“Paoding Jieniu” (The Cook Carving the Ox): A Key to Unraveling the Mystery of Chinese Wisdom

Speaking of Zhuangzi, Sima Qian said: “Thus his writings run to more than a hundred thousand words, mostly fables.” As Sima Qian observed, one of the most striking features of Zhuangzi’s writing is the use of fables to hint at profound truths. Among them is a class of fables—the cook carving the ox, the wheelwright swinging his adze to raise a wind, Wheelwright Bian hewing a wheel, the hunchback catching cicadas, the ferryman handling his boat, Woodworker Qing carving the bell-stand—that all imply a common truth. Zhuangzi, using different instances, recounts this truth again and again from every side, which suffices to show how greatly he prized it. One may say that these fables explain the starting point of Daoist thought, unlock the mystery of Chinese wisdom, and clarify the distinctive mode of thinking of the Chinese nation. Setting out from here, we can more deeply interpret, as a whole, the ideas of Daoism, and at the same time more readily understand the ideas of Confucianism. We take the cook carving the ox as our example.

I. The Distinctive Path and Wisdom of Grasping the “Dao”

The “Mastering Life” (Yangshengzhu) chapter of the Zhuangzi records: “The cook (Pao Ding) was carving an ox for Lord Wenhui. Where his hand touched, where his shoulder leaned, where his foot trod, where his knee pressed—with a hiss and a swish, the knife sang through, never out of tune: in time with the Mulberry Grove dance, in rhythm with the Jingshou music. Lord Wenhui said: ‘Ah, excellent! That skill should reach such a height!’ The cook laid down his knife and replied: ‘What your servant loves is the Dao, which goes beyond skill. When I first began carving oxen, I saw nothing but the whole ox. After three years, I no longer saw the whole ox. Now I meet it with the spirit and do not look with the eyes; the faculties of sense stop and the spirit moves as it will. Following the natural grain, I cleave along the great seams and guide the knife through the great cavities, going by what is inherently so …’” In the repeated practice of carving, the cook continually adjusted his behavior; he not only gradually adapted to and mastered the whole structure of the ox, but his carving movements had formed a particular behavioral pattern (a skill), sedimented into an experiential structure, and internalized into his survival instinct. He no longer needed to look with the eyes; relying solely on his inner spirit, hand and knife rising and falling, the whole ox was in an instant reduced to dismembered chunks of flesh scattered on the ground. His movements, like floating clouds and flowing water, full of rhythm, were just like the “Mulberry Grove dance.” That is, the cook’s experiential structure, the behavioral structure of the carving, and the structure of the ox had already entered a relation of mutual accord and identity. It is precisely the behavioral pattern of carving the ox that seems to have joined the cook himself and the ox into one; the behavioral structure thus already conforms completely to the structure of the ox, which is also the cook’s experiential structure—the ox has become a part of the cook’s body, and his knowledge of the ox is like his knowledge of his own body.

But to realize this identity, extremely practiced skill alone is far from enough. The cook must also enter the state of “not looking with the eyes, the faculties of sense stopping while the spirit moves as it will”—that is, the realm of “sitting in forgetfulness” (zuowang) of which Yan Hui spoke—and only thus can this survival instinct be fully brought into play. Some hold that “the faculties of sense stopping while the spirit moves as it will” and “sitting in forgetfulness” mean a high concentration of attention. This is in fact a misunderstanding. Zhuangzi has clearly explained this: such a state is “dismissing the limbs, dispelling the intelligence, leaving form behind and casting off knowledge”—that is, it is the unconscious state of no-thing and no-self. Only in the unconscious state can the cook’s survival instinct be fully brought into play. Any intervention of consciousness would repress his instinct, disturb the automatism of the carving, and treat the ox as an “object of consciousness,” splitting the unified relation between the cook and the ox, so that the carving is obstructed.

