Lewis Powell

Here are some of the different translations of the title of Chapter one of the Zhuangzi: "Free and Easy Wandering" (Watson), "Wandering Far and Unfettered" (Ziporyn), "Wandering Where You Will" (Palmer), "Carefree Wandering" (Mair), "Transcendental Bliss" (Giles).  Obviously one of these is an odd-one-out, being the only one not to invoke the concept of wandering.  I don't have any working knowledge of Classical Chinese, so I can't really judge the relative merits of these translations.  My first exposure to the Zhuangzi was by way of Ziporyn's translation, which is what they call maximalist; but which is also reported to have the merit of capturing the spirit and tone of the work better than some of the more conservative or literal translations.

In the spirit of carefree wandering, I am going to skip forward slightly, past the story of the Sage who speaks of the Spiritlike Man ("Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world?"), and go to the shaggy-dog tale that really centers my understanding of (and affection for) the Zhuangzi.

This story co-stars Huizi, the representative of the School of Names, and a friend and foil to Zhuangzi in the text.  Huizi is upset because the Duke of Wei gave him some gourd seeds, and he planted them, and the gourds that grew were ENORMOUS.  Too big, in fact, to use for the things that people use gourds for: 

Zhuangzi says, roughly, "well aren't you clueless when it comes to big things!" And then tells a *whole* other story.

In the town of Song there was a family that washed clothes, and they had a salve they used, to keep their hands from getting chapped.  They made a bit of money each year doing this laundry, which the salve enabled them to do.  A traveler heard about the salve, and offered them 100 measures of gold for the recipe. They talked it over and agreed, realizing that it would take them a whole lot of time to make that much money doing laundry.

The traveler takes the recipe to the King of Wu, who is engaged in war with Yue, and explains that he can help the army, because the salve will help them avoid dropping their weapons in battle (or something along those lines).  The army prevails, the King is grateful, the man is enfeoffed, and becomes a duke.

Zhuangzi goes on to note that the giant gourd could have been used as, essentially, a sort of raft, to lazily and gently float one's way down a river or around a lake. But Huizi was too busy trying to make it work like a ladle or a small bucket.  Zhuangzi suggests that Huizi's head is maybe too cluttered to think of these things, and Huizi retorts:


But you can't insult Zhuangzi by calling him useless. Because uselessness is a virtue for Zhuangzi: 

Now, we'll come back to useless trees, specifically, a bit later. Carpenter Shi (or Stoney, in the Ziporyn translation) will be the foreshadowed carpenter who passes a giant tree that is not fit for chopping and whose wood would not be good to use in any carpentry.  But the statement here from Zhuangzi is clearly too strong. Right before the bit I quoted we get some allusions to animals, and obviously in the animal kingdom, harms befall animals all the time.  And prey animals are not being useful in the sense that we are seeing condemned here, I don't think. So it will be worth unpacking this.  But the central idea being expressed here, seems to be: If you are useless, no one can use you, and you can't get used up.

This anecdote has a lot more going on, because the clever traveler makes himself useful and becomes a Duke.  In the story, this seems to be celebrated as a clever way to use the salve. However, we already saw (in the last discussion), that a sage knows better than to get involved in politics.  So, why use the example of political machinations, and political reward?  In fact, the folks who seem to have won big are the launderers, who sold the salve and no longer have to bleach clothes all winter.  There is something puzzling, at least, about the story, even once we have gotten past the superficial level of the analogy.

But this also reinforces the theme, which I have again noted, but not truly explored, of the sage's remove from the affairs of this world ("Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world?").  But here, at least, we are getting more insight into why this is the recommended stance.  In the anecdote about the imitator of the dead, it was because you make more of a hash of things by trying to fix things.  Here, it is because you are a tree.  You can either flourish as a tree, or get converted to lumber.  But in addition to the harms that befall you in getting converted to lumber, lumber is used to manufacture the materials of the conventional world, and the conventional world is the problem you were dissatisfied with.

I am not sure I am fully grasping the Zhuangist rationale, here, to be honest, but a) fear not, this theme is not going away, and b) I think it is okay for me to allow my thoughts to wander some, so long as they are unfettered. 

At least, now, it should be clearer why the keystone tag for this post-series is "learning to be useless".  For me, I have really largely tried to be useful.  Sometimes far too much, sometimes without it being asked, sometimes in ways that were, it turns out, unwelcome busy-bodying.  Definitely in ways that have, on balance, been frustrating to me and have taken a toll.  When I first got into this text, it did feel like the work was yelling at me personally. Both in that I have been the imitator of the deceased who made a giant mess by rushing to the kitchen, and because I have been useful in ways that led me to get used.  I have found it to be, if nothing else, a good corrective to think hard about the value of unlearning the impulse of usefulness, and seeing if that can help me to flourish.