Because I have very little time for reading these days, I try to keep track of any connections I intuit between the current text and others I’ve read, especially ones I tend to reread (like Thoreau and the Zhuangzi). Sometimes the connections are explicit and obvious, requiring very little development on my part. Other times, however, the connections are more tenuous, more of a feeling than anything. In that case a lot more effort is required to fully develop the themes to see if there is something there. This post is one of the latter.
I have been wanting to write about this topic for a while, but aside from the normal trouble of finding time and motivation I’ve been too nervous to even attempt it. The topic concerns the beginning of the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, the qiwulun (齊物論), arguably the most famous and certainly the most technical and dense chapter in the whole text. Even translating the title is tricky: Graham translates it as, “The Sorting Which Evens Things Out,” Watson as, “Discussion On Making All Things Equal,” and Ziporyn translates it as, “Equalizing Assessments of Things.”
Part of the reason for my hesitance is the sheer volume of scholarship on the qiwulun. It is overwhelming. Even though I’ve been researching it for years now I still feel ill-prepared to say anything at all about it, at least with any confidence. But another reason I’ve been reluctant to write about it is the difficulty I’ve had trying to articulate what it is I want to say, what it is that grabs me and draws me in. It is much easier to feel my way through the text than it is to write about it.
Despite the very technical language, my intuition is to read it not so much as an epistemological treatise, arguing for something like perspectivism perhaps, or even as an account of a mystical experience achieved through meditation or breathwork, but as something much more modest yet urgent: an attempt to describe how we, as individual selves with individual identities, relate to and interact with other selves.
It is easy to get lost in the technical language and wordplay in this chapter of the Zhuangzi. But I find that the beginning and ending episodes of the chapter, when taken together, provide a useful frame for interpreting the whole, one that avoids the most disorienting sections. When I consider them together something new emerges and I can begin to see a little more clearly what it is that resonated with me.
Piping of Heaven
The chapter opens with a dialogue between two people, one of whom seems to be meditating or practicing some kind of breathwork.
Sir Swimmy Faceformed stood in attendance before him. “Who or what is this here?” he asked. “Can the body really be made like a withered tree, the mind like dead ashes? What leans against this armrest now is not what leaned against it before.”
Sir Shoestrap of Southwall said, “How good it is that you question this, Yan! What’s here now is this: I have lost me. But could you know who or what that is? You hear the piping of man without yet hearing the piping of earth; you hear the piping of earth without yet hearing the piping of Heaven.”
Sir Swimmy Faceformed said, “Please tell me more.”
Sir Shoestrap of Southwall replied, “When the Great Clump belches forth its vital breath, we call it the wind. As soon as it begins, raging cries emerge from all the ten thousand hollows, and surely you cannot have missed the rustle and bustle that then goes on. The bulges and drops of the mountain forest, the indentations and holes riddling its massive towering trees, are like noses, mouths, ears; like sockets, enclosures, mortars; like ponds, like puddles! Roarers and whizzers, scolders and sighers, shouters, wailers, boomers, growlers! One leads with a “yeee!,” another answers with a “yuuu!” A light breeze brings a small harmony, while a powerful gale makes for a harmony vast and grand. And once the sharp wind has passed, all these holes return to their silent vacuity. Have you never seen all their tempered attunements, all their cunning contentions?”
Zhuangzi, Ziporyn trans.
I must admit, I love this passage. I love the imagery and the playful, childlike way he describes the wind. I love how absurd it is as a response to a very earnest question. But my love for this passage has prevented me from noticing that the central question, and therefore the answer to that question, is about selfhood and identity: “I have lost me. But could you know who or what that is?”
What follows is, perhaps, a lengthy exposition on selfhood and identity. The piping of man, earth, and heaven, are the prelude to the complex fugue that is to come later in the chapter. But by just focusing on this section (and the final story of the chapter, the coda) it’s easier to see the themes more clearly before they become inverted and reversed into oblivion.