From the above fable we may therefore discover such a relation: the cook is in the unconscious state, the carving becomes a survival instinct, and the ox is no longer the cook’s “object” but a “non-object” structured by bodily behavior and accorded into one with the cook—all sides standing wholly in a relation of mutual harmony and fusion, that is, the state of no-thing and no-self. As Husserl points out, any object can only be an object of consciousness. If the ox were still the cook’s object, then he would necessarily be in the conscious state, the carving would degenerate into a conscious purposive behavior, instinct would be disturbed and repressed, and the relation of accord and oneness would instantly collapse. From this we may obtain the following relational formula: Cook (unconscious experience)—carving the ox (instinctive behavior)—ox (non-object); that is, the “non-objective relation” in which thing and self are one, no-thing and no-self. By the cook’s own account, what he pursues is the realm of the Dao, which has already gone beyond the stage of skill. And the “cook” in the formula may wholly be replaced by Carpenter Shi, Wheelwright Bian, the hunchback, the ferryman, Woodworker Qing, or anyone else; the carving may be replaced by any survival instinct; the ox may be replaced by the speck of plaster on the nose-tip, the wheel, the cicada, the boat, the wooden bell-stand, and even the myriad things of nature: Heaven. This at the same time reveals the relation between the organism and nature: any organism (including the human) within a natural environment can use its own instinctive behavior to adapt to the environment, merge into it, and join with it into one. Otherwise, such an organism would be eliminated by nature. The above formula may then be changed to: (non-action, the Dao) Human (unconscious experience)—instinctive behavior—Heaven (non-object); that is, “matching Heaven with Heaven,” the unity of Heaven and humanity.

This is what Zhuangzi calls “matching Heaven with Heaven”: using the human being’s natural endowment (instinct) to accord with the Dao of nature (Heaven)—that is, “the unity of Heaven and humanity.” Instinctive behavior is the most basic way the human establishes an intimate link with nature. Only when the human is in a state of mutual fusion with nature, only when he moves according to his nature and acts in compliance with nature, can he truly experience and attain the Dao. Hence Xiong Shili says: “To let knowing go along with transformation is not no-knowing. Yet this knowing in fact forgets thing and self, sets life and death outside, and merges directly into one with transformation; therefore it is not the knowing of ordinary so-called knowledge. Zhuangzi held that his supreme, unsurpassed realm lay here.” This is precisely the human being’s establishing of a fused, unified “non-objective relation” with the world—the path of being “embodiedly” suited to things, fusing with the world, and grasping the Dao and the world—a “wisdom” utterly different from “knowledge.” This conception of the unity of Heaven and humanity, and this distinctive understanding of the Dao, is not only the source of Daoist thought but is also held by the Confucians; the thought of both Confucianism and Daoism unfolds from here.

When human and nature are in the “non-objective relation” of the unity of Heaven and humanity, merged into one, the human is Heaven and Heaven is the human; the Dao is already set within the human himself, and the human naturally grasps the Way of Heaven. The Dao flows through Heaven, Earth, and the human; the Dao of Heaven is the Dao (virtue, de) of the human. Because the Dao is in the “non-objective relation,” the Dao cannot be an object but is a “non-object”; relative to human consciousness, the Dao is “nothing” (wu) (not nonexistence), cannot be perceived or cognized, and cannot be spoken. What can be perceived and cognized must be an object; what can be spoken cannot do without the concept—and these are no longer the Dao. The Dao itself is not an object, not a concept. So Laozi says: “The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao; the name that can be named is not the constant name.” And Zhuangzi, through the mouth of “No-Beginning,” says: “The Dao cannot be heard; what is heard is not it. The Dao cannot be seen; what is seen is not it. The Dao cannot be spoken; what is spoken is not it. Do you know that which forms the formed is itself formless? The Dao is not fit to be named.” The so-called “Dao” is merely a saying Laozi was compelled to use, an “alias” (a styling), a name forced upon it.

