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S y m p o s i u m : F u z z y S t ud ie s, Pa r t 1

THE CLOUD OF KNOWING

Blurring the Difference with China

Barry Allen

Small and inconspicuous things like clouds of dust speak volumes to a careful observer of their principles, like this Chinese general:
When the enemy first approaches, if the dust rises in streams but is dispersed, they are dragging brushwood. If it rises up like ears of grain and jumps about chaotically, chariots are coming. If the dust is thick and heavy, swirling and turbulent as it rises up, cavalry are coming. If it is low and broad, spreading and diffuse as it rises, infantry are advancing. When the army is small and the dust is scattered and chaotic, it means the units are not closely ordered. If the troops are numerous but the dust clear, it means the units are well ordered and the generals com mands systematic. If the dust rises to the front and rear, left and right, it means they are employing their troops without any consistent method. When the army moves and the dust rises in streaks without dispersing, or when the army halts and the dust also stops, it is because the generals awesomeness and virtue have caused the units to be strictly ordered. If when they decamp or set out their deployments dust rises up and flies off, mount defenses against those places where it originated because enemy forces will certainly be approaching in ambush there. Observing
The author wishes to express his gratitude to Weng Hai zhen for indispensable philological assistance.

Common Knowledge 17:3 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1305373 2011 by Duke University Press

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the enemy through rising dust is thus a technique for estimating the enemys forces and seizing victory.1

These words speak to what Western strategists call the fog of war. The blur to which the unknown unknowns reduce clear vision is a danger that cannot be evaded but only waited out with patience and caution. Remain in control while awaiting clarity, and act as soon as clarity returns. Everything about the impene trable and unsettled that makes the fog of war a problem for Western thought is for the Chinese strategist a resource that wise commanders utilize to the hilt: If you induce others to adopt a form while you remain formless, then you will be concentrated while the enemy will be divided. . . . So the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it or the wise make plans against it.2 For Chinese thought, the fog of war is a cloud of knowing (rather than unknowing).3 Blur is not an inchoate condition from which one emerges, as it dis sipates, with relief. This fog can be known and operated with, despite its seeming like anything but an objectunreified, unmappable, borderless, immeasurable, vague, subtle, unsettled, a blur, fuzzyand therefore a condition of strategic blindness rather than advantage, according to the Western consensus. Not for a moment does the Chinese strategist consider blur to be an obstacle to knowl edge. The cloud is like everything else he knows anything about. He has learned to navigate its tenuous medium, to respond to its resonance and change with its changes. Xu Dong, the general whose wise words on clouds of dust I quoted, says that the acumen of strategists lies in penetrating the subtle amid unfold ing change and discerning the concordant and contrary.4 Penetrating the subtle means seeing a lot in little things. Discerning the concordant and contrary means knowing the resonance among things, what amplifies and energizes or (contrari wise) dampens the emergent and becoming. A Chinese strategist will suspect conditions that seem clear or definitive, which is what a Western thinker will expect a proper object of knowledge should
1. Xu Dong, in Ralph D. Sawyer, The Tao of Spycraft: Intelligence Theory and Practice in Traditional China (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004), 45152. 2. Sunzi, Art of War, in The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, ed. and trans. Ralph D. Sawyer (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), 168. 3. I am referring of course to the anonymous fifteenthc entury Middle English monastic text The Cloud of Unknowing. The eponymous cloud is defined in chap. 3: Lift up thin herte unto God with a meek steryng of love; and mene Himself, and none of His goodes. And therto loke thee lothe to thenk on ought bot on Hym

self, so that nought worche in thi witte ne in thi wille bot only Himself. . . . This is the werk of the soule that moste plesith God. . . . Lette not therfore, bot travayle therin tyl thou fele lyst. For at the first tyme when thou dost it, thou fyndest bot a derknes, and as it were a cloude of unknowyng, thou wost never what, savyng that thou felist in thi wille a nakid entent unto God. This derknes and this cloude is, howsoever thou dost, bitwix thee and thi God, and letteth thee that thou maist not see Him cleerly by light of understonding in thi reson. . . . 4. Sawyer, Tao of Spycraft, 454.

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seem and be. It must be a trick! a Chinese general will assume. Conditions of clarity are invariably illusory, misleading, sometimes fatal. Nor are the military thinkers alone in esteeming such knowledge: this is the usual stance in Chinese tradition; not strictly universal, there are exceptions, but it is the leading idea of knowledge and of what makes it worth pursuing.5 In the words of the Huainanzi (or Book of the Huainan Masters), the commander must see singularly and know singularly. Seeing singularly is to see what is not seen. Knowing singularly is to know what is not known. To see what others do not is called enlightenment.6 Blur is not incompatible with knowledge. Blur is its first condition and makes knowledge inexhaustible.

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I The problems of knowledge that philosophers tend to be familiar withprob lems of justification, skepticism, and the possibility of truthare not properly the fundamental ones of Western thought, despite their prominence in text books. These, as it were, official problems depend on seldom articulated assump tions concerning the value of knowledge. It is assumed that the best knowledge, the knowledge that matters most to philosophy, has to be true; that this truth should be understood ontologically, in terms of adequacy to being; and that its enjoyment is a condition of happiness. Without these ideas about happiness, pur pose, and value, the textbook problems of epistemology are difficult to motivate. Yet the assumptions are not without difficulty of their own, which has made the problems of epistemology increasingly difficult to take seriously.7 The Chi nese do not share the problems of our epistemology, because they do not share the evaluation of knowledge that made those problems perplex us. Knowledge poses different perplexities for them. Their questions concern not the essence of knowledge or its conditions of possibility but its point and value, what makes knowledge sagacious and worth pursuing. These different questions respond to different problems arising from different imperatives. What makes them inter
5. Most discussion here concerns one or the other of two closely related words, zh and zh. They are close in use, in pronunciation, and in written character, and are some times explained in terms of each other; for example in Xunzi: Of the means of knowing [zh ], those that are in people we call zh . Knowledge [zh ] having its union we call zh (chap. 22). Graphically, these are the same char acter, though with zh adding the sun radical. The graph that the two words share is formed from the radical shi (arrow) on the left and kou (mouth) on the right, prompt ing the Shuo Wen, a Han etymological dictionary, to gloss zh (to know) as to speak so as to hit the mark. Mod ern scholars find a tendency to use zh as a verb (to know) while zh is apparently uncommon as a verb but freely alternates with zh in the nominal sense of knowledge or wisdom. 6. The Huainanzi, trans. and ed. John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold D. Roth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 15.25 (612). 7. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), and Barry Allen, What Was Epistemology? in Rorty and his Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

esting is that they emerge at points where Western thinking proves unexpectedly problematic. Western theories of knowledge tend to fix on statements and beliefssym bolic, linguistic, propositional entitiesand have developed highly technical concepts of evidence, warrant, and justification, all to explain a comically small part of knowledge territorythe part that is true, the truth. This contempla tive, logocentric approach, much favored in antiquity and never really shaken from later tradition, is counterproductive for understanding the contribution of knowledge to the technical accomplishments of our civilization. The ingenuity of technical culture, the range and depth of technical mediation, the multiplicity of artifactual interfaces in a global technoscientific economy demonstrate the reach and depth of contemporary knowledge. But this knowledge resists logical analysis into simpler concepts; it rarely climaxes in demonstrable truth; and it does not stand to pure theory as mere application (or derivative how- to knowledge). The best knowledge of our civilization is therefore unrecognizable in the epistemol ogy of the epistemologists.8 The exorbitant attachment to theoretical knowledge comes with an epistemological indifference to art or techne. In all the leading schools of ancient European thought, theoretical knowledge is the preeminent value, science the noblest aspiration, and the proof of truth is the answer to all uncertainty. To really know this truth requires clarity and certainty, overcoming everything fuzzy about the empirical and ordinary. Knowledge thus becomes a problem of access. There are two levels: the one we live on, everyday experience and opinion; and the transcendent level beyond blur, which we have to access if we are to know the truth. What makes knowledge a problem of access is the decision that the best, philosophically most important knowledge is knowledge of truth, and that truth is essence or being somehow present to the soul. These decisions are taken over by later tradition with little dissent. Not until Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century does Western thinking begin to change. Nietzsche initiates the now prevalent skepticism about the correspondence the ory of truth.9 The American pragmatists, especially William James, indepen dently raise similar doubts. Today, most philosophers have abandoned the cor respondence theory, though not always for the same reason. What lesson should we take from the collapse of this ancient expectation concerning the nature of truth? Nietzsche thought that without the ontological idea of truth (truth as true to beings) the value of knowledge becomes dramatically problematic. Why

8. I develop this argument in Knowledge and Civilization (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004).

9. On the background to the argument about correspon dence and the place of Nietzsche, pragmatism, decon struction, and other postmodern responses, see Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1993).

