How we answer the important human questions in life—who are we? what is our purpose? where do we belong?—is directly connected to the world we inherit. That world limits our ability to answer those questions in ways that aren’t always obvious. Often those constraints function to keep us from questioning too much, insulating ourselves from exposing the fabric from which our worlds are woven. But sometimes the world we inherit is torn, or already frayed, and we catch a glimpse not just of how our world is stitched together—those beliefs and perspectives that create and structure our experience—but how that world is fundamentally different from the worlds of others.
Constraint
There is one section of one chapter in the Zhuangzi that has always stuck out to me. Among the somewhat silly and fanciful tales of how to successfully navigate the treacherous waters of politics and governing there is, it seems to me, a brief moment of sincerity and even vulnerability.
In chapter 4 (translated “In the Human World” by Ziporyn and “Worldly Business Among Men” by Graham “In the World of Men” by Watson) there are several vignettes where well-meaning yet anxious political appointees come to “Confucius” for advice about how to respond to particularly distressing situations. Scholars are quick to point out that Zhaungzi means to subvert typical Confucian ideals in these exchanges, and in a particularly devious way, too: by using Confucius as his mouthpiece to espouse anti-Confucian ideals and give anti-Confucian answers to these predicaments. This philosophical ventriloquism and general mocking of Confucian ideals occurs throughout the Zhuangzi, but in this one particular passage something strange happens.
Confucius said, “There are two great constraining obligations in this world. One is what is fated, one’s mandated limitations, and the other is responsibility, doing what is called for by one’s position. A child’s love for his parents is fated—it cannot be removed from his heart. An underling’s service to a boss is responsibility, the response called for by his position; wherever he goes, he is in service to his boss—it cannot be avoided anywhere in this world. Thus I call these the great constraining obligations.
Zhuangzi, Brook Ziporyn trans.
In Graham’s translation he uses destiny and duty instead of fate and responsibility, but as with most of these translations, the original Chinese is rich with meaning, so it’s useful to consider these words with all of their associated ideas in order to appreciate the fullness of the original.
This passage doesn’t stick out to just me—other commentators and scholars have pointed out the incongruence between this specific passage and the rest of the Zhuangzi. Graham says of the passage, “it is remarkable to find [Zhuangzi] talking like a moralist about the ‘duty’ to serve the ruler, especially since elsewhere he always uses the word unfavourably.”
It’s also important to note the context of the advice in chapter 4. The Zhuangzi wasn’t read by the average Warring States citizen, nor even by those with the most influence and power. Instead, it was mainly read by a specific group of people within Chinese society: those who were educated enough to read and who wished to escape both their fate and responsibility.
For those who wanted to get away from politics (eg, hermits) or who were prevented from pursuing their political ambitions (eg, frustrated or exiled scholar-officials), the Zhuangzi was their counsel. Other than that, the Zhuangzi was not a major voice in Chinese political discourse, especially the political discourse on freedom where it could have been the most impactful.
Tao Jiang, “Beyond Dust and Grime“
But reading the passage from my context feels more like Zhuangzi-as-Confucius is acknowledging some aspect of my life that rarely gets addressed by philosophers. More than that, it really feels to me as if Zhuangzi is speaking from a similar place, like he understands something fundamental about me and my experience of the world.
Inheritance
Each of us occupies a world that is made by our predecessors. We are given ‘reality’; we do not discover it.
Viola Cordova
The relationship I have with my disabled brother is almost impossible to explain well. It wasn’t (and isn’t) like the other sibling relationships I observed growing up, even those within our family. I became a full-time caregiver for him roughly 13 years ago but have always helped care for him, even before I officially took on this labor. In trying to make sense of our relationship I often compared it to what I imagined a parent-child relationship was like. Though, since becoming a parent I realize that in some very important ways this comparison isn’t right. The relationship I have with my brother was and is something else entirely, something for which I have no given frame of reference save for the frame built by experience itself.
I inherited a world very different from my parents’ world and very different from the worlds of my friends and peers. There has never been a time when my brother wasn’t in need of significant care and never a time when I wasn’t giving him care in some capacity. In short, I have never known a time before my brother.
In contrast, my parents’ lives and identities were ruptured by his existence. His very body marked a radical shift in how they saw themselves and understood their worlds. For them, there was the time before and the time with him. For my friends and peers, his existence threatened to rupture their lives and identities. Most of the people I grew up with didn’t know anyone like my brother, let alone cared for someone like him, and the thought of including him in their world might tear it apart at the seams.
That I was born into a situation so dramatically unlike both my family and my friends is something I cannot change: it is fated. It means, in a very real way, I have inherited a different world. As a result, not only are the answers to those important human questions different from the people I know, but the questions themselves are different.