From this angle, the “Dao” of Laozi and Zhuangzi differs from what Western philosophy calls “essence” or “law.” The Dao points directly to the law of nature’s operation, and can only be felt, experienced, and intuited within the “non-objective relation” of fusion with nature; it is the body’s direct grasp of the Dao in the unfolding of instinctive behavior, requiring entry into the unconscious instinctive state of “setting the world outside, setting things outside, setting life outside, no past or present, neither dying nor living.” And because the survival instinct comes as a gift from the species, indeed from the organism, having passed through a long process of natural sedimentation, testing, and elimination, the Dao is quite close to what Heidegger calls “truth.” As Wang Bi says: “The Dao, by formlessness and non-action, completes and aids the myriad things; therefore one who devotes himself to the Dao takes non-action as ruler and the wordless as teaching—faint and continuous as if existing, and things attain their truth. To be of one body with the Dao is called ‘being identical with the Dao.’” The so-called essence or law, by contrast, stresses what is obtained in the conscious state and the “objective relation” through observation, analysis, cognition, verification, and the like; and because the “objective relation” splits human from nature, although the so-called essence or law has passed the test of practice, it can hardly avoid being estranged from the Dao, and can only continually approach it. Hence Husserl says: “Every perceived object in the process of cognition is a flowing approximation … it is indeed the essence of this object, but it is forever only an imperfect approximation.”

Likewise, the so-called “great image” and “great tone” are “non-objects”; relative to human consciousness, though formless and faint of sound, they have already been constructed by human behavior within the “non-objective relation” and received by the body, becoming unconscious experience. Therefore “knowing the Dao” does not equal “being conscious of” it, and is far greater and deeper than “being conscious of” it; it is the foundation and root of all consciousness and knowledge. Human consciousness and knowledge are developed upon the foundation of unconscious experience; though a transcendent change and infinite expansion occur within, they remain rooted in unconscious experience, rooted in bodily behavior. Clearly, Zhuangzi’s fable reveals a path that transcends the linguistic medium and “dualistic” thought, grasping the Dao and the world directly and in an embodied way.

II. The Common Starting Point and the Divergences of Confucian and Daoist Thought

The thought of the unity of Heaven and humanity and the understanding of the Dao are shared by Daoism and Confucianism; the difference between the two lies only in the following respects. First, Daoism holds that anyone—whether the cook, Carpenter Shi, Wheelwright Bian, the hunchback, the ferryman, or Woodworker Qing—so long as he transforms a certain skill into a survival instinct and enters the unconscious instinctive state, can experience and attain the Dao. Since anyone can experience and attain the Dao in the instinctive state, the sage too becomes unnecessary, and knowledge is of no use; therefore Laozi advocated “cutting off sageliness and discarding wisdom.” For instinct, there is no distinction of good and evil; good and evil can only be relative to human reason—they are reason’s reflection and judgment on the value of behavior. “The knowledge of the ancients reached the utmost. To what did it reach? There were those who held that nothing had yet begun to exist—the utmost, the exhaustive, to which nothing can be added. Next, they held that things existed, but there had not yet begun to be boundaries. Next, they held that there were boundaries, but there had not yet begun to be right and wrong. When right and wrong became manifest, the Dao thereby was impaired.” In the state of the unity of Heaven and humanity, the human only acts according to Heavenly nature. Therefore “non-action” (wuwei) is not stillness without motion, not acting according to subjective purpose and will, but acting in compliance with nature and according to one’s own nature. When the human acts in compliance with nature and his own nature, he has already merged into nature and directly experiences and grasps the Dao. For just this reason, one should rise at sunrise and rest at sunset, roaming free between Heaven and Earth, content of heart. Once everyone acts in compliance with nature, where is there any need for the intervention of external power? “What is the power of the emperor to me?” This is precisely the reason Laozi advocated a small state with few people. Zhuangzi, for his part, pursued free-and-easy wandering, preferring, like the tortoise dragging its tail in the mud, to take his own delight.