Sir Swimmy Faceformed, after hearing about the wind (the piping of the earth), asks what about the piping of heaven? Sir Shoestrap responds:
“It is the gusting through all the ten thousand differences that yet causes all of them to come only from themselves. For since every last identity is only what some one of them picks out from it, what identity can there be for their rouser?”
Zhuangzi, Ziporyn trans.
Watson’s translation of this passage is similar: “Blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each can be itself—all take what they want for themselves, but who does the sounding?”
The wind blows and the breath of the earth animates us all: like the hollows and holes in forests and trees, and like the holes of a flute, we all resonate but according to our own unique frequency. That unique pitch is, I think, what most people would consider to be their self or identity. But Zhuangzi doesn’t end there. There is also something upon which we all rely, something which causes each and every note to sound, something that creates the circumstances for selves to emerge, but that has no selfhood or identity of its own.
It would seem then that from this formulation Zhuangzi has set up and problematized a dualism. On the one hand, there are the undeniably different and unique pitches of each being. On the other hand, however, is that self-less piper who is breathing into all of us and creates the conditions for difference. Which one of these is us? Could we really know who or what we are? Or have we lost ourselves in the oneness of the rouser?
But—and this is why I love the Zhuangzi—this dualism is sidestepped and problematized in an entirely new way when paired with the very last story of the qiwulun.
Dreaming of Butterflies
The last story of the chapter is likely the most famous story from the whole of the Zhuangzi:
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, fluttering about joyfully just as a butterfly would. He followed his whims exactly as he liked and knew nothing about Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he awoke and there he was, the startled Zhuang Zhou in the flesh. He did not know if Zhou has been dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Now surely Zhou and a butterfly count as two distinct identities, as two quite different beings! And just this is what is meant when we speak of transformation of any one being into another—of the transformation of all things.
Zhuangzi, Ziporyn trans.
This story, when read in isolation, can be read as a story about our inability to distinguish reality from illusion, and about a need to cultivate the type of awareness that would aid in the process of discerning truth from fiction. Admittedly, this is usually how I have read the story. But when I look at it alongside the piping of heaven story, as a frame to the entire chapter, it seems more about identity and selfhood than about our ability (or inability) to distinguish reality from illusion.
If the opening dialogue on the piping of heaven created dissonance by exposing the impossibility of definitively identifying who or what we are, the butterfly story responds not by resolving the dissonance, but by changing keys entirely. The point now isn’t to merely cast doubt on our ability to know who or what we are, but to suggest that who or what we are is unfixed: the transformation of Zhuang Zhou into the butterfly, or the transformation of the butterfly into Zhuang Zhou, says something important about the nature not just of our individual selves, but of selfhood and identity writ large, in all of nature.
Not only can we not be sure whether we are an individual tone or the one doing the blowing, now we can’t even be sure that we remain that one tone or whether we change pitches. In other words, our inability to identify whether we are a self, unique and separate from that which animates all things, is compounded when we consider that we also cannot be sure that we remain constant in our identities, that perhaps our selves are unfixed and fluctuate endlessly.
These stories, when combined, don’t just destabilize my conceptions of who or what I am, but they expand the idea of identity and selfhood to include creatures like butterflies. Perhaps then, the transformation of things (wuhua 物化) also means the transformation of identities between and among things.
Morning Mushrooms
In a passage that bears striking resemblance to the piping of the earth section of the Zhuangzi, Robin Wall Kimmerer, In Braiding Sweetgrass, describes a visit to the forest and the symphony of sounds that greet her:
I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles, to lean my bones against the column of white pine, to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear the voices outside it: the shhh of wind in the needles, water trickling over rock, nuthatch tapping, chipmunks digging, beechnut falling, mosquito in my ear, and something more—something that is not me, for which we have no language, the wordless being of others in which we are never alone. After the drumbeat of my mother’s heart, this was my first language.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
If Zhuangzi destabilizes our ideas of selfhood, then Kimmerer helps get our feet back on solid, fertile ground. However, the ground itself deepens the mystery, and even though it offers stability it challenges us with its overwhelming complexity of unseen and wordless forces, forces which nonetheless participate in the arboreal orchestra.
