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Saturday, March 19, 2005
~ 10:16 PM ~
I reread a book recently. A book about Zhuang Zi. For those who do not know him, he believed in a carefree life, that all should be adhering to nature's way so as to be happy. I quite miss that wonderful form of life.
Zhuang Zi told of stories in the original book, Zhuang Zi, written and named after by himself. One of the stories goes like this:
There was a carpenter who went on a tour to look for high-quality wood, with his disciples. On the way he saw a very tall tree, but just walked away. His disciples asked him why he didn't want that tree as the material he sought for. He answered that pillars would rot, ships would sink, and containers will not hold if they were made of that wood. 'That tree is just useless!' he said.
Later that night, the tree came to his dream. It was angry that the carpenter accused of it being useless. To a tree, being useful was equivalent to having an incurable disease. Useless trees, however, survives the longest. If the tree had been a useful tree, it wouldn't have lived till that day to reprimand the carpenter. The carpenter, upon hearing this, was enlightened, and bowed to this tree of wisdom.
As we can see, this story, like most of the other stories in his book, speaks of the use of the useless. To be useful is not always a good thing. Zhuang Zi illustrated the point with a scenario where living things are sacrificed to a certain deity. However there are some which are considered as 'unlucky' and thus are not offered to the gods. Come to think of it, beautiful people, which are the ideal sacrifices, meet their doom earlier, while the 'unlucky' ones live. Is 'luckiness' really lucky then?
Zhuang Zi also teaches us that we should not impose our form of thoughts to others. For example, we do not know whether a fish is happy or not, since we are not fishes. Likewise, we cannot say whether what others say about fish is right or wrong, since we are not them and we do not know whether they know about a fish's feelings. Concepts are then individualistic and uncompromisable(if there is such a word).
He is known to be a peace loving man. He compared a war among states to be a fight of people on the two feelers of a snail. In many ways, he seems to be a successor of Lao Zi, the founder of the original Taoism, which was not a religion but a philosophy. Lao Zi himself thought that no action is the best, and the monarch whom no one knows of existence, but is there, is the best monarch. How true it is.
I sure had a great time reading the book( it was a comic book). It reminded me of the carefree life that I may have taken if not for all the mundane things I have to look after, like studies. Maybe I will go for a retreat when I have a lot of time. Argh...NS.
