Chuang Tzu on Knowledge, Skill, and Letting Go

For this session we’ll read chapters 2, 3, 6, 18, and 19 of Burton Watson’s translation of The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (also known as the Zhuangzi). Together, they ask what it means to live well when our judgments about what is right, useful, or worth pursuing may be less secure than we think.

Chapter 2 questions whether any one perspective can settle a disagreement and ends with Chuang Tzu’s famous butterfly dream. In chapter 3, Cook Ting’s effortless way of cutting up an ox offers a surprising picture of skill: he succeeds by working with what is there rather than forcing his way through it. Chapters 6 and 18 take that attitude into harder territory—illness, grief, death, and the search for happiness. Chapter 19 returns to skill and asks what it might mean to “master” life without trying to control everything in it.

Is Chuang Tzu asking us to give up on truth, or to hold our convictions more lightly? Can we accept change without becoming passive? And is the good life something we achieve, or something we stop getting in the way of?

The reading can be found here