When I first read Kimmerer’s description some years ago I was immediately reminded of the piping of the earth passage from the Zhuangzi. And while I immediately made a note that there was some connection or resonance between them it has taken me several years of pondering to articulate what exactly it was I intuited. This is, of course, an ongoing process.
Like the Zhuangzi passage, Kimmerer’s description hints at the nature of identity and selfhood, although in her account this self is an other, not her own. The, “something that is not me, for which we have no language, the wordless being of others in which we are never alone,” seems very similar to what Zhuangzi calls the piping of heaven. Just the like the piping of heaven, which creates the conditions for selfhood to emerge and causes each thing to be what it is of itself, Kimmerer describes a language—that is, some kind of sounding—that is also a source of being, in particular the being of others and otherness. In other words, it is the something more in the forest that is both not me and yet creates the conditions for me to be related to other beings, other selves.
Kimmerer continues:
I could spend a whole day listening. And a whole night. And in the morning, without my hearing it, there might be a mushroom that was not there the night before, creamy white, pushed up from the pine needle duff, out of darkness to light, still glistening with the fluid of its passage. Puhpowee.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
The word puhpowee is an Anishinaabe word that means something like, “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.”
“In the three syllables of this new word I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.”
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
In another interesting coincidence, the Zhuangzi, just after the piping of heaven passage, also uses mushrooms to help explain not just this animating force, but also the nature of selves and identities:
Joy and anger, sorrow and happiness, plans and regrets, transformations and stagnations, unguarded abandonment and deliberate posturing—music flowing out of hollows, mushrooms of billowing steam! Day and night they alternate before our eyes, yet no one knows whence they sprout. Let us stop right there, no need to go further! Already it is constantly coming to us day and night, this from which they are all born! Without that there is no me, and yet without me there is nothing picked out from it.
Zhuangzi, Ziporyn trans.
Our human emotions and human identities then are like the morning mushroom, still glistening and warm from their birth out of the fertile soil, animated by some unseen force. Puhpowee.
The piping of heaven and puhpowee, while not exactly the same thing, are, I think, ideas that resonate and harmonize with each other. That force which creates the conditions for the mushroom to emerge in the night is related to that force that creates the conditions for our identities, selves, and emotions to emerge. We are the morning mushrooms, simultaneously connected to and dependent on a vast underground network from which we emerge, flowering and fruiting, temporary and fleeting, coming and going with each day.
The question I’m left with, the question the mushroom asks of me, has two parts: when thinking about identity and selfhood, who is left out? who is denied an identity and a self? And if we acknowledge the identity and selfhood of those beings we have previously denied, how does that change the terms of our relationship, how are we—as selves—related to each other?
New Grammar
How we understand our own selfhood shapes how we understand the selfhood of others. But more than that, how we understand our own selfhood determines whether we extend selfhood to other, nonhuman beings. What these passages evoke in me isn’t a desire to discern what characteristics or traits constitute a self, human or otherwise, but to discover how a broader conception of self, one which includes the nonhuman, changes how I relate to others and myself.
Setting aside the questions of who or what we are, asking the question of how we live, and how we live with others, is a question that inheres in what Kimmerer calls a grammar of animacy.
Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us…
In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Any attempt to answer the question, “how do I, as a self, relate to and live with and among other selves like me—and more importantly—other selves that are not like me?” requires one to know the piping of heaven and to be attentive to the sound of mushrooms flowering in the night. It requires learning not necessarily a new language, but a new grammar, where animals, plants, rocks, water and other beings are also persons, with agency and selfhood.
Too often questions of selfhood and identity begin and end with humans. Always lurking behind or between the word “self” is a hidden human, so that our answers to who and what we are remain in the realm of the human. “You hear the piping of man without yet hearing the piping of earth; you hear the piping of earth without yet hearing the piping of Heaven.” If we extend selfhood beyond the human to include, say, mushrooms and butterflies, then the answers to, and even the question of our selfhood itself changes radically.
