Organizer: Scott Cook, Grinell College
Chair: Shuen-fu Lin, University of Michigan
Discussant: John Major, Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc.
The "Qiwulun" ("Essay on Equalizing Things") chapter of the Zhuang Zi has long been recognized as one of the most subtle and profound essays in the history of Chinese philosophical literature. The elusiveness that marks Zhuang Zi's writings has, however, rendered the essay a perennial subject of debate. This outcome is ironic, considering that the "tragedy" of debates in general-resulting from the rigid affirmation of one perspective to the exclusion of all others-is one of the few points on which Zhuang Zi's stance seems clear. In keeping with the spirit of the essay itself, this panel attempts to harmonize the debate by presenting four different perspectives on the "Qiwulun" that yet emerge from a common origin.
Scott Cook addresses the theme of the aesthetic appreciation of the world's musical diversity in its inevitable return to silence. Yuet Keung Lo examines the role of "illumination" in attaining to the ultimate state of unity. Harold Roth proposes that mystical experience, for Zhuang Zi, is "bimodal" in nature, having elements both introvertive and extrovertive. And Brook Ziporyn unpacks Zhuang Zi's "radical relativism," which privileges the claim that "all things are one" precisely by its affirmation of all claims in general. Despite differences in their points of departure, each paper shares the common assumption that the essential unity of all things is indeed something that Zhuang Zi does affirm. In what sense this is so and how the paradoxes it entails may be understood are questions which these papers hope to illuminate.
Harmony and Cacophony in the Panpipes of Heaven
Scott Cook, Grinnell College
The dialogue between Nanguo Ziqi and Yancheng Ziyou that opens the "Qiwulun" chapter of Zhuang Zi's work has long been recognized as one of the greatest and most thought-provoking examples of early Chinese philosophical prose. In it, Nanguo presents the image of the "panpipes of Heaven" (tianlai), in which he describes in vivid terms the multifarious sounds produced when different winds blow across myriad crevices of various shapes, and then poses the question: "who is it that rouses them forth?" This paper inquires into the aesthetic nature of the image-is it a cacophony of worldly noise or a celebration of sounds? It suggests that the answer may well lie in the attitude of the listener: like Nanguo in his achieved state of self-forgetting, one comes to celebrate the diversity of the world precisely by "forgetting" its distinctive members as possessing any absolute value, but rather enjoying them as temporal players in the unified, yet ever-changing, symphony of life and death. By losing both self and other, one finally awakens to the awareness that all things even out in death, in the return to "Heaven's pool" of transformation, just as the numerous crevices all alike return to an even and vacuous silence when the storm has blown over and the musical tempest has reached its coda. By unfolding the import of this crucial, opening image, this paper hopes to provide the basis for a better understanding of all that follows it in the celebrated "Qiwulun" chapter.
To Use or Not to Use: The Idea of Ming in the Zhuang Zi
Yuet Keung Lo, Grinnell College
The phrase "mo-ruo-yi-ming" appears twice in the "Qiwulun" chapter of the Zhuang Zi. It refers to a method in determining the truth of the various schools of philosophy in Zhuang Zi's time, or for that matter, the Truth. Traditionally, the phrase has been understood as "nothing supersedes the use of clarity or lucidity." But did Zhuang Zi, who prized ambiguity and indeterminacy in his Daoist vision of truth, actually encourage us to use our ming in grasping the undifferentiated and unitive Dao? In fact, in many instances, the idea of ming (illumination/clarity/lucidity) is disparaged in the Zhuang Zi, where it often carries a negative connotation of undesirable distinction-making which obfuscates the Truth.
