Zhuangzi according to Fukunaga (Livia Kohn)

Integrating the multifaceted descriptions of Zhuangzi's [Chuang Tzu's] worldview into an organized whole, the Japanese scholar Fukunaga Mitsuji has proposed an interpretation that, though influenced to a certain extent by Guo Xiang's [Kuo Hsiang's] later commentary, seems to capture the essentials as they were understood and perpetuated by the Chinese themselves. According to Fukunaga, Zhuangzi begins with the conviction that human beings do not feel at home in the world - an understanding shared by many of his contemporaries.

But Zhuangzi does not look for causes in the social and political framework of the times. Rather, he claims that people are unhappy in the world because of their rationally determined minds. To him, the world is perfect as it is - nothing one could do or say would make it better. It is a reality to be accepted as such. To change being in order to influence consciousness would have sounded absurd to Zhuangzi. Althougn he agrees that the problem of existence lies in the discrepancy between being and consciousness, he insists that the change must take place in the mind alone.

According to Fukunaga, the first step Zhuangzi advocates to transform the mind is to understand properly what consciousness is and how it causes problems in people's lives. He claims that human beings are strangers to the world because they set up abstract categories and intellectual divisions to deal with life. They thereby destroy life's purity and simplicity. Zhuangzi agrees with the Daeode jing [Tao Te Ching] in acknowledging that the reality of being is nothing but an ongoing process of change. But people place a distance between themselves and their experiences by giving names to things. They perceive them as good or bad, desirable or undesirable.

Human self-consciousness - and again Zhuangzi concurs with other ancient Chinse philosophers - is most immediately expressed in language, in 'names'. But he does not advocate a 'rectification of names', as Confucius did, nor does he support the effort to make the conscious network more coherent and improve its accordance with reality. Rather, Zhuangzi contends that all names, all self-consciousness, have to become part of inner spontaneity. The silence of immediate experience has to be restored. Human estrangement for Zhuangzi comes when people set up mental categories and emotional values in dealing with things. Then they begin to love life and hate death; they increasingly shift between extremes, emotionally and intellectually, instead of taking things for what they are. Good and bad, joy and anger, right and wrong, liking one and disliking another - these attitudes represent the fundamental error of human existence in the world.

Zhuangzi's solution to the predicament is to "make all things equal", as the title of the second chapter suggests. The first step in this direction is the realization of one's erroneous behavior in the past. One must first understand that passing judgment and having feelings about things are harmful to oneself. One must realize that there is no neeed ever to feel separate from the inherent perfection of all. In fact, one always participates in the Tao, the absolute, the One. The absolute is the now; it is right here to be participated in absolutely.

(From Early Chinese Mysticism, by Livia Kohn, Princeton 1992)