Confucianism, by contrast, holds that only the sage can experience and apprehend the Dao. The Way of Heaven is subtle and hidden, mirrored only by sagely brilliance. Therefore Confucius even dreamed of seeing the Duke of Zhou. He not only sought to ask Laozi about the Dao, but dreamed of beholding the Duke of Zhou’s bearing and receiving instruction directly from him. Only the Duke of Zhou could truly apprehend the Dao, model himself on the virtue of Heaven, set an example for later generations, and practice the wordless teaching. “The sage follows his nature, and this is the Dao. Those below the sage cannot follow their nature, and in respect of the Dao cannot avoid excess and deficiency; therefore they must cultivate the Dao.” Since only the sage can attain the Dao and comply with the nature of Heaven and Earth, it should be the sage who institutes ritual and music, to regulate and cultivate later generations—disciplining behavior with ritual, edifying human nature with music, and removing the licentious, harmful “sounds of Zheng” so as to rectify the human heart. “The sage’s words transform the Dao: in accordance with human nature he institutes ritual, and in accordance with human nature he composes music. The great root of ritual and music is the same, but their functions differ: ritual stresses reverence and restrains from without; music stresses harmony and makes sincere within. Inner and outer mutually nourish, opposing yet completing each other—this is the ultimate norm of the human Dao.” Only by beginning from the cultivation of human nature can one truly “follow the heart’s desire without overstepping the bounds,” and make human behavior conform to the Way of Heaven. The so-called “mean” (zhongyong) is behavior neither leaning nor inclining, taking the behavior of the sage as the norm—that is, conforming to the Dao of nature.

Yet once the sage’s behavior is taken as the standard, good and evil have a basis for distinction, and one is bound to stress approving the good and condemning the evil; the human is thereby ranked, and ritual becomes a concrete, operable scale of distinction, a means of discipline, and a standard of moral measurement. And it is precisely this distinction that departs from the source of the Dao; so Laozi disdained ritual: “Thus, when the Dao is lost, virtue follows; when virtue is lost, benevolence follows; when benevolence is lost, righteousness follows; when righteousness is lost, ritual follows. Ritual is the thinning of loyalty and faith, and the beginning of disorder.” The reason a difference exists between Confucianism and Daoism lies first in this: what Daoism calls “attaining the Dao” can wholly be unconscious experience, whereas Confucianism stresses the apprehension of the Dao, which no longer rests at unconscious experience but is a comprehension of that experience—and the state of comprehension is attainable only by the sage, not by the ordinary person; hence Wang Bi says, “the sage embodies nothing.” Second, Laozi and Zhuangzi hold that the Dao is everywhere, that even in the ant, the tile, and the dung the Dao resides, human experience encompassing all of nature; whereas Confucianism stresses the great Dao, the Way of Heaven, the way of the human—that is, morality. The Dao attained by the cook and others is still unconscious experience and has not entered the stage of true awakening; even apprehension goes only as far as the lesser Way, even “trifling skills” that, though worth noting, are not the great Dao—which the gentleman does not pursue. Although Confucius too gladly sought instruction from a ferryman, taking others as teachers, he held that the great Dao, the Way of Heaven, and the way of the human can be apprehended only by the sage.

Second, Zhuangzi says: “Heaven and Earth have great beauty but do not speak; the four seasons have clear laws but do not debate; the myriad things have their completed principles but do not discourse.” Although this saying derives from Confucius, it is a core view of Daoism. Not only do Heaven and Earth not speak; the human too cannot speak the Dao. “Heaven and Earth are born together with me, and the myriad things are one with me. Since we are one, can there be speech? Since it is already called one, can there be no speech? The one and the speaking make two; the two and the one make three. Going on from here, even a skilled calculator cannot reach the end—how much less the ordinary person!” Language has the capacity to differentiate; whatever is spoken by language is necessarily differentiated by linguistic concepts, set up by the speaker as an object of speech, its relation to the human reconstructed as an “objective relation,” creating an estrangement between human and world and causing the Dao, as “non-object,” to be concealed. It is precisely this situation that places Laozi in a paradoxical predicament. Laozi was compelled, in the paradox of both speaking and negating speech, both using the concept and negating the concept, to lead the reader to apprehend the Dao in person. Zhuangzi wrote many fables, “weighty words,” and “goblet words,” hinting at, exploring, and approaching the Dao in a roundabout, indirect mode of speech that creates a particular situation, reticent and oblique. Since the Dao cannot be spoken, what can be spoken cannot be truly valuable and meaningful—this is why Wheelwright Bian regarded the sages’ books that Duke Huan read as the dregs of the ancients.

