Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social ReformerZhuangzi
Religion
Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer
Zhuangzi
Ethics -- China; Philosophy, Chinese
"Granting that you and I argue. If you beat me, and not I you, are you
necessarily right and I wrong? Or if I beat you and not you me, am I
necessarily right and you wrong? Or are we both partly right and partly
wrong? Or are we both wholly right and wholly wrong? You and I cannot
know this, and consequently the world will be in ignorance of the truth.
"Who shall I employ as arbiter between us? If I employ some one who
takes your view, he will side with you. How can such a one arbitrate
between us? If I employ some one who takes my view, he will side with
me. How can such a one arbitrate between us? And if I employ some one
who either differs from, or agrees with, both of us, he will be equally
unable to decide between us. Since then you, and I, and man, cannot
decide, must we not depend upon Another?
Upon God, in whose infinity all contraries blend indistinguishably
into ONE.
Such dependence is as though it were not dependence. We are embraced in
the obliterating unity of God. There is perfect adaptation to whatever
may eventuate; and so we complete our allotted span.
"But what is it to be embraced in the obliterating unity of God? It
is this. With reference to positive and negative, to that which is
so and that which is not so,--if the positive is really positive, it
must necessarily be different from its negative: there is no room for
argument. And if that which is so really is so, it must necessarily be
different from that which is not so: there is no room for argument.
"Take no heed of time, nor of right and wrong. But passing into the
realm of the Infinite, take your final rest therein."
Our refuge is in God alone, the Infinite Absolute. Contraries cannot
but exist, but they should exist independently of each other without
antagonism. Such a condition is found only in the all-embracing unity
of God, wherein all distinctions of positive and negative, of right
and wrong, of this and of that, are obliterated and merged in ONE.
Herbert Spencer says, "The antithesis of subject and object, never
to be transcended while consciousness lasts, renders impossible all
knowledge of the Ultimate Reality in which subject and object are
united." _Principles of Psychology_, i. p. 272.
The Penumbra said to the Umbra, "At one moment you move: at another
you are at rest. At one moment you sit down: at another you get up.
Why this instability of purpose?" "I depend," replied the Umbra, "upon
something which causes me to do as I do; and that something depends
in turn upon something else which causes it to do as it does. My
dependence is like that of a snake's scales or of a cicada's wings.
Which do not move of their own accord.
How can I tell why I do one thing, or why I do not do another?"
Showing how two or more may be the phenomena of one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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