Christopher Tricker (2022). The Cicada and the Bird. The usefulness of a useless philosophy. Chuang Tzu’s ancient wisdom translated for modern life.
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The following excerpt presents us with Chuang Tzu’s vision of the Tao (the path), and how to walk it. Now, the Tao (the path) means different things to different people. For example, for Confucians it was the path of aristocratic culture and ritual. But for Chuang Tzu, it’s the surface isness (the presenting phenomenology) of things: the shape, colour, texture, and feel of things that we experience directly when we put our brain’s labels aside. His best metaphor for how to walk this path is a story about a cook carving up an ox.
The Cook and the Ox
The cook is unravelling an ox for Cultured Benevolent Lord.
His hand, a subtle turn –
The shoulder leaning just so.
His foot: poised, placed –
The knee bending in flow.
Then whoosh!
Whirl!
Knife suspended –
And swoosh!
Not a sound not in tune.
In time with the Mulberry-Grove Dance.
In step with the Sacred-Chiefs Corroboree.
Cultured Benevolent Lord says:
O, bravo!
How does skill arrive at this?
The cook, putting the knife down, replies:
What your subject cares about is the path.
He’s moved on from skill.
When your subject first began unravelling oxen, he had eyes only for oxen.
After three years, he never attempted to see a whole ox.
And now, your subject meets the parts with his daemon and doesn’t scrutinise them with his eyes.
His administrative thinking stops and his daemon’s longing goes forth,
yielding to the natural grain,
striking at large gaps,
guiding through large openings,
going by the given structure.
To skilfully pass through a joint – that’s something he never attempts, much less a large bone!
Good cooks replace their knife every year, because they cut.
Common cooks replace their knife every month, because they hack.
Well, your subject’s knife is nineteen years old. It has unravelled several thousand oxen and its edge is as if freshly issued from the grindstone.
The sections have space between them, and the knife-edge lacks thickness.
Using something that lacks thickness to enter where there’s space – one’s scope in which to wander is vast. Indeed, the knife has room to spare.
That’s why after nineteen years the knife-edge is as if freshly issued from the grindstone.
Still, when I come across a knot, I see the difficulty it presents.
Warily, cautioned – my gaze stilled; my action slowed – I move the knife ever so subtly.
And poof! The knot unravels itself like a clod of soil crumbling to the ground.
Lowering the knife and …
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