Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou, fourth century BCE) was a Chinese thinker whose book, the Zhuangzi, is one of the two founding texts of Daoism. The book teaches that humans live inside a nature of endless transformation, that the human point of view is only one among many and not the measure of all things, and that the natural way of beings is spoiled when people force them to suit human purposes. His stories of the horses broken by a famous trainer, of the fish in the river and of the butterfly dream sit close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s critique of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and of human supremacy.
Who was Zhuangzi? #
Zhuang Zhou lived in the latter half of the fourth century BCE, in the Warring States period of Chinese history, and is usually dated to about 370 to 290 BCE.1 2 Little is known of his life beyond the stories in the book that bears his name. Some scholars place him in or near the south of China and suggest he was influenced by its shamanic culture.2
The Zhuangzi as it now stands is the edition of the scholar Guo Xiang, who died in 312 CE and cut an older collection of fifty-two chapters to thirty-three. These fall into the Inner Chapters (1 to 7), the Outer Chapters (8 to 22) and the Miscellaneous Chapters (23 to 33). Only the Inner Chapters are thought to come from Zhuangzi’s own time, and even that is a scholarly guess; the rest are by later hands writing in his spirit. Several of the stories below come from those later chapters, so ‘Zhuangzi’ in them means the Zhuangzi of the book.1 For Daoism as a whole, see What does Daoism teach about humans and nature?
Is the human point of view the right one? #
Not in any absolute sense, for Zhuangzi. In one dialogue a sage, Wang Ni, points out that a man who sleeps in a damp place gets lumbago and dies, and asks what of an eel. Living up a tree is frightening, but what of monkeys? “Of the man, the eel, and the monkey, whose habitat is the right one, absolutely?” Humans eat flesh, deer eat grass; humans admire the famous beauty Mao Qiang, yet at the sight of her fish dive deep, birds fly high and deer run off. Who is to say which standard is the right one?3
The same chapter carries his best-known story. Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, flitting about, aware only of being a butterfly; then he woke, and was himself again, and did not know whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man.4 And it says: “The universe and I came into being together; and I, and everything therein, are ONE.”5 Humans, on this view, are one form among the countless forms the world keeps changing into, not its centre.
What happens when humans force nature to fit them? #
The Outer Chapters answer with horses. By nature horses live on dry land, eat grass and drink water; when pleased they rub necks together, when angry they turn and kick. Then Bo Le, famed for his skill with horses, came along, and branded them, clipped them, pared their hoofs, put halters on them and shut them in stables, so that two or three in ten died; then he starved them, drove them and whipped them, until more than half were dead. Bridled and bitted, the survivors learnt to glare, bite and fight the bit, and so “their natures become depraved”. Yet every age praises Bo Le for his skill, as it praises the potter and the carpenter for what they make of clay and wood.6
Another Outer Chapter draws the line between the natural and the artificial in one stroke. Horses and oxen have four feet, and “That is the natural”; to put “a halter on a horse’s head, a string through a bullock’s nose” is the artificial. And it warns, “do not let the artificial obliterate the natural.”7 The Inner Chapters end with a parable of the same kind. Two kindly rulers, wishing to repay Hun Tun, ruler of the centre, for his hospitality, noticed he had none of the seven openings everyone else has for seeing, hearing, eating and breathing, and bored one a day for him. On the seventh day Hun Tun died.8
Can we know what other beings feel? #
Zhuangzi thought something could be known. Walking on a bridge over the Hao river with his friend, the logician Huizi, he remarked on the minnows darting about: “That is the pleasure of fishes.” Huizi objected that, not being a fish, he could not know what fish enjoy; Zhuangzi answered that, not being Zhuangzi, Huizi could not know what he knew. The conversation ends with Zhuangzi going back to the question itself: Huizi had asked how he knew, and “I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.”9
Readers have taken the story in different ways, as a playful turn of logic, or as a serious claim that knowing comes from being there, in relationship, not from standing outside.10
How did Zhuangzi face death? #
As a change like the turning of the seasons. When his wife died, Huizi came to offer condolences and found him sitting on the ground, beating time on a bowl and singing, and told him this was going too far. Zhuangzi answered that when she died he could not help being affected; but then he remembered that before her birth she had no form, that form came, then life, and now, by a further change, death, “like the sequence of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.” To go on weeping, he said, would show he did not understand those laws, so he stopped.11
How does Zhuangzi’s teaching connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most strongly in his horses. Therapeutic Shamanism sees a truly profound change in human consciousness and in our way of life in the move from hunter-gathering to totalitarian agriculture, when people stopped seeing themselves as one species in a community of species and began to see themselves as owning the land, growing only what they wanted and using it as they wished.12 Zhuangzi’s horse-breaker, praised by every age for wrecking the natures of the animals he trains, is a sharp picture of what domestication does to animals; and those who govern people, the chapter adds, make the same mistake. See What does domestication do to us?
Wang Ni’s eel and monkey make the same point as the teaching on human supremacy. In shamanism humans are not superior to animals, nor animals to plants and stones,13 and treating our own kind of consciousness as the highest is part of human arrogance.14 See What is the myth of human supremacy? And the fish on the Hao river touch the shamanic aim of understanding another being from the inside out, so as not to let a human way of seeing get in the way.14 See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over where the good old days were. The Zhuangzi looks back to a time when people “dwelt with birds and beasts, and all creation was one”, but the same passage describes the people of that age weaving their own clothes and tilling the soil for food.15 They were farmers, not hunter-gatherers. For Therapeutic Shamanism the break came earlier, with farming itself in its totalitarian form, so a farming golden age already lies on the far side of it.16
And over grief, gently. Zhuangzi did not deny being moved by his wife’s death, but he set out to stop weeping once he understood it. In Therapeutic Shamanism feelings need to be felt and allowed to move through the body, not bypassed or suppressed, and grieving is a process that takes its own time.17 See What does animism teach about grief?