Responsibility
How do you survive in a world that is different from the one you have been prepared for?
Viola Cordova
At multiple points in my life I have had almost every close friend ask some variation of the same question: “isn’t there someone else who can take care of your brother?”
Of course the answer is yes. Of course there are other people who can and will take care of him (though these days those people are becoming harder and harder to find). But the part that is so incredibly difficult to explain is that isn’t a question I can ask, let alone answer, and especially not in that way. The struggle for me is not to understand why they’re asking that question but to explain to them why I’m not asking that question.
I can understand why they ask that and related questions, because I have had to learn to be familiar with their world, the world I wasn’t prepared for. That world values and is constrained by individual rights, desires, and freedoms. The world I inhabit values and is constrained by responsibilities, sacrifice, and fate. Most people who ask that question of me cannot understand the questions I ask or the answers I give, not through any fault of their own, but because they were prepared to live in a different world than me.
How do I explain that the ways I conceive of my fated obligations cannot entertain the questions they ask about my situation?
To be clear, I am not suggesting that my friends and peers don’t understand responsibility or making sacrifices; nor am I suggesting that they are self-centered and driven only by self-interest. Rather, I am saying that because the circumstances of their lives were different in a very particular and specific way from mine, there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the kinds of questions that can be asked and the kinds of answers that are possible.
The words spoken by Zhuangzi-as-Confucius resonate with me because they feel very familiar, like the world I was prepared for. He describes with startling accuracy how I feel about my situation, why I cannot ask certain questions, and why certain answers are not available to me. They also point to something else, something that comes along with feeling dislocated, caught between the world I was prepared for and its concomitant constraining obligations and the world and constraining obligations of my friends and peers.
Divide
Action from principle,—the perception and the performance of right,—changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.
Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
For as long as I can remember there has been a chasm dividing me from my friends and peers. Not only does it divide me from those to whom I wish to be connected, it divides me from myself as well. Acting from the values and beliefs I have about the world—which are rooted in my inherited situation—necessarily results in choices that are in opposition to those around me, people who do not share or understand the values and commitments I have. My choices seem, from their perspective, impossible.
It’s not uncommon for me to feel like I am caught between these two competing value systems. Establishing and maintaining friendships and other relationships places certain demands on everyone. In my case one of the demands is to inhabit a world I wasn’t prepared for and fundamentally disagree with. These are not conscious demands that any one person is making of me; rather, they are embedded in the fabric of that world. But unless those demands are met (or an attempt to meet them is made) there is no possibility for relationship at all.
Caring for my brother is demanding in its own right, but these are, for better or worse, demands I have accepted and place value on. Yet even though this world is more familiar to me it often feels as if I am inhabiting it alone. The great irony of caring for someone like my brother is the more care they require the more is demanded of you and the less you are able to seek out the care you need in order to continue to meet those demands.
That I care for my brother is, to me, not the problem. The problem is that I am doing it alone. And the more he needs me to care for him the less resources I have within me to nurture those other relationships that would help both me and him. The two great constraining obligations in my life—fate and responsibility—put too much strain on all my other relationships, so much so that they often cannot survive.
The divide between our worlds severs our connection and prevents it from reforming; it widens with each passing year and each abandoned friendship. Nurturing friendships in ways their inherited world requires and recognizes often means abandoning the responsibility and duty I feel to care for my brother—something I’m not willing or able to do. The bond is broken, the fissure deepens. As painful and lonely as that is, the most painful of all is the realization that this fissure lies deep within me, not just between myself and others; it moves with me, no matter what world I try to inhabit.
Casualty
The second part of the Zhuangzi passage above continues:
To be reconciled to wherever you may have to go in the service you must render to your parents is perfect filial piety, and to be reconciled to whatever may be involved in the service you must render to your boss is complete loyalty. But further, in the service you must render to your own heart, to know that nothing can be done about the sorrow and joy it unalterably puts before you, and thus reconcile yourself to them as if they were fated—this is completely realized virtuosity (de 德). Being a son or a subordinate, there will inevitably be things you cannot avoid having to do. Absorb yourself in the realities of the task at hand to the point of forgetting your own existence. Then you will have no leisure to delight in life or abhor death.
Zhuangzi, Brook Ziporyn trans.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, this passage articulates, better than anything else I have yet found, how I feel about my inherited situation. In my more despondent moods I interpret the whole of the Zhuangzi as an attempt by one person, constrained by obligation and fate, to find a way to live—at peace—within a world he wasn’t prepared for.
