Zhuangzi, the Human World, and the Saint

Reading of “Understanding the Tao” #6

In a previous post, I offered to start reading the book Comprendre le Tao (Understanding the Tao) by the French scholar Isabelle Robinet. She was an internationally renowned French Sinologist. While some of her work has been translated into English, this book is not. However, you can take a look at her book, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, published by Stanford University Press in 1997.

I have already published several posts about this book by Robinet. You can read or reread them here: Taoism.

In this new post, I would like to continue my reading.

Zhuangzi and the Human World

Robinet begins this part by emphasizing that Zhuangzi (莊子) is a “philosopher of becoming and change,” a philosopher who invites us to embrace the unknown, the unexpected, the uncertain, and to view life as a game with ever-changing rules (p. 53). In a statement that troubled me, she explains:

The language games that Zhuangzi engages in reflect the playful aspect of life, which possesses the gratuitous and useless value of play, which commits us to nothing and which, like play, offers infinite possibilities. (p. 53, my translation)

And she pursues: “Forget yourself, forget right and wrong, be so at ease that you forget even your own well-being.”

Zhuangzi refers to humble craftsmen who have mastered their art to a level where excellence is produced without rules and without thinking. Human action occurs without the intervention of the intellect. It is an engagement with life, in an immediate and original way, before self-knowledge or knowledge of what to do.

It leads to the distinction between intentional efficiency and life-inherent efficiency, which occurs spontaneously. When doubt, fear, the desire to succeed, or questioning disappears, authentic alignment with reality becomes possible. This further leads to more spontaneous and efficient behavior.

Immediate presence of presence itself. Consciousness, in fact, is only the mark of a time that is still that of learning, of a recent and unripe acquisition. It obstructs action. (p. 55)

Zhuangzi’s teaching consists of “learning to unlearn” (p. 56). He insists on the impossibility of teaching this, which is the essence of life. There is, she rightly notes, something in a teaching that cannot be taught and must be truly experienced in a direct way. She reflects:

If he made fun of the laborers who exhaust themselves with breathing exercises and gymnastics or dietary observances, it is because they are slaves to their efforts and forget that when the fish is caught, the net must be thrown away. (p. 57)

According to Robinet, Zhuangzi is optimistic. Order is natural and disorder is abnormal. Order is primordial and language is a disturbance that becomes a disordered movement.

But for Robinet what is the strongest illustration of Zhuangzi’s views appears in his account of the Saint.

The Saint according to Zhuangzi

She explains that for Zhuangzi the Saint refuses to lead or govern. Unlike Laozi’s Saint, Zhuangzi does not fight the masters’ discourses but radically leaves it behind.

Anonymous because he is exemplary, he is the Human Being par excellence whose natural excellence is to transcend the human and access the universe and the “celestial” (p. 60)

He is the anthropomorphic form of the Tao in complete alignment with it. He is the opposite of the ordinary man who is stuck between life and death, wealth and poverty, and so on and he refused to reify himself.

He shifts the conflict inherent in knowledge subject to affirmation and negation, and reveals beyond it the continuum, extensiveness, the thread that connects a concept to its opposite, that grasps what escapes in what allows itself to be apprehended. (p. 61)

The Saint is described as a supernatural being who can take the form of a dragon or a snake. When people are ruled by the impermanence of things, he is not ruled by it because he is one with it.

He is man’s companion and heaven’s companion at the same time. He lives in the middle, between the hearth and the sky, in a unified state with the Tao.

After Laozi and Zhuangzi

After these explanations, Robinet presents, in a very short chapter (chapter 3), other tendencies that developed in Taoism during the Warring States period (403–222 BC).

She believes that for China it was an intense period of intellectual development that laid the foundation for all Chinese culture. She notes that Laozi and Zhuangzi were not originally considered to be part of the same movement, and that Taoism nevertheless encompassed a number of doctrines that remain somehow related (p. 64).

Robinet briefly introduces the Huang-Lao school, which attempted to provide concrete political applications of Taoism. This school promoted the renunciation of wealth, the practice of longevity rituals, and a “non-action” kind of government — a proto-noninterventionism, if I may say so.

She also presents the Huainanzi (淮南子), an ancient Chinese text consisting of essays from scholarly debates held at the court of the Prince of Huainan. The purpose of this work was to create a synthesis of knowledge dealing with Taoism, Confucianism, and Chinese legalism. The influence of Taoism seems clear, as it invites political leaders to conform to the Tao. The cosmological dimension of this text is also remarkable, insisting on the central role of the “primordial breath” in the universe (p. 67).

It was at the end of the Han dynasty (206–220) that Taoism became institutionalized. What seems to be important here as well is the place of rituals in Taoist practices, to deal with difficulties, illnesses, or more simply as local celebrations.

Robinet also gives various explanations of Taoist church rituals. For example, she explains that,

The initiation that marked the entrance into the Celestial Masters church was punctuated by a ritual of a sexual and cosmic nature in which the participants, embodying Heaven or yang and Earth or yin, proceeded to a hierogamic union accomplished during a choreography that followed the distribution of the world into Nine Regions (for the eight points of the compass rose and the Center) and symbolized the beginning of a process of creation of an immortal body built on this cosmic diagram. (pp. 70–71)

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I will stop this reading here and continue it in another post with part two of this Robinet’s book.