With the exception of a few anecdotes preserved by tradition, and whose historical foundation is far from certain, the life of Zhuang Zi is practically unknown to us. We only know that he lived in the principality of Song ( in Henan now ) around 285 BC, at the end of an existence marked by indifference to honours, wandering and misery and it is believed that he must have died at an advanced age.
The Book
We know that Zhuang Zi takes up in part from Lao Zi the themes of unity, serenity, rejection of the world, developing them, systematizing them and giving them more force and relief.
But he stands out from Lao Zi by a greater tendency to internalize. The sociopolitical concern of the latter therefore disappears; non-action no longer has any social or political connotation and becomes a state of consciousness… Rather than a dream of the Golden Age, the theme of the return to Unity becomes an aspiration to be one with the moving stream of life. A mystical element both integrates and overhangs Lao Zi’s dialectical relativism.
As a result, Zhuang Zi is widely read by Buddhists today.
Unquestionably the image of the Saint is the most important link that connects Zhuang Zi to the Taoist tradition. He believed in the existence of beings in human form, immortal and endowed with supernatural gifts. The Zhuang zi is the oldest text that gives us a living and precise description of it. While Lao Zi’s Saint is only a tutelary and exemplary character endowed with certain powers, in Zhuang Zi he takes on a completely different scope, to the point of constituting the complementary, positive pole of the negative pole represented in the work all its critical and sometimes destructive aspect.
To the questions posed by Zhuang zi and which he leaves unresolved in terms of discourse and conceptualization, the Saint is the only mysterious answer, an answer that prefigures the future figure of the Taoist Saint.
The Saint according to Zhuang Zi
He is characterized mainly by total physical and mental freedom: he is outside the world, he navigates, frolics in the four corners of the universe; he is One with the universe in its unanswered mystery; it is “out of the ordinary”, universal diversity that it encompasses so infinitely that it draws from it an inexhaustible capacity for change, for diversified responses, without harming its one and unifying identity.
Exempt from any moral, political or social concern, from any metaphysical concern, from any search for efficiency (unlike Laozi, advising a prince), from any internal or external conflict, from any lack and from any quest, he has a free spirit and lives in perfect unity with himself and with everything. He thus enjoys a total plenitude which confers him in a great power which takes on a cosmic dimension.
Consequently, and contrary to the Saint of Lao zi, he does not govern, even by non-action. He is One therefore one and only, true: for Zhuang zi is defined as “artificial” that which depends on the outside. He is also celestial, which also means natural, as opposed to “human”, because man superimposes on nature landmarks and tools that have a utilitarian purpose.
He wrote, “The Saint rides the wind, or white clouds.” So his body does not wither; fire does not burn it and water does not immerse it; the heat wave nor the frost touch it, neither beasts nor men can harm it.
Attention, we must take seriously at least the existence at that time of longevity techniques: the “divine men”, for example, do not eat the “five cereals”.
It will be understood, here, everything is based on the mystical flight. His characters often fall into ecstasy (for example before the magnificent flight of the Phoenix), leaving their bodies like “dead wood” or like a “clod of earth”, and their hearts (intellectual life and emotional life) like “ashes extinct”!
Zhuang Zi provides the mystical element of Taoism expressing itself through an integration with the Cosmos, not, as in the system structured on the model of Yin-Yang and the Five Agents, here, in our lower world… Attention, Zhuang Zi has therefore a little “anti-norm”, even anarchist side.
We understand that in Europe, because of Zhuang Zi, we think of Taoism as opposed to Confucianism.
« Fasting » from the heart goes hand in hand with a formula that Zhuang zi borrows from Lao zi, “keep the One”, a key word in Taoism where it designates various meditation techniques. Lao Dan is remembered responding to Confucius curious about how he fell into ecstasy: “Get the One and identify yourself with it”
In other passages of Zhuang zi, all the principles of Taoist contemplation are there: the “straight body” (Zheng), which suggests both a healthy body and a body in the correct position for meditation, and the “coming spirits in the dwelling” which evokes the appearance of divine spirits, either in the meditation chamber, or in the body of the Taoist, their “dwelling”.
All this corresponds to the attitude of concentration and closure to the outside world, to the world of the senses, an act of withdrawal and rupture which, in fact, is only the complement and the preliminary stage to the movement of extension which is opens with the Saint frolicking in a continuous universe where there is no longer any interior or exterior.
Qi and Jing
Two principles are put by Zhuang zi at the foundation of life, principles which will have the same importance in Taoism, the breath (Qi) and the Essence (Jing).
It was he who first wrote that “life is concentration of the breath; if it disperses, it is death”.
This Qi, this “breath”, is neither matter nor spirit, the only substance in the world, it is the primordial Breath of the Taoists and it is the one that will be the subject of most longevity techniques. But this Qi can materialize in Blood for example.
The other element is the Jing, root of the essences of the body. The Saint says that it “must be kept intact and whole” and “not to be agitated”.
The tranquility advocated by Lao Zi, the silence and the absence of thought are repeatedly emphasized by Zhuang Zi. This is how Guang Chengzi, staged, gives his opinion to Huang di: “Don’t look, don’t listen, embrace your minds in peace, and your body, by itself, will be correct; be calm, be pure, do not tire your body, do not agitate your essence, and you will be able to live a long time; if your eyes see nothing, if your ears hear nothing, if your heart-mind knows nothing, your spirits will guard your body, and your body will live long; take care of your interior, close yourself to the exterior; too much knowledge leads to ruin”
Compared to Lao Zi, to finish, we can add that the Dao is staged, paradoxically, in a more concrete way in the Zhuang Zi. There is the Dao of the gifted and talented craftsman who is the master of his work. The Dao takes definitions more related to different perspectives on Life, even if the concern for the possibility of a true Knowledge of this life is great in the ironic sage. The Saint, fierce, anarchist, out of the world, as we have seen, only aspires to be ONE with the great Dao of the Universe…