This paper, focusing on the "Qiwulun" chapter, will discuss the idea of ming and its related notions like guang (light), zhao (bright), ming (darkness), and hundun (chaos) in the Zhuang Zi. It will argue that the idea of ming in the Zhuang Zi was probably conceptualized against the same idea in Confucian thinking, which almost always associated ming with positive, moral connotations. In contrast, Zhuang Zi's ming is amoral in nature, and in its optimum mode, it is ironically darkness par excellence. It is darkness that subsumes illumination. Rather than urging his disciples to exert their ming, the method of "yiming" is to stop their use of ming, which relies on their essentially finite intellect. Only then will they attain to the state of hundun in which the sensory channels of their ming are yet to be bored into distinct entities.
Bimodal Mystical Experience in Chuang Tzu's "Essay on Equalizing
Things"
Harold D. Roth, Brown University
The second chapter of the foundational Taoist text Chuang Tzu, the famous "Essay on Equalizing Things," has long been regarded as essential to a complete understanding of the philosophy of the core "inner chapters" of the text. Yet few scholars agree on the basic viewpoint that is being advocated in this second chapter. Some scholars see this viewpoint as advocating a form of skepticism; others see it as a form of relativism. Some emphasize its playfulness; others its philosophical sophistication.
What I will argue in this paper is that the author of the "Essay on Equalizing Things" was, first and foremost, a mystic. Relying on my recent research on early Taoist mystical praxis and on the analyses of mystical experience and mystical philosophy in the writings of Walter Stace, Peter Moore, Robert Forman, and others, I will demonstrate the presence of what I have elsewhere deemed "bimodal mystical experience" in this chapter. These two modes are elaborations on Stace's introvertive and extrovertive types of mystical experience.
I will first analyze the evidence that indicates that the author of the "inner chapter" was involved in mystical praxis. I will then proceed to discuss the passages in the "Essay on Equalizing Things" that provide evidence for introvertive mystical experience (such as Nan-kuo Tzu-ch'i leaning against the armrest and the sages of old who thought that there had never begun to be things) and extrovertive mystical experience (such as "evening things out on the Whetstone of Heaven" and the defining concept of "equalizing things").
When taken together these two modes of mystical experience go a long way to explaining the phenomenological origins of the distinctive blend of cosmology, humor, and religious transformation that are the hallmarks of this beloved text. This analysis further continues the process of bringing Chinese religious experience into dialogue with the religious experience of human beings the world over.
How Many Are the Ten Thousand Things and I? The Performative Truth of Zhuang Zi's
Radical Relativism
Brook Ziporyn, University of Michigan
The question of how to square Zhuang Zi's "perspectivism" (which seems to preclude privileging any particular truth claim over any other) with his apparent approval of one particular perspective (for example, that which sees that all things are one, or that all perspectives are equal) has emerged as one of the most central issues of current Zhuang Zi interpretation, as is attested by the recent publication of the watershed book Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi (Kjellberg and Ivanhoe, eds. SUNY, 1996). This paper attempts a solution to this quandary which, unlike all the essays in that volume, eschews the assumption that Zhuang Zi must be either a relativistic perspectivist or privilege one particular perspective, but cannot do both. I argue that Zhuang Zi, in the Inner Chapters, is both uncompromising in rejecting the possibility of any unbiased or universal perspective and elaborates and privileges a particular perspective-the perspective that all things are one, that all perspectives are equal. This perspective is no more immune to Zhuang Zi's skeptical objections than any other. But its self-referential nature, and pragmatic non-discomfirmability, give it certain unique qualities, not the least of which is a kind of staying power in the midst of the transformation of perspectives, which amounts to a performative (tautological) demonstration of its truth. It is precisely its ability to co-exist in and as any other perspective, including its direct contradiction, gives it the special skill-functions which Zhuang Zi describes so enthusiastically. The argument can be summed up briefly as follows: If a relativist claims that, since all claims are relative to perspective, no claim can be right, he is contradicting himself, for this relativist claim too cannot be right. If, however, like Zhuang Zi, the relativist claims that, since all claims are relative to some perspective, all claims must be right, there is no contradiction: for this relativist claim itself, by its own standards, must also be right. This paper attempts to unpack, by means of a close reading of the Inner Chapters, the premises and consequences of this unique position.