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should we care about knowledge if it is not the truth?10 He does not pose this question mockingly, assuming that there is no answer. He poses it to show that it is a questionthat the answers we used to give are untenableand to stimulate a new philosophy of knowledge. He expects reflection on the question to show that philosophys ideal of enlightenment participates in the irrationality it claims to overcome. The passion for an enlightening truth has a religious quality; it seems a way for atheists to still believe in God. To turn away from religion because it is unscientific and therefore untrue is not the triumph of reason over superstition. It is a new superstition, or one whose superstitious quality is newly apparent, except to those who still think truth is divine. Critical rationalists must awaken to the unreason of rationalism, as they dutifully demystify demystification and discover that truth is a name for the will to power.11 Nietzsche called this predicament European nihilism. Plato sowed the seed when he taught us to need something transcendent. Without it, all the good things about us seem threatened by metaphysical failure. The merely human, tainted with the stigma of contingency, is worthless. Having inherited these ontotheological expectations, we have a tendency to assume that, without a tran scendent reference (reason, logic, being), knowledge collapses into nihilism, with no real difference possible between true and false. In the face of modern disbelief about the transcendent, Western theory falls short of a convincing response to its own nihilistic implications. Hence the postmodern, perhaps even post- Western problem of knowledge: how to acknowledge the self- destruction of Western rationalism and get beyond the obvious relativistic, nihilistic implications; how to understand the point and value of pursuing knowledge when we do not believe in objectivity or a thinginitself; how to remain cheerful and creative when truth, as philosophy has tried to think it, does not exist. Epistemology may be pass, but the philosophy of knowledge has never confronted more interesting ques tions. What is the value of knowledge, if not truth? What is the value of truth, if not adequation or correspondence? What is the relationship between knowledge and technical accomplishment? What is the relationship between knowledge and wisdom? What makes technical, technological knowledge wise? These are not classical questions. And although I do not think we have to go to China for enlightenment, it makes an instructive excursion for anyone who likes to see alternatives and to experiment with concepts. However, there is huge disagreement among scholars about Chinese philosophywhether there even is such a thing, whether it is at all comparable to Western philosophy, and what

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10 . Why Know: Why Not Rather Be Deceived? in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter A. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 455.

11. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, third essay.

counts as philosophical in Chinese tradition.12 Some scholars think ancient Chi nese thought is so alien, its language so distant from Western experience, that it is unreasonable to expect significant conceptual exchange between the two tradi tions. Others take the view that, with due caution, contemporary philosophy can enter into the movement of Chinese concepts and bring some of their tendency to its thinking. I favor the latter view, and while I hope to avoid gratuitously reading Western assumptions into cryptic ancient texts, I do subject them to questions that their authors never dreamed of. Some scholars think this approach is untenable. They would restrict schol arly usage to emic categories, meaning those consistent with the viewpoint of the culture under study. They disavow etic categories, or concepts meaningful to the community that studies the cultureas if the only way to discuss Chinese ideas rigorously is in terms the ancient Chinese might recognize as their own.13 For some forms of scholarship, that procedure is perhaps appropriate; but in phi losophy, it seems like a case of the tail wagging the dog. I think we should have as many ways of reading the Chinese as we can invent. There should be a place for conversations that forget whether they are emic or etic, that no longer know whether they are Western or modern, that court blur and seek a hybrid quality consistent with experimentation and creativity in concepts. That, and not disci plinary specialization, however global, is what it will take for Chinese intellectual tradition to make a difference to philosophy. It is not important that we call ancient Chinese thinkers philosophers. We need not assume they are engaged in a project similar to that of Western phi losophers. We do not require comparable intentions at all (and they are obviously lacking). There is no word of ancient Chinese that we can translate as philosophy. Such a word did not exist until the nineteenth century, when zhexue, combining two Chinese characters, those for wisdom and study, was coined by a Japanese scholar to refer to the philosophy of Western antiquity. It was only in response to Western problems that philosophical ideas were first identified in Chinese clas sics, constructing Chinese philosophy according to familiar Western models (idealism, realism, and so forth). Chinese scholars themselves think the results were not all bad. Some issues were more aptly expressed as an upshot of these comparisons.14 But the unrestrained construction of Chinese thought according
12. For a balanced treatment of the debate, see Carine Defoort, Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate, Philosophy East and West 51.3 (2001): 393413. 13 . See Mark Csikszentmihlyi, Ethics and SelfCultivation Practice in Early China, in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han, 1250 BC220 AD, ed. John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill,

2009), 1:519. For an emic approach to my topic, see Jana S. Roker, Searching for the Way: Theory of Knowledge in Premodern and Modern China (Hong Kong: Chinese Univer sity Press, 2008). 14. Tang Yijie, Constructing Chinese Philosophy in Sino- European Cultural Exchange, in New Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Chinese Philosophy, ed. Karyn L. Lai (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).

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to Western models, and the simplistic equation of terms from the classics with concepts of Western theory, are obviously untenable. The Chinese faced a version of our problem in their own history, with the introduction of Buddhism, a new religion in China, after the first century CE. How should they translate the formidable corpus of Indian thought, whose terse abstraction has nothing in common with any Chinese tradition? They did not try to think like Indians and did not scruple over etic categoriesindeed they used almost nothing else. The result was not naive scholarship but, instead, the invention of Chinese Buddhism. This experience suggests that ancient Chinese thought need not be reproduced in Western terms as if it were an object to be true to. The challenge is to invent the context, and experiment with the terms, in which philosophy is becoming global. Philosophy is not or is no longer West ern, or at least it does not have to be. It may have begun in the West (even that is disputable), but philosophy cannot be reduced to its history. On the contrary, philosophy has never ceased to question its own conditions and is now obviously globalwhich is to say, borderless, undemarcated, deterritorialized, a blurand working through a new relationship to territory and to the globe. Dissatisfaction with epistemology is a part of this emerging dynamic. There are by now many lines of flight in the theory of knowledgepostpositivist, post structuralist, pragmatist, and feminist, to name a few. I propose an even more literal deterritorialization of the problems of knowledge in Chinese thought. We do not need those problems to be ours to learn from how they respond to the problems they find. Their innocence of epistemology is what makes them inter esting to the philosophy of knowledge. Innocence does not mean indifference to perplexity about knowledge. The ancient Chinese had ideas about knowledge because, as they thought about the problems that compelled them, they became perplexed by knowledgeby its difference from ignorance and error; by its rela tionship to wisdom and virtue; by its effectiveness and irreplaceable contribution to civilization. These problems perplexed them precisely because the Chinese have regarded knowledge as of surpassing value. That most philosophical of Sinologists, Angus Graham, persuades me that reading this value into the texts is not the result of a gratuitous Western bias. He says that the derivation of all value from the value of knowledge is one of the constants of Chinese thought, for which to know is the supreme imperative.15 Put in the terms raised by the present, inchoate symposium, we can say that fuzziness is not the same as igno rance or navet. It is not an obstacle to knowledge but, rather, its condition of possibility. Hence my title: The Cloud of Knowing.

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15. A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (Chicago: Open Court, 1989), 134, 146. Elsewhere Graham calls knowl edge the ultimately unchallengeable imperative of Chi nese thought. Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical

Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 435.

II Innocence of epistemology does not mean naive epistemology, as when scholars speak of Chinas epistemological optimism.16 The Chinese have been said to rely naively, optimistically, on lower standards than do Western theories of knowl edge and science. Is it really lower standards, though, or different priorities, dif ferent standards? If you expect veridical knowledge of things in themselves, or the apodictic demonstration of truth, or even just a robust experimental result, your standards cannot be too high. But certainty is not the only value that knowledge serves, and other values can be satisfied without fixing on theory and truth. The best knowledge, the knowledge of the sage, knows how to see the evolution of circumstances from an early point. When the development of cir cumstances is not so settled that it cannot be diverted, highly effective action is practically effortless (provided you know how). The Chinese pass on the story of a servant who foils a powerful duke and prevents a war merely by starting a rumor.17 The knowledge of when and how to intervene is not deduced from principles or held in the mind as a representation or theory. The expression of the knowledge is behavioral, practical, a response to circumstances that is at once effortless yet highly effective. The Chinese describe such action as wu wei, which literally means no action or not doing but here refers to nonaction that is paradoxically active and highly effective.18 The value of the best, most sagacious knowledge is to enable action of that kind. Military victory is a problem not of force but of knowledgea generalization that is especially true of the most desirable sort of victory, the one that comes without a battle. Knowledge is not considered to raise a problem of access. It is more like knowing how to swim than like an ocular knowledge of presence; more like knowing a territory than seeing an object; more like knowing the dynamic relations of things in an environment than contem plating a finished form. How can we not be struck by a conception of knowledge that evades transcendence without forfeiting normativity or lapsing into dogma tism? The Chinese worry is not access but getting stuck.19 What we call objects are processes and constantly changing. We must unlearn objectivity, not fixate on forms. Impartiality is its own reward. The point of detachment is not ocular, to see better what was always there. Detachment is good as a means to the desired flexibility, overcoming differences that separate you from the dao, the spontane

16. See Thomas A. Metzger, A Cloud across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between China and Western Political Theories Today (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005). 17. The story is told in Guanzi, trans. Zhai Jianyue (Gui lin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2005), chap. 51.