Consider a later dialogue, in chapter 6, where Zhuangzi is once more recounting a dialogue between Confucius and a disciple. Interestingly, I’ve not come across anyone suggesting that Zhuangzi is yet again using Confucius as his mouthpiece. It makes sense to me that this passage should also be read like the others, with Zhuangzi putting his anxieties into the mouth of Confucius.
Here, Confucius sends a disciple to pay his respects to a recently deceased friend. When the disciple arrives he is shocked to see the others singing and making music, clearly disregarding the strict rituals for mourning. When the disciple returns to Confucius to recount this bizarre encounter he asks,
“What kind of people are these? They do not cultivate their characters in the least, and they treat their bodies as external to themselves, singing at a corpse without the least change of expression. I don’t know what to call them. What sort of people are they?”
Confucius said, “These are men who roam outside the lines. I, on the other hand, do my roaming inside the lines. The twain can never meet.”
The disciple then asks, “Since you know this, Master, which zone is really your homeground”
Confucius said, “Me? I am a casualty of Heaven—you and me both.”
Zhuangzi, Brook Ziporyn trans.
Casualty of Heaven—a very familiar feeling indeed.
“Heaven” here is tian (天) and as with most things in the Zhuangzi doesn’t mean or imply what the English translation suggests. Tian can refer to Heaven, but most literally it refers to the sky. It can be translated as Heaven, the Heavenly, Sky, Skylike, Celestial, or even Nature, with this last one hinting at the metaphysical importance of the word. Brook Ziporyn says the term is,
very unlike “God” and its equivalents in Western traditions, and perhaps closer to “Nature,” which similarly is something the existence of which is never contested… The primary meaning of “sky” is never absent in the word, in its most rudimentary and undeniable sense: what is up there above the reach of human beings, where weather comes from, which changes though the seasons and thus sets the conditions for all human activity but is beyond human manipulation.
What strikes me about Zhuangzi-as-Confucius in this dialogue is his seemingly calm acceptance of being a casualty of Heaven. He isn’t shaking his fist at the sky asking, “why me?” but instead simply states that this is his home, within the bounds, constrained by fate. Embracing his inheritance is the beginning of finding his way, not the end.
Depths
All my life I have attempted to bridge the chasm between myself and others and within me. Every attempt has failed, every bridge collapsed. I’m not even sure what successfully bridging it would look like at this point. Like the politicians and officials in the Zhuangzi, I have had many ideas about how to navigate a world I wasn’t prepared for but none have borne fruit.
In the very first vignette of chapter 4 Yan Hui asks Confucius for advice. He is traveling to Wei where the ruler has become tyrannical and wishes to help improve the situation. Every idea that Yan Hui has for navigating that situation Confucius strikes down.
“Proper in external demeanor, I shall appear modest and empty, but I will constantly be making effort, single-mindedly focused on my real purpose. Would that work?
Confucius said, “No, no! How could that ever work?”
Yan Hui said, “But in this I will be internally upright but externally adaptable, and I will speak only in preexisting sayings linked to antiquity… Would this work?”
Confucius said, “No, no! How could that ever work?”
Zhuangzi, Brook Ziporyn trans.
I have similarly tried to navigate these two competing worlds and value systems to no avail—they are incompatible and unbridgeable: “the twain can never meet.”
The divide between my world and the world of my peers has been inscribed within me as well, dividing me from them and dividing me from myself. Even if I could adopt the worldview of my friends and peers that fissure remains with me because it is me. And even choosing to nurture and cultivate the worldview I inherited—doing those things I believe to be right and just—also turns out to be something that divides me from others and myself.
Wandering free and easy between these two worlds isn’t sustainable either—it only causes a constant anxiety from which I cannot be saved. So then what is there to do?
I cannot—and I’ve tried—abandon the responsibilities I’ve inherited. Choosing to inhabit one or the other of these worlds, bridging the chasm that divides, amounts to turning my back on the other. Either I face loneliness and isolation from people I want to be connected to, or I live with the unrelenting guilt of abandoning the people and values I am connected to.
The world I was prepared for, the fate I have inherited, constrains me in ways most cannot understand. But somewhat paradoxically, it offers a different kind of freedom: the freedom to roam within the lines. The calm, peaceful acceptance of Zhuangzi-as-Confucius is found not by bridging the chasm or healing the fissure within, but by going deeper into it.
Zhuangzi’s response to these situations suggests to me that rather than bridging the two worlds I should instead roam freely within the borders between those worlds. That is, the chasm that makes up the borders between the world I inherited and the world I am not prepared for is precisely where to find peace. Make my lodging place in the chasm, guided by the radiance of drift and doubt, wandering freely and uneasily in the shadowy splendor: finding peace means becoming friends with the depths.