Carried Away in the Watercourse

LEFT ALONE TO FOLLOW ITS NATURAL COURSE, CONSCIOUSNESS EBBS AND FLOWS like the tides, rises and falls like waves on the sea, rolls and tumbles like a mountain stream, wanders like a meandering river.

Over the past month or so, I’ve re-read the Zhuangzi (also known as the Chuang Tzu) in two translations, one old, the other new — but both new to me. The experience proved to be altogether unsettling. With a text like this, however, that’s just how it should be.

The language in James Legge’s 1891 translation seems so archaic now that it verges on the incomprehensible. Brook Ziporyn’s 2009 translation, on the other hand, is so academically creative that it renders a favorite text virtually unrecognizable. Ziporyn has concluded, for example, that in this context the proper translation of “dao” should be “course” rather than the more universally familiar “way.” As a result, I found myself pausing each time I read “course” in his translation to reconsider what the text might mean with “course” instead of “way” rendering the Chinese “dao.”

Of course (pun intended), Zhuangzi’s paradoxical thought itself pushes us beyond comprehension and recognition. He uses words to convince us words are empty. He uses logic to nullify the use of logic. He overturns conventional judgment, not to re-value all values (a la Nietzsche), but to urge us to transcend values altogether (which is the point of Nietzche’s revaluations, after all). So, being carried away while reading a Daoist classic is actually the point of a text that, paradoxically, really has no point to make.

In so far as it’s about anything, Zhuangzi’s text is about the dao. Alan Watts defined the dao as “the watercourse way” (a phrase that in Chinese would include “dao” twice: “the dao-of-water dao”). But the opening line of Laozi’s Dao De Jing tells us the dao is ineffable: “The dao we call ‘the dao’ is not the eternal dao” (Yang Peng trans., 2016, mod. — the Chinese text has “dao” in all three spots). Thinking, reading, and writing about the dao, therefore, is like trying to grasp flowing water. When you get a handful of flowing water, it is no longer flowing. Thus, to understand the dao, you have to let go, dive in, and go with the flow.

Zhuangzi used rational language to push us into non-rational experience. If Zhuangzi had been a Buddhist, we’d call his text an act of skillful means (upaya), and the enlightenment to which he pointed a realization of emptiness (sunyata). We could include his teachings in the Perfection of Wisdom tradition (prajna paramita). Buddhism, however, didn’t reach China until some 400 years after Zhuangzi had come and gone — and Zhuangzi would have rejected any such categorization, because he rejected all categorizations.

So, reading his text, and earnestly trying to comprehend it, is always and necessarily to become unsettled. It is to wander without aim beyond the frontier; to be carried away in the watercourse.