18. An authoritative study is Edward G. Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu- Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 19. Franois Jullien, Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 31011.

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ous flow of changes. Instead of transcending perspectives, you become skilled at never getting stuck in one. Blur becomes your mtier. The prestige of pure theory in Western thought rests on identiable assumptions. One is the assumption of Heraclitus, who was the first to empha size that a common logos links human beings to the principle of order in the cosmos. What makes us rational and therefore human is the same logos, the same reason, that makes the universe a cosmos, a rational system. Grasping that system, apprehending it in thought, seeing all the parts cohere in one intricate, finished cosmos of ends, is the only thought that Aristotle could imagine for a god. The divine activity is the contemplation (theoria) of truth, and, he says, this same divine contemplation is our happiness too. Happiness extends just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy.20 Why is pure theory so good? Because in these epistemic acts we actualize the best part of ourselves, the part with which we connect to the source of ultimate value. It seems to follow that the more we know about what is logical or logos in ourselves (mind, reason, language), the better we can know the truth of nature. Epistemology is usually considered a preoccupation of modern philosophy, which of course it is. But modern philosophy could be obses sive about epistemology only because in ancient Greek thought it was established that, by knowing more about the logos in us, we greatly improve our theoretical knowledge of truth (episteme). One might see a parallel here with ancient Chinese, especially Confucian, thought. The difference between an accomplished junzi, a perfected person, and a commoner is the junzis carefully cultivated self- k nowledge. But the parallel goes no further. What self- k nowledge does for the junzi is to make him adept at com pleting thingshandling them as they should be handled, in a ceremoniously appropriate way. Under any circumstance, he spontaneously, effortlessly uses whatever comes to hand nobly, benevolently. That approach is far from Greek thought, for which a knowledge of how to use things or handle affairs is too prag matic to detain a philosopher: it is techne, the second- class know- how of artisans and mechanics. Kongzi (Confucius) shares the Greek condescension toward the technical arts.21 He makes it obvious that, despite having trained in a craft as a boy, he does not involve himself in mechanics, extending even to the mechanics of law or policy. Such work is narrow and takes a narrow mind to accomplish. He compares intellectual specialization to the manufacture of a highly specialized ritual vessel. A perfected person is not a vessel (2.12), and specialized is another

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20. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1178b, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).

21. Confucius, Analects, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Edward G. Slingerland (Indianapo lis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 8.9, 8.18, 9.2. I follow this trans lation throughout, and subsequent references are paren thetically embedded.

word for unbalanced. The role of the junzi is to be the one whose balance bal ances others. As Mengzi puts it later, Anywhere a gentleman passes through is transformed. . . . He flows with heaven above and earth below.22 Such people are not superhuman. There is a process of self- cultivation, a carefully calibrated transformation that Confucian teachers have down to an art and by which anyone can become a junzi, perhaps even a sage. In the Great Learning, a Confucian text of the third century BCE (pos sibly from Kongzis own school), it is said: From the son of Heaven down to commoners, all without exception should regard self- cultivation [xiushen] as the 23 root. First transform yourself, then transform everything around you. Accord ing to the Confucian Book of Rites, a good ruler has three worries: that there are important things he should know but has never heard of; that he has not properly appreciated that which he has heard of; and that he lacks the competence to put what he has learned into practice.24 The answer to all three concerns is ceaseless self- cultivation. The goal is to become so at home with goodness and with cere monious proprieties that these become second nature. Your spontaneous hearts desire can accord beautifully with the requirements of appropriate and noble behavior for the circumstance at hand. It may take a lifetime to reach that point, but apparently it can be done: Kongzi tells us that by the time he was seventy he could follow his hearts desire without overstepping the bounds of propriety (2.4)and that is the highest achievement of knowledge. The point of learning is not just to have knowledge but to be changed by it, and it is never a question of repeating a formula. You must not be ashamed to admit that you do not know, nor even to seek knowledge from inferiors (5.15). To love learning means knowing what you do not know, knowing the limit of your knowledge. Above all, one who loves learning knows how to learn from himself and therefore never makes the same mistake twice. To love learning is not merely to like it a lot, or to longingly lack it, as Socrates longingly lacked wisdom. To come to love learning, to love the process, is to succeed in learning, to do it superbly well and reap the benefit of effectiveness and mastery in life. To get to the point of sagacious knowledge requires submission to the insights of other people and of the cultural heritage: The Master said, I transmit rather than innovate. I trust in and love the ancient ways (7.1). The element of trust relates to what distinguishes this love of learn ing from pedantic antiquarianism: The Master said, Both keeping past teach ings alive and understanding the presentsomeone able to do this is worthy of
22. Mengzi, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Bryan W. Van Norden (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), 7A13. I follow this translation throughout, and sub sequent references are parenthetically embedded. 23. The Great Learning, in Daniel K. Gardner, The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007), 6.

24. Book of Rites, trans. Lao An (Jinan: Shandong Friend ship Press, 2000), 211.

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becoming a teacher (2.11). A recent symposium in these pages well defines this attainment as improvisatory fluency in historical idioms.25 In Platos Symposium, Socrates is made to prove that one can love only what one lacks. Confucian hao (joy, love, especially for learning) cannot be analyzed in these terms. The Confucian joy in learning reminds me less of Socrates than Nietzsche and his frliche Wissenschaft. For Nietzsche, as for Kongzi, acquiring and perfecting knowledge consists in living a certain type of life and is not a sep arable goal to which learning is a means. Plato holds knowledge and life apart, as he does knowledge and learning. Learning is strictly speaking impossible; it is a misnomer for remembering knowledge that cannot be learned because it is eternal, unchanging, and not subject to the blurthe neither hereness now nor thereness yetof becoming. Knowledge is, in Platos understanding, discontinuous with the immanent plane of life, requiring instead submission to something universal and unconditional. The truth of this knowledge is not measured by its value for life (our life). It is measured by being: by what is and does not change. That such a truth is also very good for us, that it alone is last ing happiness, and so onthat was a promise, a hypothesis, but never anything that philosophers knew. Sages are not stuffed with learning. They do not know everything. They cannot explain the origin of the universe or why people have different destinies. The knowledge of a Confucian sage is defined by the li, which is to say he knows the appropriate way to handle circumstances as they arise. Undistracted by dis interested curiosity, sage knowledge does not wander. There is no sage knowledge outside the li, and no point to knowledge that does not translate into practice in the lithe proprieties inherited from the ancient sages and founders of civiliza tion. These proprieties define the value of humanity, and humanity defines the value of everything else. Asked about the meaning of ren (usually translated as benevolence or humanity), Kongzi says it is a matter of restraining yourself and returning to the rites [li ]. Asked to elaborate, he answers, Do not look unless it is in accordance with ritual [li ]; do not listen unless it is in accordance with ritual; do not speak unless it is in accordance with ritual; do not move unless it is in accordance with ritual (12.1). This admonition presumably includes the pursuit of disinterested inquiries and the practice of difficult techniques, all of which must be checked against tra

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25. Roger Moseley, Mozarts Harlequinade: Musical Improvisation alla commedia dellarte, in the symposium Between Text and Performance, Common Knowledge 17.2 (Spring 2011): 338. On Confucian love of learning, I fol low the excellent treatment in Franklin Perkins, Love of Learning in the Lun Yu, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33.4 (December 2006): 50517.

