Drumming on the Tub

So. I want to tell you a story.

It's from the Zhuangzi, which is one of the two texts at the heart of early Daoism, alongside the Dao De Jing. It was written (or compiled, or assembled, or accreted — opinions vary, as usual) a couple of generations after the Dao De Jing, by a fellow named Zhuang Zhou, also called Zhuangzi, also called Master Zhuang, who lived sometime in the fourth century BCE and who was, by all evidence, a fantastic writer and a deeply weird and wonderful human being.

The Zhuangzi is to the Dao De Jing what — I don't know — what stand-up comedy is to philosophy lectures. Same subject matter, totally different register. The Dao De Jing is dense, aphoristic, sometimes mysterious. Eighty-one short chapters of here is the way and the way is not the way and stop forcing things. The Zhuangzi is stories. Butchers. Useless trees. Dreams about being a butterfly. Cooks. Cripples. Skulls that talk. Giant fish that turn into giant birds and fly to the south. Madmen who turn out to be sages. Sages who are unrecognizable from drunks. The whole text is alive with characters and jokes and absurdity, and it teaches the same things the Dao De Jing teaches, but it teaches them through laughter and weirdness instead of through cryptic verse.

I love this guy.

OK. So. The story.

Some quick vocabulary before we start, just so you have it.

Qi (氣). The vital current. The animating something that flows through everything alive. Not energy in the modern physics sense — qi is older than that conception, and bigger than it. It's the breath, the flow, the moving-stuff of being alive. Trees have qi. Rivers have qi. People have qi. When something dies, the qi disperses. When something is born, the qi has gathered. Qi is going to come up in the story.

Hún (魂) and pò (魄). Two aspects of a person. Hún is the lighter, upward-tending part. Pò is the denser, body-bound part. Both are made of qi. Both gather to make a person. Both disperse when the person dies. Different traditions and different teachers have said different things about what happens to each one after the dispersal — there are stories about the hún rising upward and the pò sinking downward, stories about both eventually returning to the great undifferentiated mix, stories about ritual practices for guiding them to wherever they go. The framework doesn't insist on one answer. What the framework does insist on, though, is that a person is not a single thing that either persists or doesn't. A person is a composition. And a composition can come apart, and the parts can go their own ways. (A note: the hún and pò are not named explicitly in the story I'm about to tell. But they are the conceptual world Zhuangzi was writing within. He didn't have to name them. His readers would have known.)

Wanwu (萬物). The ten thousand things. This is the Chinese way of saying everything — every plant, every animal, every river, every person, every cloud, every grain of sand. The whole shimmering varied content of the world. The wanwu come into being and go out of being. The qi gathers into them and disperses out of them. This is the way it goes.

Jùshì (巨室). The vast room, or the great chamber. Zhuangzi's image, in the passage we're about to read, for where the person who has died has gone to rest. It's not the afterlife in the Western sense. It's the cosmos itself, considered as a kind of vast dwelling where everything that has come apart is gathered. The wanwu are inside it. The qi flows through it. It's not a separate place. It's the great room that contains everything, including us, and including those who have gone before us. They have not gone somewhere else. They have gone to lie down in the room we are also in.

Hui Shi. Zhuangzi's friend. They appear together throughout the Zhuangzi, arguing, joking, reasoning. Hui Shi is a logician — he likes puzzles and paradoxes and proper procedures. Zhuangzi loves him and also loves to mess with him. Their friendship runs through the whole text. When Hui Shi eventually dies, Zhuangzi mourns him deeply, saying something like now there is no one I can really talk to anymore.

That's enough vocabulary. Here's the story.

Zhuangzi's wife died.

They had been together a long time. They had raised children together. They had grown old together. Now she was gone.

Hui Shi, his old friend, came to pay his respects. He arrived expecting to find Zhuangzi in mourning — maybe weeping, maybe sitting quietly, maybe receiving condolences, doing what people do when their wife of many years has just died.

He did not find that.

He found Zhuangzi sitting on the floor with his legs spread out in front of him, banging on an upside-down cooking pot like it was a drum, and singing.

Singing.

Hui Shi was — let's be honest — pretty horrified. He stood in the doorway looking at his old friend, this wild man on the floor banging on a pot, and he said something like: what are you doing? She lived with you. She raised your children. She grew old with you. And now you're not even crying. Just not crying would be one thing. But you're singing? You're banging on a pot and singing? Don't you think this is a little much?

And Zhuangzi looked up at him and said something more or less like this:

When she first died, of course I was sad. I'm not made of stone. Of course I grieved. How could I not?

But then I started to think about it. And I looked back. I looked back beyond her dying. I looked back beyond her growing old, beyond her being my wife, beyond her even being born. I looked back to before she had a body. To before her hún and pò had gathered into the composition that was her. To before there was even qi to be her qi. To when she was just — part of the whole undifferentiated mix, the great soup of things that hadn't yet sorted themselves into things.

And I saw that something happened. Something stirred. The qi gathered. A body formed. The body became my wife. We had our life together. Then the qi began to disperse. The body unmade itself. And now she has gone back into the great mix, where she came from.

She is going through the same kind of changes that the seasons do. Spring becomes summer. Summer becomes autumn. Autumn becomes winter. Winter becomes spring again. Nobody yells at the seasons for changing. Nobody weeps because spring has turned into summer.

She has lain down to sleep in the jùshì, the vast room of all things. If I followed her around weeping and wailing, it would mean I hadn't understood any of this. It would mean I thought her transformation was a wrong thing, when it is just the way of things.

So I stopped weeping. And then, after a while, I started drumming, and celebrating this remarkable passage, this transformation!

That's it. That's the story.

When Hui Shi heard this, the text doesn't say what he said. He probably stood there for a while. He probably thought about it. He maybe argued, knowing him, but probably not for long. Some things you can't argue with even if you want to.

OK so after my parent passed, this story helped me.

Not right away. Not in the first days, when the grief was acute and there was nothing to be done with it but feel it. I'm not made of stone. Zhuangzi's first move is real. Of course you grieve. Of course you weep. The story doesn't ask you to skip that part.

But after a while — and the after a while matters; this isn't a story about how to feel in the first hour or the first week — after a while, when the sharpness had begun to settle into the long quiet ache that grief becomes, this story gave me something I hadn't been able to find anywhere else.

The story doesn't say don't be sad. The story doesn't say they're in a better place or any of the well-meaning things people say. The story doesn't promise reunion or afterlife or eternal soul. The story just looks. It looks back beyond the body. It looks back beyond the qi. It looks all the way back. And from that view, it sees what's happening — what is always happening, to everyone, all the time — and it says: this is the way of things. This is the great cycle of transformation. The person you loved came out of this and has gone back into it, and so will you, and so will I, and so does everyone. It's a return to a pure and undifferentiated state of being.

So here's what I came to understand. The drumming isn't denial. The drumming isn't I am okay now and I have moved on. The drumming is something stranger and quieter. The drumming is the recognition that the whole thing — the gathering of qi, the forming of a body, the long life lived, the dispersing back into the great mix — is part of a much larger picture and process, of life and death, ebb and flow. For me at least... this passage helped.

You will find me in the cave.

Peace.

I read this passage in Burton Watson's translation, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 113. Watson uses spirit where the Chinese has qi, and the hún and pò I added aren't in the passage but are the world Zhuangzi was writing within. Watson's version is sharper than mine. Go read him. While you're at it, read the rest of the Zhuangzi. The passages are truly enjoyable and you will learn so much about early Chinese thought.