The Simple Way, Part 62

The Simple Way
The Life & Teachings of Zhouzi
by Scott Bradley

Chui asked Zhouzi, “ Is it wrong to murder and steal?”

“Have you considered the cuckoo? It lays its egg in the nest of another and when hatched, its chick pushes the young of the other out of the nest. Can we say that the cuckoo murders and steals?”

“Indeed it does.”

“And would you say that the cuckoo is wrong to do so?”

“No, it is not wrong,” replied Chui, “for it has no sense of right and wrong; it merely follows Nature’s way. Yet the sense of right and wrong in man is also Nature’s Way and thus to murder and steal is wrong.”

“With this I can only agree,” answered Zhouzi. “Only I would add that to murder and steal must likewise be Nature’s Way, for nothing transcends the Singularity. But what if you were to observe humanity not as a man but as you observe the cuckoo? Would you not take the sum of the human expression and form it into a unity? What room then would there be for right and wrong? Humanity is only what humanity does and it is this that the sage affirms as expression of Tao. Thus, free of right and wrong, he can also affirm the ever-shifting rights and wrongs of men and dwell therein.

"This is the transcendent view informed by Tao. For Tao makes no distinctions, being all that is. Thus, as men observing the cuckoo, we acknowledge no right and wrong, but if we were to enter the world of birds we would most certainly condemn them as murders and thieves. Is this not the Two Roads walked by the sage Zhuangzi?

“How much ‘wrong’ is done for the ‘right’? How much ‘right’ is done for the ‘wrong’? ‘All of history is a deserted battlefield of rights and wrongs,’ as another has said. It is only those who affirm the rightness of all that is that can follow along with the rights and wrongs of men without enjoining battle.

“But why speak of these things as if they mattered? Reality is as it is and speaks for itself. For my part, I care nothing for a moral philosophy—my concern is for the individual heart. For it is the tyranny of right and wrong that causes the strife within, setting the heart against itself, replacing joyful affirmation of being with yearning, guilt and the hunger to become.”

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