The Master said, If your wisdom reaches it, but your Goodness [ren] cannot protect it, then even though you may have attained it, you are sure to eventually lose it. If your wisdom reaches it, and your Goodness is able to protect it, but you cannot manifest it with dignity, then the common people will not be respectful. If your wisdom reaches it, your Goodness is able to protect it, and you can manifest it with dignity, but you do not use ritual to put it into motion, it will never be truly excel lent. (15.33)

The li, the traditional rites and ceremonies, put knowledge into practice, where it proves its wisdom in exquisite, effortlessly balanced, wu wei conduct. In its philosophical sense, wu wei means doing so little, so easily, that you seem to be doing nothing at all. To have this quality, action must flow spontaneously; there is no deliberation, calculation, or indecision. But spontaneity is not all there is to wu wei, at least not for Confucians. Your nonaction must be graceful, dignified, impeccableseemingly choreographed; and it must prove highly effective, with nothing that circumstances require, for a balanced and harmonious response, being neglected. This interpretation of wu wei is controversial; the ideal is typically associ ated with thinkers we classify as Daoists. Still, it seems to me that rather than being the preoccupation of one, as against another, school of Chinese thought, the value of wu wei action, and the value of knowledge as conducive to such action, is common ground for Confucians, Daoists, the military philosophers, and (with exceptions) the medieval Neoconfucians. The differences among them lie in their understanding of what wu wei presupposes as background conditions (especially what sort of training) and exactly why this art of accomplishing without having to do much is so valuable. The Huainanzi is a Daoist- leaning work presented to Emperor Wu by his uncle Liu An, king of Huainan, in 139 BCE. It is an encyclopedia of Chinese thought collaboratively written by the finest masters of the early Han. The first chapter, entitled Originating in the Way, offers this comment on wu wei:
Sages . . . take no deliberate action [wu wei], yet there is nothing left undone [wu bu wei]. In tranquility they do not try to govern [wu zhi], but nothing is left ungoverned [wu bu zhi]. What we call no deliberate action is not to anticipate the activity of things. What we call noth ing left undone means to adapt to what things have [already] done. What we call not governing means to not change how things are

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ditional proprieties. Knowledge is valuable only when subordinated to humanity, meaning subordinated to dignified and traditionally appropriate conduct. When knowledge becomes disinterested, merely curious, or when its use is calculated, we lose balance and stray from the path of goodness:

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naturally so. What we call nothing left ungoverned means to adapt to how things are mutually so.26

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When the text explains no deliberate action to mean not anticipating the activ ity of things, it emphasizes the importance of timelinessof knowing when. For the sage deals with processes, not objects; or rather, he perceives that objects are always in the process of becoming. An essentialist confronting an indefinite or unpredictable object may think of it as fuzzy. But a fuzzy object, if understood as a process, is by no means an obstacle to knowledge. A sage waits patiently, watchfully, nonjudgmentally, and responds to whatever comes. When the text explains nothing left undone I think that means to adapt to what is already done and refers to the way in which things can be artfully adapted, made to fit in and function together. When it explains not governing to mean not changing how things naturally arerelying, that is, on what happens spontaneouslyit implies that wu wei action is inconspicuous in its beginnings and irresistible in its tendency, making the outcome seem inevitable and impersonal rather than the result of a deliberate aim. Finally, when the text explains nothing left ungoverned to mean adapt ing each thing to the others or (on an alternative translation) making use of the mutual causation that obtains among things, it is, I think, referring to action that moves in alliance with the evolution of circumstances and does not rely on external energy or force.27 Wu wei effectiveness requires an aptitude for reading the subtle signs of incipience, the first beginning of things, and a knowledge of how circumstances unfold, discerning crucial points where development can be inconspicuously diverted. Such knowledge may be called foresight, provided there is no suggestion of divination. The idea is not to possess the facts of the future and calculate; it is, rather, to affect the future discreetly by knowing where it is birthing and pliable. Such knowledge requires a kind of penetration, not from phenomena to essence, but from the obvious to the subtle, the actual to the virtual, the manifest to the latent. At this point, it may be useful to survey some Chinese comment on this kind of penetration in order to demonstrate its dominance in the tradition. Good examples date to before 300 BCE. According to Guanzi, a Warring States period collection of treatises, sages are characterized by reacting to things when they come into being. Thus, when something new comes, they will recognize it according to the knowledge they accumulated. For, the text continues, heaven and earth show symptoms at first and sages can follow them to achieve success. . . . If they act according to these symptoms fully, they will succeed in obtaining
27. The alternative translation of Huainanzi 1.9 is in Thomas Michael, The Pristine Dao (Albany: State Univer sity of New York Press, 2005), 75.

26. Huainanzi 1.9 ( 59).

At the beginning the indications of order, disorder, survival, and perdi tion are as subtle and invisible as the new dawn. The reason why sages are more outstanding than ordinary people is that they can foresee the development of things. Without thinking or talking about anything, they just wait patiently for the right time. . . . The correct way to react to external things is to remain quiet, let things take their own course, and be upright and disinterested. The importance of wisdom is to foresee the development of things before these changes ever take place.30

Numerous Han texts, representing various schools, attest to this continuity of approach. A passage from a Han commentary on the Zhouyi, the oldest core of the Book of Changes (the I Ching or Yi Jing), argues that the sage uses the Way of the changes to study the subtle, activating forces, and therefore he is able to know the subtle, activating forces of all affairs. . . . Does not the one who knows the incipient [ ji ] possess spiritual power? . . . The ji is the subtlety of movement and the earliest omen of good fortune.31 In the Confucian Maintaining Perfect Balance (Zhongyong) of the same era, it is said: When a country is about to flour ish there are surely some fortunate omens; where it is about to perish, there are surely some omens of weird and monstrous things. . . . Whether the calamity or blessing is imminent, the good and bad can be foreknown [xian zhi].32 The Huainanzi, previously mentioned, is a synthesis of views (of the second century BCE) in which we find the same point made: The collapse of the wall begins with a crack; if the sword breaks, there was definitely a nick. The sage sees them early, thus none of the myriad things can do him harm.33 And again: Foreknowledge
28. Guanzi, 251, 917. 29. Wuxingpian 5; cited in Haiming Wen, Confucian Pragmatism as the Art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and the World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 142. Paul Goldin suggests these manuscripts derive from a sin gle tradition of Confucianism and are datable to around 300 BC. After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 36. 30 . The Spring and Autumn of L Buwei, trans. Zhai Jianyue (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2005), 16.6, 17.3, 20.8, 23.3. 31. Zhou Yi, Great Commentary; cited in Lo Chinshun (Luo Qinshun), Knowledge Painfully Acquired, trans. Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 50. See Yi Wu, Chinese Philosophical Terms (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), 96. 32. Zhongyong 24 , as cited in Wu, Chinese Philosophical Terms, 114. 33. Huainanzi 18.18 (742).

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the whole world.28 According to a line from the Wuxingpian, a Guodian tomb text from c. 300 BCE: Knowing it by observing its inchoate beginnings is tian [heaven/nature] ( ji er zhi zhi tian ye).29 Around 240 BCE, we find the thought recurring in The Spring and Autumn of L Buwei:

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and foresightedness, vision reaching to a thousand [miles] away, are the zenith of human talent.34 Dong Zhongshu, the leading Confucian of the early Han, asks and then answers: What is called knowledge [zhi]? It is to predict accurately. . . . One who is zhi can see calamity and fortune a long way off, and early anticipates benefit and injury. Phenomena move and he anticipates their transformation; affairs arise and he anticipates their outcome.35 A passage from Sima Qian, the great historian of the early Han, concerns the genius of Zou Yan, whom Joseph Needham calls Chinas first man of science. Zou Yans wisdom was to exam ine small objects, and from these [draw] conclusions about large ones, until he reached what was without limit.36 In the Three Kingdoms period following the Han, Ji Kang (22362) writes, When knowledge [zhi] operates, foreknowledge [qian shi] is established. When foreknowledge is established, the mind is opened and things are pursued.37 The thirteenth- century Daoist Book of Balance and Harmony (Zhong He Ji) defines this way of knowing as deep knowledge:
Deep knowledge of principles knows without seeing, strong practice of the Way accomplishes without striving. Deep knowledge is to know without going out the door, see the way of heaven without looking out the window. Strong action is to grow ever stronger, adapting to all situations. . . . Deep knowledge is to be aware of disturbance before dis turbance, to be aware of danger before danger, to be aware of destruc tion before destruction, to be aware of calamity before calamity. . . . By deep knowledge of principle one can change disturbance into order, change danger into safety, change destruction into survival, change calamity into fortune.38

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Finally, the Ming dynasty Neoconfucian Wang Yangming (14721529) writes, along similar lines: The sage does not value foreknowledge [qian zhi ]. When blessings and calamities come, even a sage cannot avoid them. He only knows the incipient activating force of things and handles it in accordance with the circumstance.39

34. Huainanzi 11.7 (420). 35. Dong Zhongshu, as cited in David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking through Confucius (Albany: State Uni versity of New York Press, 1987), 5051. 36. Sima Qian, Shiji, as cited in Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Colin A. Ronan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 14243. 37. Ji Kang, Answer to Jiang Jius Refutation of My Essay on Nourishing Life, in Philosophy and Argumentation in Third- Century China: The Essays of Hsi Kang, trans. Robert

G. Henricks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1983), 38. 38. Book of Balance and Harmony, in Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), 7. 39. Wang Yangming, Instructions for Practical Living and other Neo- Confucian Writings, trans. Wing- tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 225.