As to whether the Dao can be spoken, there is no fundamental difference between Confucius and the Daoists. Confucius said: “What does Heaven say? The four seasons run their course, the hundred things are born—what does Heaven say?” And Zigong said: “The Master’s words on nature and the Way of Heaven cannot be heard.” Confucius well knew the Way of Heaven was hard to apprehend and to speak, and turned instead to devote himself to editing the classics of the ancients; besides the Six Classics, the Analects too is his disciples’ record of his words and deeds. But once it is posited that the sage can experience and apprehend the Dao, and that only the sage can do so, then one cannot but rely on language and writing to speak and transmit it; otherwise the sage cannot set an example for later ages. This is precisely the prime mover behind the Wei–Jin “debate on words and meaning,” which bears on the great problem of the transmission of Confucian thought, with the appraisal of persons as its transitional bridge. Expounding the “debate on words and meaning,” Tang Yongtong says: “The Confucian books speak of the teaching of names (mingjiao); Laozi and Zhuangzi speak of the natural (ziran). What the Laozi-Zhuangzi Mystery Learning repeatedly states is rarely seen in the Confucian classics; thus the two teachings of Confucius and Laozi are in full conflict, hard to reconcile. The Wei–Jin scholars had two ways of resolving this difficulty. One held that the meaning of vacuity-and-nothing is indeed embodied by the sage, but in edifying the people, if benevolence and righteousness and the teaching of names are not used, then however lofty it is unworkable … The other took vacuity-and-nothing as root and edification as branch—root and branch being like substance and function. Function requires verbal teaching (the Confucian classics), while the substance (the mysterious import) is cut off from words and images. We cannot abandon the substance and speak only of its function, nor cling to verbal teaching and forget the meaning beyond the images.” The Way of Heaven is the way of the human. Since both Confucius and Laozi held that the Way of Heaven cannot be spoken—that any speaking of it necessarily reduces it to an object of speech, splits human from nature, and so misses the Way of Heaven—the wisest choice is to turn to the way of the human, that is, to the concrete manifestation of the Way of Heaven in the human, to the human being’s moral behavior, turning from “substance” to “function.” Whether human behavior conforms to the Way of Heaven is the ultimate criterion for measuring morality. Although Laozi’s Daodejing already runs the Dao of nature together with the virtue of human relations, Confucianism placed its focus directly on human ethics, morality, and ritual instruction.

Once the gaze turns to human moral behavior, from substance to function, it becomes possible to describe, transmit, and even judge it in language. “The Way of Heaven cannot be spoken in a vacuum; it cannot but run through the nature and destiny of the individual. Nature and destiny cannot be rootless; they cannot but connect with the metaphysical Way of Heaven.” Precisely because of the shift from substance to function, Confucianism could explore and hint at the mysterious, vacuous substance through concrete function. So Wang Bi says: “Therefore, seeking it from the ruling principle, though things are many, one knows that one may govern them by holding to the one; viewing it from the root, though the meanings are broad, one knows that one may raise them all under a single name.” The relation of substance and function determines that the true and the good are in fact one body, inseparable. The true is the substance of the Dao; the good is the function of the Dao, the concrete manifestation of the Dao in human behavior—that is, the meaning and value of behavior. As an inheritor of Confucian thought, Liu Xie directly says: “The Dao is handed down through the sage to take form in writing; the sage, through writing, makes the Dao manifest.” The doctrine that “writing carries the Dao” not only endows the transmission of the sage’s thought with practical possibility but greatly raises the status of writing and of the literatus—which is one reason Confucian thought continually spread, multiplied, and gained the dominant position. By this point the view of words and meaning (the Dao) had clearly shifted, from substance into function, from the vacuous into the actual.

