ZenExperience-obooko-rel0025

CHUANG TZU
The second important figure in Taoism is the almost equally
legendary teacher remembered as Chuang Tzu, who is usually
placed in the fourth century B.C., some two centuries after Lao
Tzu. An early historian tells that once Chuang Tzu was invited to
the court to serve as a minister, an invitation he declined with a
typical story: An ox is selected for a festival and fattened up for
several years, living the life of wealth and indulgence—until the
day he is led away for sacrifice. At that reckoning what would he
give to return to the simple life, where there was poverty but also
freedom?
In Chuang Tzu's own book of wisdom, he also derided the
faith in rationality common to Chinese scholars. To emphasize his
point he devised a vehicle for assaulting the apparatus of logic—
that being a "nonsense" story whose point could only be
understood intuitively., There has yet to be found a more deadly
weapon against pompous intellectualizing, as the Ch'an
Buddhists later proved with the koan. Chuang Tzu also knew how
quickly comedy could deflate, and he used it with consummate
skill, again paving the way for the absurdist Zen masters. In fact,
his dialogues often anticipate the Zen mondo, the exchanges
between master and pupil that have comic/straight-man
overtones.
In this regard, Chuang Tzu also sometimes anticipates
twentieth-century writers for the Theater of the Absurd, such as
Beckett or Ionesco. Significantly, the Columbia scholar Burton
Watson suggests that the most fruitful path to Chuang Tzu "is not
to attempt to subject his thoughts to rational and systematic
analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to
think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive
sense of the mind moving beyond the words, and of the world in
which it moves." 7 This is undoubtedly true. The effect of comic
parody on logic is so telling that the only way to really understand
the message is to stop trying to "understand" it.
Concerning the limitations of verbal transmission, Chuang
Tzu tells a story of a wheelmaker who once advised his duke that
the book of ancient thought the man was reading was "nothing but
the lees and scum of bygone men." The duke angrily demanded