III An instance of what such writers mean by deep knowledge is no doubt in order. I will take an example from the Confucian tradition: rectifying names (zheng ming), which is a project for reconstructing the whole of society by reconstruct ing the norms of language. It is also a stratagem for making the result seem to have happened of itself, without anyone proposing or directing it. Chinese tradi tion tends to view language as a way of relating to other people, rather than (as in most Western theory) a semantic relation between a thing and its name. To use words is to be skillful in drawing distinctions that could not exist without language; for instance, between good and bad, right and wrong, or (for that mat ter) cousin and uncle. Skill with language makes you persuasive, meaning that others like how you name things and come around to your point of view as if it had always been their own. A well- made distinction can unite people of different ranks and classes, but only when there is no slippage between the use of names and peoples behavior. How people use names and what they can justify doing or not doing are, of course, connected. Norms for the use of words inform norms of behavior via the controlling function of normative words. Take, for example, father. Modern Western society has largely disconnected this word from issues of propriety. Its principal meaning is now genetic. Suppose you could persuade people to refrain from this promiscuous use and restrict application of the word to men who conspicuously fulfill traditional expectations. Under those condi tions, it would be a solecism to call an obviously unfilial man a father. Such men would have a different name, a word expressive of opprobrium, and it seems likely that there would be fewer such men. Fathers would be motivated to be fathers, and sons sons. Rectification means making right, making straight, aligning, correcting, which implies that correct usage is known and has been departed from; one rec tifies words that have deviated from known norms. The rectification of names is more like a calendar reform than the decision to adopt a measuring system (for example, the metric), which would be more profoundly arbitrary.40 Reforming an existing calendar means bringing the names of the months back in line with the expectations of the seasons (so that December is a winter month and July a summer one). To do so requires tracking the drifting dates of the equinoxes and solstices. A Confucian rectification of names must track social conditions and adjust them where they fall out of line with ancient norms. Generalize this rea

40. For the contrast between calendars and metrics, see May Sim, Ritual and Realism in Early Chinese Science, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 29. 4 (2002): 495517. The argument is developed in Sim, Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2007), chap. 3.

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soning across language and you see that a thoroughgoing rectification of names would work a great transformation, a return to normative usages. The question, of course, is how to do sohow to reform a living language. When there is slippage from the norm, if rectification is not accomplished, eventually there will be a crisis. As Kongzi puts it in the Analects: If names are not rectified, speech will not accord with reality; when speech does not accord with reality, things will not be successfully accomplished (13.3).41 It is best to modify the situation of mismatch between behaviors and names far in advance of any crisis, while matters remain fluid and evolving and while the wise can effect changes that seem to come about by themselves. Thus, rather than command that all must use words in a newly prescribed (though classically sanctioned) way, a wise ruler might begin with a relatively inconspicuous command for his own ministers to issue and receive documents using only the revised or revitalized vocabulary. Enforce this usage scrupulously and allow it to sink in, from the min isters to the officials, from the officials to the hundred clans. Eventually, anyone who interacts with officials at any level anywhere in the realm would be exposed to the new usage and would have to conform in order to placate administrators. It would take generations before illiterate peasants spontaneously complied, but in time presumably everyone would follow the new usage, which means that the ancient norms would be reestablished. The ritual proprieties of the Zhou era would live again, and no one would be aware of the change. To a Confucian, that is the summit of political wisdom. It is interesting to compare the Confucian rectification of names with the Western idea of a planned language (like Esperanto) and the logical reconstruc tion of language envisioned by the logical positivists. Rudolf Carnap believed that a properly normed language would make metaphysical statements gram matically impossible. That, for Carnap, would be a desirable result, because he thought metaphysics was worthless compared to the demonstrable knowledge of science. It is characteristic of rationalism to want as much as possible made explicit and discursively reasoned out. There can be nothing subtle, nothing allu sive. Indirection and allusion seem like flaws and impediments, and language cries out for improvement. What seemed good to Carnap about Esperanto (he was an Esperantist) was the promised boon in rationality when everyone would use the same words in the same way.42 Never mind that it would take coercion (however well meant) to achieve that result, and coercion as well to maintain it.

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41. There is a good discussion of the historical context of Analects 13.3, including the identity and circumstances of Kongzis interlocutor Zilu, in Hui- chieh Loy, Analects 13.3 and the Doctrine of Correcting Names, in Confucius Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Analects, ed. David Edward Jones (Chicago: Open Court, 2008).

42. Rudolf Carnap, Intellectual Autobiography, in The Philosophy of Rudolph Carnap, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963).

But since the perfection of rationality is apparently an inadequate incentive to those who control the instruments of coercion (which is nothing new), we are left with a beautiful idea, good in theory and useless in practice. Kongzis rectification of names is not one step in an ingenious plan, all analyzed and worked out in the sages mind. It is the decisive move in a game, an effective stratagem that inconspicuously compels the evolution of circumstances to realize a normative order. The game itself could be called Zhongyong, which is the title of a Confucian work of classical or near- classical times. I follow Daniel Gardner in translating the title as maintaining perfect balance.43 We probably should not understand balance here in terms of equilibrium, as if equilibrium were an ideal state, for the lesson of the work seems to be the opposite: the value of maintaining constancy under conditions far from equilibrium. To elucidate the value of wisdom, the best knowledge, the work deploys the idea of completing things (cheng wu). Completing things seems to mean handling them well, using them with dignified propriety and poise, finding their best fit in the collective economy of humans and nonhumans.44 What are the things that sages com plete? The usual Western explanation is to say that a thing is a substance, a substantial being, a thing- in- itselffinished, formed, present, identical with itself. In the Confucian tradition, the vision is fuzzier: nothing is finally one thing and not another, opposites become each other, everything becomes something else. A thing, what we name, is not a substance but a rhythm, a flow within a flow. There is no universe in itself with a mechanics of its own, indifferent to humanity; or if there is, then Confucians do not see it: Things do not have inde pendently established principles. Unless a thing, in revealing itself, resembles or differs from something else, contracts or expands, or ends or begins, then even though it may appear to be a thing, it is not a thing (Zhang Zai).45 The propri eties of the human realm give things a normality and appropriateness they could not have otherwise: things lack understanding and require us as companions.46 We complete things when interaction is wu weias with fluency in the use of tools or instruments. We complete things when we can interact without forc

43. Tradition attributes the Zhongyong to Zisi, a grand son of Kongzi. Qing dynasty philology dates it to the later Warring States period or possibly the early Han. Zhu Xi, a Neoconfucian scholar of the twelfth century, began the practice of collecting this work in a Confucian primer called The Four Books, which became the core of Confu cian (and therefore Chinese) education down to the twen tieth century. On the date and authorship of Zhongyong, I follow Tu Wei- M ing, Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 13132; and Roger Ames and David Hall, Focusing on the Familiar (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

44 . On the collective economy of humans and nonhu mans, see Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cam bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 45. Zhang Zai, as cited in Anne D. Birdwhistell, The Concept of Experiential Knowledge in the Thought of Chang Tsai, Philosophy East and West 35 (January 1985): 43. 46. Chu Hsi (Zhu Xi), Reflections on Things at Hand, trans. Wing- tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 77, 83. Also the earlier so- called Western Inscrip tion of Zhang Zai: All things are my companions.

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ing, thus permitting people to vanish into things, and things to dwell amicably among us. According to the Zhongyong, authority to know the good use of things belongs to those who are truthful with themselves. Obviously, this kind of truth fulness (cheng) has nothing in common with ontological truth. It is not a logi cal relation of being and representation; it is the normative form of a relation ship among humans and nonhumans. Zhongyong says that truthfulness is the beginning and end of things; without truthfulness there is nothingnothing, because the patterns and processes that things are remain virtual and incomplete until they find their fullness in a humane economy.47 Zhongyong deduces this conclusion in an elegant sorites:
Only he who is most perfectly truthful is able to give full realization to his human nature; able to give full realization to his human nature, he is then able to give full realization to the human nature of others; able to give full realization to the human nature of others, he is then able to give full realization to the nature of other creatures; able to give full realization to the nature of other creatures, he can then assist in the transformative and nourishing processes of heaven and earth.