But the Dao, after all, cannot be seen or spoken; even when language is organized into writing, one can only speak the traces of the Dao’s operation, describe its veining, and cannot directly speak the Dao. One thus has to “tax the void to demand the existent, knock at the silent to seek a sound,” and approach the Dao in an obscure, oblique mode of language. “The hidden (yin), as a mode, has its meaning arising beyond the words, its secret resonance communicating sidelong, its latent coloring issuing covertly—like the interchanging trigrams of the Yijing’s lines, or the pearls and jade hidden in the rivers and streams.” Because only the sage can experience and apprehend the Dao, others have neither the qualification nor the possibility of apprehending and speaking the Dao directly in their own way; the only path is continually to interpret the sage’s classics—“transmitting but not creating, trusting and loving the ancients”—and never, as in the West, to have later generations continually criticize and overturn their predecessors, with theory endlessly renovating its tricks. “Since the sage is the ultimate of the mean, capable of all things, the classics too are plain and central, containing all things. The sagely Dao is the mean; hence ‘writing can take the classics as its model.’” Wang Yangming put it still more plainly: “The human heart and the principle of Heaven are wholly one; what the sages and worthies set down in books is like portraying the spirit in a likeness—merely showing people the general form, so that through it they may seek out the truth. As for their spirit, breath, words, smiles, and movements, these of course cannot be transmitted. Later writings then take what the sage has portrayed, imitate and copy it, and arbitrarily analyze and add to it to display their own cleverness—and the loss of truth grows ever greater.” The only place where later generations are permitted to exercise creativity is in continually uncovering the subtle meanings within the sage’s classics, seeking the great import in the subtle words, and honestly inheriting the thought of the sages. To put it at the extreme, the whole of ancient Chinese intellectual history is a history of classical interpretation, and it cast the distinctive moral coloring of Chinese culture. Over against Confucianism, the Legalists stressed “technique” (shu) unconstrained by ritual norms; yet the two are also mutually opposed and mutually completing.

In fact, this mode of thinking that links substance and function, the actual and the vacuous, was already contained in the Book of Changes (Zhouyi). Though the Dao is nothing, its operation leaves traces, and the Zhouyi uses the simplest signs (the trigrams and their lines) in their changing combinations, together with the appended judgments, to describe these traces. Even though the signs cannot manifest the Dao itself, they can liken the image of Heaven and the form of Earth, liken the traces of the Dao’s operation, and thereby hint at the Dao. This way of symbolizing the Dao, hinting at it, and grasping it through signs is precisely what Vico calls “poetic wisdom,” and this wisdom has long influenced the mode of thinking and the cultural creation of the Chinese nation.

Third, Laozi and Zhuangzi pursue freedom, but this freedom is not what Westerners call the subject’s “freedom of the will.” John Searle points out: “The gap between reasons and decision (forming a prior intention); the gap between decision and the onset of action (the intention-in-action); and, for complex actions, the gap between the onset of the action and its continuation through to completion. This gap has a traditional name in philosophy: ‘freedom of the will.’” Freedom of the will prompts the subject to make autonomous decisions of choice at these gaps—that is, what Sartre calls freedom as the freedom of choice. But for Laozi and Zhuangzi, it is precisely abandoning all subjective will, abandoning reason, ideal, and purpose, abandoning autonomous choice, even abandoning subjectivity, healing the gaps, and complying with nature, the Way of Heaven, and one’s own nature—a freedom that is purposeless non-action founded on instinct. Such people as the cook, so long as they gain true skill and transform it into a survival instinct, entering the realm of self-forgetting, thereby gain true freedom. This freedom is the freedom of wholly merging into nature, the freedom of “not depending on anything” (wu suo dai)—that is, the Dao-attained state of being one with Heaven and Earth. Clearly, there is a huge difference, even an opposition, between the Chinese and Western understandings of “freedom”: the Chinese nation stresses the freedom of merging into nature—freedom is the natural; the Western peoples stress resisting nature to gain the subject’s freedom—that is, freedom set in opposition to nature.