Though I can’t access the experience of mushroom selfhood or butterfly selfhood—I can’t know what it’s like to be those people—there is some relationship between the mushroom and me, the butterfly and me, some common rouser or piper that pipes puhpowee in the night and creates the conditions for all of our selves to emerge, however different they are from each other. Perhaps one reason the Zhuangzi compares us and our emotions and desires to mushrooms of billowing steam is that we are constantly and always a symphony of notes, arising and decaying endlessly. And though we share a common source, there is no constancy to our individual identities in the same way that there is no constancy to the flowering fungi, arising in the morning and decaying by noon. That is, the force which causes the mushroom to emerge out of the fertile earth, wet with fluid from their passage, is the same force that causes us all to emerge—but it’s also a force that allows each thing to be unique, not just once, but always and continually.
Our selves and identities are constantly, endlessly emerging like the wind blowing through the hollows, like morning mushrooms springing up in the night, not knowing what comes at noon. To then hold on to anyone of these iterations as our true identity or our true self is to cut off the source, to dam up that thing upon which we all rely.
Augmented Reality
What I find valuable in these stories isn’t so much their description or definition of selfhood but the ways they destabilize and expand my ideas of who and what I am. When taken together they open up the notions of selfhood, identity, and relations to include far more than I had previously thought possible.
If the piping of heaven is what causes individuals to be what they are, of themselves, then that thing which causes each to sound—“the rouser” in Ziporyn’s translation—also relates each to the other. Each individual tone is dependent on the air moving through, and even though they each have their own unique timbre they are nonetheless related and connected to some shared source. Similarly, whether I dream that I’m a butterfly or a butterfly is dreaming of being me, there is some relationship there between the selfhood of the butterfly and my selfhood. What matters to me isn’t whether I can tell the difference between myself and the butterfly, but that there is some thing which binds each of us to the other in relation, so that our identities become intermingled: we are both participating in a shared, though fleeting, identity.
But the butterfly story isn’t just about relativizing our identities. It’s more than just a story about who we are, it’s a story about who we are from the perspective of others—I am simultaneously a person dreaming I’m a butterfly and the dream of a butterfly; both of these things are true at the same time. When considered in conjunction with the piping of heaven story, it is a story about the transformation of my identity from one to the other. I can be both a person dreaming I’m a butterfly and the dream of a butterfly because my identity and selfhood are not fixed but endlessly emerging, transforming, and decaying. The transformation of things is not just physical, as if it were limited to only bodies and flesh, caterpillars and butterflies—the transformation of things is a transformation of identity too. Just as the meaning of words are peculiarly unfixed, so too are our very selves.
Not only are our identities and notions of self unfixed and changing, but, as Kimmerer’s suggests, the idea of selfhood itself is far more extensive than we dreamt: mushrooms and water and rocks and butterflies all have identities and selfhood, unfixed and constantly emerging selfhood, but selfhood nonetheless. Humans are implicated in this selfhood because their identities extend outward into the environment and all its relations, which includes us. “Without that there is no me, and yet without me there is nothing picked out from it.”
That the beings we are related to also have identities and selfhood doesn’t diminish our selfhood or identity but augments it. The result is a world that is peopled with selves of all kinds—human, fungal, and everything in between.
When Sir Shoestrap says, “I have lost me. But could you know who or what that is? You hear the piping of man without yet hearing the piping of earth; you hear the piping of earth without yet hearing the piping of Heaven,” perhaps he’s directing our attention away from questions of human identity and selfhood merely, and instead directing us to listen to the, “wordless being of others in which we are never alone.” In the soft soil under the pines, where the mushrooms emerge in the night, that is where we will find not just ourselves, but all selves, unceasingly transforming night and day.
One response
[…] We Are The Morning Mushrooms […]