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This conclusion is confirmed ten chapters later: Only he who is most perfectly truthful is able to put in order the worlds great invariable human relations, to establish the worlds great foundation, and to know the transformative and nour ishing processes of heaven and earth.48 The necessary and sufficient condition of this truthfulness seems to be the absence of selfish desire. You must prove a disinterested motive to do the right thing. You do not have to rid yourself of desire, which is probably impossible; it is only selfish, self- regarding, conventionally egoistic, and obviously partial desires that must go. Truthfulness, then, comes down to impartiality ( gong), an interper sonally authenticated freedom from self- serving interest. Western tradition tends to assume that we are truthful when we accord with things as they are in them selves. In the Confucian tradition, knowing the truth of things is not a problem of representation; it is a problem of use. We misuse and abuse things without a truthful person on hand to establish norms. Whatever the circumstance, a pro found person of accomplished knowledge handles it with finesse, not doing too much yet leaving nothing undone. What makes this possible, according to the Confucian explanation, is the cultivated spontaneity of a second naturea sec ond nature that returns you to your original nature before self- regarding desire drove you off balance. This doctrine of the mean (as Zhongyong is sometimes translated) seems to
47. Maintaining Perfect Balance, 25; in Gardner, Four Books, 125. 48. Maintaining Perfect Balance, 22, 32; in Gardner, Four Books, 124, 129.

have little in common with Aristotles teaching of that name.49 Aristotle defines the virtues as middle states between usually vicious extremes. While the Aristo telian mean is not calculated or arithmetical, it is a ratio that has to be estimated, judged, and chosen as a reason for action. Confucians envision something more circumstantial. Zhu Xi (11301200) says in a comment on the Zhongyong, There is no fixed shape to the preservation of perfect balance; it depends on the cir cumstances of the moment.50 Zhong (middle, balance) is not a norm peculiar to humanity, as Aristotles virtuous mean is. This balance is at once that of a person, a community, an environment, all under heaven. For Aristotle, keeping the mean, a life of virtue, is most of our happiness, but happiness is not addressed in the Zhongyong at all. Its concern seems to be harmony, including proper main tenance of humanitys relation to the nonhuman (heaven, earth, the ten thousand things). Confucian wisdom thinks in oceans, encompassing opposite points of view without dialectical reconciliation, because taking a single fixed position disregards a hundred others (Mengzi, 7A26). The contrary of Confucian knowl edge is not the false but the partial. Wisdom has no goal; its value is to keep a way open, to avoid accumulating obstructions, to sustain viability. Wisdom is not a way to the highest end (as if a place you might finally reach). Rather, wisdom is a way to stay on course amid transformation, never halting, never stuck, maintain ing perfect balance.

IV Some discussion of an anti- Confucian interlude in Chinese thoughtthat of Mozi and Yang Zhumay help, at this juncture, to define the unique quality of Confucianism. Mozi was about a year old when Kongzi died. Mozi is thought to have spent time in Confucian studies but has the distinction of being the first thinker of influence to reject Confucian principles categorically. Little known now in the West, Mozi in his day was a force to reckon with. His school was a community of scholar- k nights organized as a private militia, lending their force to victims of military aggression, in accordance with their teaching against it. Perhaps the school was too militaristic for the First Emperors liking, because Mohism disappeared from history around the time, 213 BCE, when the emperor ordered a burning of books and (according to legend) a holocaust of scholars.51 Mohism was forgotten even in China until modern times.
49. See Andrew Plaks, Means and Means: A Compara tive Reading of Aristotles Ethics and the Zhongyong, in Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparison, ed. Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); and Sim, Remastering Morals with Aristotle and Confucius, chap. 4. 50. Commenting on Maintaining Perfect Balance 2.2; in Gardner, Four Books, 113. 51. A. C. Graham, Mo tzu, in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Insti tute of East Asian Studies, University of California Press, 1993).

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The one thing that Mozi and Kongzi agreed on was how far the Chinese had fallen from the magnificent time of the early Zhou dynasty (about five hun dred years before). Kongzi did not have an explanation for why the sons of Zhou had fallen so far, since it did not matter why; the question was what to do about it. But Mozi thought the right solution required a correct analysis of the disorder. The people, he said, have fallen into partiality, which for him meant irrationally graded caring. There is no overcoming the troubles of the time until impar tiality in all things is restored. What is needed is not good men but impartial care (jianai ) and consistent standards (fa). Mozi praised artisans for their dis crimination (bian) and regular standards (fa), as well as for the usefulness of their products. Scholars and councilors, he argued, should be like thatmore work manlike, consistent, and useful. For Kongzi, skill (qiao) was apparently always negative. Its connotations for him ranged from deception, trickery, and narrow specialization to vulgar self- interest. Mohists restore the value of skill and artifice to the positive column: Achievement that is beneficial to people [li ren] is said to be skillful [qiao], and anything that is not beneficial is said to be clumsy.52 This was one of Mozis criticisms of the Confucians: they discredit technical knowledge (whether that of humble artisans or masters of statecraft) and artistry (including the art of war); and the same prejudice makes them denigrate experi ments and resist innovation. A Western reader may find some of these arguments familiar and wonder if Mozi is really comparable to any of our Western rationalists. Compared with the Confucians he may be something of a rationalist, but his emphasis is not where Western rationalists put theirs. He does seem to ask questions recognizable from Western philosophical contexts. What is the point of talking if there is no stan dard for assessing what people say? When one advances claims, one must first establish a standard of assessment. To make claims in the absence of such a stan dard is like trying to establish on the surface of a spinning potters wheel where the sun will rise and set. Without a fixed standard, one cannot clearly ascer tain what is right and wrong or what is beneficial and harmful (35). Standards are models to guide the performance of norm- governed activities. For instance, We need not select the bigger benefit out of all the benefits, but we must select the lesser harm out of all the harms (44). Statements toowhat people say, or their claimsrequire a standard. First, we should make explicit exactly what the point of discourse is: The purpose of disputation [bian] is to distinguish clearly between right and wrong, inquire into the principles of order and misrule, clarify the points of sameness and difference, discern the patterns of names and objects, judge the benefits and harms, and resolve confusions and doubts (45).

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52. Mozi, trans. Wang Rongpei and Wang Hong (Chang sha: Hunan Peoples Publishing House, 2006 ), chap. 49.

Subsequent references to chapters of this translation are parenthetically embedded.

Mohists make unprecedented efforts at logical analysis and explicit defini tion. For example:
Inferring [tui] is using what is the same in that which he refuses to accept and that which he does accept in order to propose the former. (45) The negation of something may proceed from the negation of some thing similar to it, because only the things of the same category can have common grounds. (41) When one says that something is an ox and the other says that some thing is a nonox, they are offering contending arguments [zheng bi ]. It is impossible for both of them to win. As it is impossible for both of them to win, one of them will certainly lose. (42)

And there are explicit suggestions for conducting disputation:

If someone gives a statement to say that it is like this, you should refute him by a negative statement. (42) Things of different categories are not comparable, for the measuring standards are different. (41)

The value that these standards express is not logical validity or necessary truth but something closer to verification. A well- made statement is verifiable in the sense that it is assessable, having a content that can be made explicit and tested. This test is not of truth but of application. The standard for a serious state ment is Mozis three gauges: Is there a basis in the words and acts of the ancient authorities? Is it verified by experience and observation? Is there application; can you act on it to advance important goals? Of course, application sounds fine, but evil can be performed as skillfully as good can be. What are the important goals? For that, Mozi has another standard. Goodness of application is deter mined by four supreme goals: Enrich the poor; increase the population; remove dangers such as war; enhance social harmony. The three gauges and four goals establish the standard to which Mozi holds his own and any other claim to knowledge; and it is by appeal to this standard that he proves the imperative of impartial care, which he demonstrates to have basis and verification and to serve the goals he has set. Impartial care is thus more than simply a good idea; Mohists call it the will of heaven. The Mohist seems to equate the heavenly with whatever can be demonstrated to be supremely reasonable and benevolent. To show how heavenly, how divinely sanctioned, impartial caring is, Mozi shows how benevolent it is for the people. How could something so reasonable not be right, or something so right not divine?