Confucius too esteemed freedom in his heart. When Zilu, Zeng Xi, Ran You, and Gongxi Hua each expressed their aspirations, Confucius greatly admired Zeng Xi’s state of existence: “to bathe in the Yi River, to enjoy the breeze at the Rain Altar, and to return home singing.” This realm of freedom—close to nature, open of breast, unfettered—was what he longed for. Confucius even said: “With coarse food to eat, water to drink, and my bent arm for a pillow, joy is also therein.” But unlike Laozi and Zhuangzi, Confucius’s greater aspiration was to participate in social governance. Confucius was born in an age when the royal bonds had come undone and ritual and music had collapsed; his ideal was to “subdue the self and return to ritual,” rebuilding the social and political order according to the sage’s system of ritual and music. Laozi and Zhuangzi revered the natural order; it is precisely the natural order that gestates human life and generates the rhythm of life, so that only by complying with the Dao of nature and merging into the natural order does one in fact unfold the rhythm of life and experience the freedom of life. Confucius held that only the sage can apprehend the Way of Heaven and accordingly institute ritual and music to set an example for later ages; therefore ritual and music must be taken as the highest norm of behavior, establishing a moral-ethical order and then constructing a social-political order, putting the Dao into social practice—that is, taking substance as basis and function as the actual goal. He hurried anxiously among the feudal lords, tirelessly instructing his disciples and promoting his ideal. If Laozi and Zhuangzi held that virtue is the Dao, and that the moral order and the social-political order must conform to the natural order, then Confucius, although likewise holding that the Dao is virtue, in fact inverted the logical relation of the two.

Confucius held that the system of ritual and music instituted by the sage stipulates the moral-ethical order and embodies the natural order; therefore one must strictly comply with the system of ritual and music and the moral-ethical order, and the social-political order must be built upon them—only thus can the Dao of nature be embodied. For Confucianism, therefore, ritual has supreme authority. “Morality, benevolence, and righteousness cannot be completed without ritual; instruction and the rectification of customs cannot be perfected without ritual; the settling of disputes and litigations cannot be decided without ritual; the relations of ruler and minister, superior and inferior, father and son, elder and younger brother cannot be fixed without ritual; serving a teacher in office or study cannot be made intimate without ritual; ordering the court and governing the army, holding office and enforcing law, cannot have dignity and authority without ritual; in prayer and sacrifice, in offering to the spirits, one cannot be sincere and grave without ritual.” Ritual becomes the concrete embodiment of the all-encompassing, inviolable Way of Heaven, even the Way of Heaven itself. But the social-political order, after all, is not identical with the system of ritual and music and the moral-ethical order, still less the same as the natural order, and often becomes an external constraint on human life and behavior; therefore the free, natural realm of which Zeng Xi spoke can only become a spiritual compensation when the social-political ideal cannot be realized—the “when used, to act; when set aside, to withdraw,” the reluctant “following of what I love.” That is, when the social-political order violates the sage’s bequeathed teaching (the system of ritual and music) and thereby departs from the natural order, unable to receive the Dao of nature, Confucius, having no choice, retreats to the next best and pursues, within his own heart, the free realm of attaining the Dao. “If the Dao does not prevail, I shall mount a raft and float upon the sea.” The reason it is said that Daoism withdraws from the world and Confucianism enters it lies in the difference between the two sides’ understanding of the relation between Dao and virtue—one may also say, in the difference of focus on substance or function. Because in Confucian thought the social-political order is founded on the moral-ethical order and closely linked to the natural order, this provided a basis of legitimacy for the social-political system and, favored and extolled by successive imperial powers, became the mainstream of cultural thought.

