice where you are forcing, where you are gripping too tightly, and where life is quietly offering you an easier way through. Thank you for watching.