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Hence the temptation to recognize in Mozi the profile of Western rational ism: preoccupation with analytical explication; a demand for consistent standards; an optimistic expectation that reason can rule. There is always a reason: If some thing is so there must be reasons [suo yi] why it is so (45); proper reasoning [l] will dispel any doubt (41); those who are not in the right will comply with those who are in the right; those who lack knowledge will comply with those who have knowledge. Lacking valid arguments [wu ci], they will acknowledge defeat (39). Yet reason is not something Mozi has a theory of (compared, say, to Heraclitus on the logos)and unlike Socrates, it is not on knowledge of truth that Mozi stakes his optimism. What seems to give him confidence is not belief in reason but in the heart (xin), a presumption of benevolence, the goodness of contending parties. If they are not good, they cannot be expected to behave reasonably: If both parties are benevolent by nature, they will have no reason to become ene mies. . . . Seeing anything good they will be won by it (39). Not because they are so rational but because they are good enough to respond impartially to the prospect of impartial benefit. The work we have under the title Mozi includes texts that entered the cor pus sometime after the founders work. These later treatises, referred to as the Mohist Canons, are the pinnacle of traditional Chinese logical and theoretical thinking. For the first time in Chinese literature, we have demonstrations apply ing explicit definitions and standards of proof, and the first (sometimes the last) Chinese thought on mechanics, optics, and epistemology, before contact with the Occident. While these Canons seem dedicated to the value of making as much as possible clear and explicit, the texts themselves are anything but. They are among the most obscure and confusing in Chinese tradition. Our understanding of them is largely the result of the brilliant insights of translators and philosophi cal interpreters, above all Angus Graham.53 Ideas about knowledge in the Canons are manifestly more explicit and theo retical than anything in other Chinese authors.54 These texts associate knowl edge and wisdom with capability (cai), clear vision (ming), thought ( l), planning (mou, ji), and skill (qiao). They distinguish four capacities that must collaborate in the completion of knowledge: cognition or intelligence (zhi), explained as the means or faculty of knowledge; thinking (l), explained as seeking by means of intelligence (but not necessarily finding); knowing (zhi), explained as being able to relate things to others and describe them. The Canons make an additional three distinctions within the capacity for zhi- k nowledge:

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53. A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978). 54. Besides Grahams Later Mohist Logic, my account of Mohist epistemology draws from Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic in Traditional China, in Science and Civi-

lization in China, vol. 7, part 1, ed. Joseph Needham (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33842; and Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 5367.

sources of knowledge, including reports, explanations, and experience. Explanation (shuo) is explained as making a matter clear (ming). An example of knowledge by explanation is knowing that a cube will not roll. Perception is explicitly ruled out as the source of such knowledge. Perception is a source of data, but there is no knowledge without further relating by thought and language: Knowing is different from having a pictorial idea. . . . When one knows, it is not by means of the five senses.55 It takes intelligence, a power of the heart, to make something of what the senses provide. This is among the Mohists most influential ideas and is silently appropriated in later thinking about the senses.  Different branches of knowledge, including knowledge of names, of objects, of relations between names and objects, and of how to act.
 Different  Different

capacities on which knowledge draws, including a capacity to sort and grade with names; a capacity to investigate things; skill at dialectics, articulating distinctions and relations; an ability to apply dialectical knowledge to action, which requires the mastery of names, the understanding of objective standards, and knowledge of the relation between names and objects.

Everything about the analysis is novel. Scholars had never seen their language used with such regimentation and a tenacious will to make things explicit. The Chinese made this experiment exactly once, however; and when Mozis school disappeared no one wanted to do it again. For Confucians, ethical life is a condition and source of knowledge; for Mohists, knowledge is the source of ethics. Right and wrong is for Mohists a problem of knowledge, of intelligence in devising policies, making their con sequences explicit and setting them in motion. To be a good ruler, you have to know something, many things, a whole art of rulership. Confucians shudder at the very idea: they reject technique and calculation. The most important thing about a ruler is, for Confucians, his charismatic virtue, which they take to include wisdomand wisdom is a kind of knowledge, though not the technical, manage rial, calculating knowledge of merchants or military commanders. It is precisely that calculating knowledge that Kongzi discredits when he tells his disciples not to be vessels (2.12). Above all, a king must not be a vessel, a specialist, a techni cian. He must work at self- cultivation, never losing himself in arguments about the advantages of policy. If the ruler is not balanced in himself, no clever policy can balance the state. As we learn about Confucian thinking by reflecting on the opposition to it

55. Mozi, as cited in Harbsmeier, Language and Logic, 339.

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by Mozi, so too we can learn by contemplating Yang Zhu, who seems to have been responsible for provoking Confucians to think about human nature. Before Yang, for instance in Kongzi and Mozi, there is no reflection on this notion, while after Yang there are several competing theories. The oldest idea of human nature in China is that we naturally pursue our own pleasure and longevity, by nature putting that pursuit before any dedication to the general good. Yang Zhu turns this idea against the Confucians; he may even have taken up his brush and publicized his views to oppose them, and he should have felt no better than they did about the school of Mozi. Both make the same mistake, from Yangs perspec tive: they call for self- sacrifice, which would deform our nature. Yet our nature is heaven- sent; to deform it must be a mistake. Yang is mostly remembered for the apparently uninhibited selfishness of slogans like Everyone is for himself and Accord priority to self.56 Xing (nature) denotes what it is about a thing that is heaven- sent. This nature develops from birth without training or effort, though this is not exactly the Western idea of the innate or instinctive. The Chi nese are interested in how a thing develops when it is appropriately nourished and not obstructed.57 Scholars say that xing can be translated as tendency, direction, path, norm, or potential. What these connotations seem to have in common is the idea of how a thing changes when not interfered with. We may wonder how to distinguish interference from normal interaction, but the idea seems to be that human nature, or what is heaven- sent about us, is a package of developmental potentials we all start life with. Yangs thought seems to be that if we avoid arti ficial interference (a Confucian education, to take the obvious example), people develop in a preferable way. The Confucian regime must therefore be contrary to heaven and should not be practiced. Confucians could not tolerate what Yang taught about human nature and required a counterteaching. Since Kongzi deliberately avoided the topic of human nature (5.13), his followers were on their own to develop a response that made sense in terms of their philosophy and overturned Yang. It was Mengzi who did so, and it made him the second name in Confucianism. His argument begins from the supposition that our nature is good, which must mean that knowledge, which is laborious and artificial, cannot be vital to a harmonious society. What is vital is sound development, nurturing the seeds of good that a heaven- sent nature plants in us. Goodness is less a problem of knowledge (knowing the right thing to do) than of motivation, attention, commitment, and will (zhi). It is the need for commitment that explains how, despite being good by nature, some turn out badly. It is Mengzi who, in his explanation of commitment and its power, intro

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56. Yang, as cited in He Zhaowu et al., An Intellectual History of China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991), 46.

57. A. C. Graham, The Background of the Mencian Theory of Human Nature, in Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi, ed. Xiusheng Liu and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002).

duces the concept of qi into Chinese philosophical literature: Your will [zhi ] is the commander of the qi. Qi fills the body. When your will is fixed somewhere, the qi sets up camp there. Hence, it is said, Maintain your will, do not injure the qi (2A2). Qi is a word for any gaseous substancesteam, clouds, smoke, the air, and breath itself. It is the modern Chinese word for weather. Qi is material only if matter is understood dynamically, as interchangeable with energy and never at rest. Qi has extension and is in constant transformation independently of aware ness. It is the original material of all things and penetrates all things, making all things flow. Qi fills the body more dramatically than Descartes says that animal spirits do. Cartesian animal spirits, being matter (however volatile), are inert and moved solely by impulse. Qi is energetic, vibratory, and incapable of being still. It has always been associated with the dynamics of yin- yang, as the stuff of which yin and yang are phases or the material of their continuum. For instance, in the earliest recorded pairing of yin and yang, we are told: This qi of heaven and earth does not lose its order. If it goes beyond the order, the people are in confusion. Yang bends over and cannot go out; yin rushes and cannot distill away, so there is an earthquake.58 Mengzi is saying that our power to commit to something can command the bodys qi and must do so if one is to be good. The command metaphor should not be understood dualistically, as mind directing body. There is no Cartesian firewall between body and soul. If will can command the qi, the qi can fortify the will: When your will is unified, it moves the qi. When the qi is unified, it moves your will (2A2). Asked in what he particularly excels, Mengzi replies, I am good at cultivating my floodlike qi (2A2). With cultivation, qi accumulates. Care for it, and it becomes concentrated, stronger, and more beneficial to you and everyone around youbut only with proper cultivation. Trying to accelerate its growth is as bad as starving it. Our nature is developmental and must be left to unfold with minimal interference, even though interaction with people (and training with artifacts) belong to our natural conditions of existence, much as domesticated grain requires weeding and irrigation. Nourishing qi is like throwing a dam over a rivulet. From day to day, there is little visible change; but after a season, a force of great power accumulates. Such is Mengzis floodlike qi, born of cumulative righteousness. Mengzi cites The Book of Songs, If there is a thing, there is a norm [ fa], and comments: Kongzi said, The one who composed this ode understood the Way! (6A6 ). Why must there be a norm? We have a hint in a passage from Maintaining Perfect Balance (Mengzi was a student of its traditional author): pro
58. Sayings of the States (431 BCE), as cited in Zhang Dai nian, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Edmund Ryden (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2002), 46.