III. China and the West: Different Ways of Grasping the World

The cultural thought of the Chinese nation is built upon the foundation of the unity of Heaven and humanity; the inquiry into and experience of the Dao is the starting point of its thinking, rather than the worship of God or the interrogation of the Idea or essence—thereby transcending the Western “dualism” and casting the distinctiveness of the Chinese nation’s cognitive mode and cultural thought. At the same time, owing to divergences in the concrete path of interpretation, rich and varied intellectual resources are formed. Although the Western intellectual world continually critiques “dualism,” it has always found it hard to escape its influence thoroughly. Heidegger, drawing on ancient Chinese thought, turned the question of ontology from “beings” to “Being,” proposing the theoretical framework of “Dasein’s being-in-the-world” to interpret Being. But by interpreting Being with the imposing tome Being and Time, he in fact placed the author, as interpreter, outside the world, becoming an analyst aloof from Being—far from being an experiencer who “forgets thing and self, sets life and death outside, and merges directly into one with transformation”—thereby creating an estrangement between the interpreter (analyst) himself and Being, and concealing Being anew. The later Heidegger accorded language an extremely high status, but whether the language he spoke of was poetic language or primordial language, it could not let him escape the “dualist” trap that follows in language’s wake. For Laozi and Zhuangzi, to understand Being one must merge into the world, experience it in person, and keep silent.

Merleau-Ponty stressed the “embodiment” of perception, attempting to introduce body and movement to interpret the problem of perception. But he likewise placed body and movement within the phenomenological framework, bringing them into the field of phenomenological analysis and treating body and movement as the “agent of behavior,” so as to sever the primordial linkage between body and world and conceal and distort the constructive and experiential function of bodily behavior. As Esposito comments: “What Husserl proposed was, in the end, ‘one’s own body’ with a spirit-dominated connotation—something perceptual experience always involves, and which Merleau-Ponty developed, improved, yet never truly transcended. That pair of hands touching each other or stroking things is still the subject’s hands … the thing, though understood and identified with, still remains someone’s object, and he or she always relates to the object setting out from himself.” As for the present-day theory of “embodied cognition,” although it greatly values the important role of the body in cognitive activity, it overlooks that the body itself stores a vast unconscious experience. Yet Laozi and Zhuangzi long ago resolved this difficulty. Laozi, with such self-contradictory special modes of expression as the Dao, nothing, the great image, and the great tone, evades the linguistic medium so as to construct the unified relation between human and world. Zhuangzi further uses fables to hint at it in an oblique, indirect way: the cook and others grasp the Dao of nature and life precisely by constructing a particular behavioral pattern (a skill), sedimenting it into unconscious experience and forming a survival instinct. Humanity and indeed all organisms have instinctive behavioral patterns and use them to grasp their world and adapt to their environment. So long as one merges into the world and adapts to it, one has in fact already grasped the experience of the world; and to interpret this experience likewise requires entering this state of being-in-the-world and experiencing it in person. “The human heart is of one body with Heaven and Earth; therefore above and below flow together with Heaven and Earth.” Any effort to seek an objective standpoint and make an objective interpretation—indeed, to explore objective answers purely by cognition rather than by experience—is bound to split the unified relation of Heaven and humanity and depart from the primordial experience.

Humanity shares this wisdom of grasping the world; only our forebears, as early as the pre-Qin era, had already fully understood this wisdom and consistently valued this way of grasping the Dao and the world—and so we name it “Chinese wisdom.” It is precisely the valuing and use of this wisdom that let the Chinese nation, in early times, acquire an extremely rich experience and gestate a splendid culture. This mode of lived experience is, to be sure, limited by the finitude of the body itself, lacks transcendence, and rests at the level of experience rather than being a “scientific” cognitive capacity; yet it is the foundation of all cognitive capacity and scientific knowledge. The thought of the unity of Heaven and humanity and the distinctive understanding of the Dao are the crystallization of the wisdom of the Chinese nation; they reveal a path by which the human being grasps the Dao and the world in an embodied way, and serve as a sound remedy for the Western “dualism.” By valuing this wisdom and fully mining and bringing it into play, humanity’s capacity for cognition and creation can be greatly enhanced.