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duced and developed without injuring one another . . . the courses of the seasons, the sun, and moon are pursued without conflict.59 This inference is an astute one from original becoming and irreducible plurality. What a thing is has no substan tial and, as it were, local determinationno nucleus of self- identical substance. Instead, what a thing is depends on which other things it relates to in a net work and process without end. Nothing happens without resonance elsewhere. Every change is simultaneously a manifold incitation and a multivalent response. Resonance implies economies of energetic exchange, an immanent economy of real multiplicity. There is no dualism; opposites include and transform into each other, and nothing is permanently raised above transformation or experience. One implication of this view is that there is an optimal, though perhaps not one unique, way for things to coexista condition of mutual existence under which things avoid provoking destructive responses (though that does not make them indestructible). Instead, the regularities, which include timely destruction, are part of the pattern, the flow of changes, the dao, and give each thing a natural duration, whose power to absorb disturbance contributes to the stability of an entire economy or ecology. Another implication is that what a thing is (the dif ference it makes to an environment), and what it ought to do or how it ought to be handled, belong together, grow from the same conditions, and are not so indif ferent as modern logic assumes.60 We cannot understand what a thing is without understanding how it ought to behave in relation to others upon whose existence it dependsthe norm of its interaction. This reading seems confirmed by later commentators. Zhu Xi, writing more than a thousand years after Mengzi, says, The blue sky is called heaven; it revolves continuously and spreads out in all directions. It is sometimes said that there is up there a person who judges all evil actions; this assuredly is wrong. But to say there is no ordering principle would be equally wrong.61 Another five hundred years later, Dai Zhen, in a commentary on Mengzi, holds that nature and obligation are not two things. If one considers the nature of something, then the clearer one makes it without straying from it in the slightest is what it necessarily ought to be.62 The heart, heaven- sent, actuated by qithe same qi that fills the 10,000 thingsis capable of knowing the right response to any thing heaven sends. Right does not mean efficient or profitable or even rational; it means proper, or as things should be. The value of knowledge is knowing how to find that norm and handle things without conflict. Mengzi is saying we discover the norm by discovering ourselves. He carefully distinguishes this right use, the

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59. Maintaining Perfect Balance 30.3, as cited in Tu, Centrality and Commonality, 86. 60. According to Graham, one can nevertheless distin guish is and ought in Chinese; Studies in Chinese Philosophy, 430.

61. Zhu Xi, in Needham, History of Scientific Thought, in Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1956), 492. 62. Dai Zhen, as cited in Zhang, Key Concepts, 348.

knowing of which is genuine knowledge, from mere cleverness, of which Mengzi is contemptuous: Those who are crafty in their contrivances and schemes have no use for shame (7A7). Craftiness is shameless, because, while it may be effec tive and clever, it is also meretricious and untrustworthy, serving bad as well as good. To this technical, artisanal knowledge, Mengzi opposes liang zhi, pure knowingor, in an older translation, innate knowledge: That which people are capable of without learning is their genuine capability [liang neng]. That which they know without pondering is their genuine knowledge [liang zhi] (7A15). Self- c ultivation is not so unnatural as Yang supposed, no more so than weeding and watering sprouts. On the one hand, too, knowledge is not especially important; on the other, the best knowledge (knowing how to do the right thing) is innate and unreflective. What makes it best is not that it knows everything but that it knows the best thing, which is how to maintain balance despite blur. It takes diligent self- cultivation to hold this middle, but doing so is more like improvising music than matching a fixed standard.63

V Western theories of knowledge invariably discuss the senses. Whether sense is inimical to knowledge (Plato, Descartes), or merely the beginning of knowl edge (Aristotle, Spinoza), or even its principal source and verification (Epicurus, Locke), no Western theory of knowledge omits critical reflection on the senses. The relationship between the senses and knowledge was not controversial for thinkers of Chinas Warring States period; they did not feel the problem that the senses raise for Western thought. Can we imagine how baffling Xunzi might find these words of Plato, his near contemporary? Everywhere in our investiga tions the body is present and makes for confusion and fear, so that it prevents us from seeing the truth. . . . It is impossible to attain any pure knowledge with the body.64 Chinese indifference to this problem is not naive. Ontological truth is not the essence of knowledge, and the senses are not expected to do the heavy lifting that our epistemology requires. Everyone in Chinese tradition agrees that sense discrimination is an important discipline. There is no disdain for the senses, no suggestion that they should not be trusted or that a better kind of truth lies beyond them. The different senses have their strengths and weaknesses. Sensations are not atomistic data with intrinsic qualitiesthe Chinese are psy chological holists. A conscious sensation is a discrimination, a difference within multiplicityas Xunzi observes: Forms, colors, and designs are differentiated by the eye. Pitch and timbre, bass and treble, modal keys and rhythms, and odd
63. Observations of much relevance to these concerns are found in the symposium Between Text and Perfor mance, Common Knowledge 17.2 (Spring 2011): 221347. 64. Plato, Phaedo 66e, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997).

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noises are differentiated by the ear. Sweet and bitter, salty and bland, pungent and sour, and distinctive tastes are differentiated by the mouth.65 Nor is there anything contemplative about sensing or sense consciousness. Every sensation is contextual, occurring in a phase of life, a context of action that tinges the con sciousness of sensation. What the senses discriminate and respond to are differences as real and potentially valuable as any we know. Sensations come to us on the air, borne on the wind. Hence the power of music, as Xunzi explains in his refutation of Mozis condemnation of music. Its energy flows into the ears of an audience and harmonizes everyones qi. When they are not artificially harmonized in this way and through the discipline of rites and ceremonies, the senses instigate their own desires (the eyes love colors) and tend toward excess. Xunzi says that the eyes not only desire colors, they desire the most extreme differences of color; and every other sense is extreme in the same way (11.11). By themselves, the senses are help less to control these desires. That is why the heart- mind (xin) is integral to the knowledge- f unction of the senses: The heart- mind that dwells within the cen tral cavity is used to control the five facultiesit is called the Lord provided by nature (17.4). Chinese thought localizes thinking and feeling in the heart rather than the brain. This heart is conscious and intelligent; it both understands and feels, and whatever knowledge there is in the senses depends on the heart- mind, which combines and modulates the senses, somewhat like the common sense of Aristotelian psychology. Xunzi silently follows the Mohists. It takes the hearts synthesis to make sensations knowing or wise. He says that the heart thinks (l ) and chooses; for him, thinking is a kind of seeking, and knowing a kind of finding. Like the Mohists, he defines thinking (l ) as seeking with intelligence (though not necessarily finding).66 Western thought about the knowledge- f unction of the senses tends to focus on the problem of getting past a subjective sensation to an objective reality. Do things in themselves cause sensations, or are sensations self- caused (as in dreams)? Even if sensations are caused by realities, must they resemble their causes, so that we can know the truth of things by contemplating sensations? Chinese thought is uninterested in mimetic fealty but does value the efficacy of a response. The concern is not with a correspondence between consciousness and object; it is with the irreproachable spontaneity of the response, assisted (as it may be) by acute sensory discrimination. This response is not a private event in consciousness, because insofar as it is potential knowledge, the response tends toward appropri ate action. To look is to see, to see is to know, and to know is to know what to

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65. Xunzi, trans. John Knoblock (Changsha: Hunan Peo ples Publishing House, 1999), 22.5. Subsequent paren thetical references to Xunzi are from the chapters of this translation.

66. On the unacknowledged appropriation among Con fucians of Mohist thinking about perceptual knowledge, see Birdwhistell, Concept of Experiential Knowledge.

do and do it. Knowledge is not isolated from the will, and not complete until put into practice. The knowledge of things is always going to be specialized: knowing a lot about a little. Knowledge of things measures one against another; for instance, a carpenters knowledge in comparing lumber and selecting the best pieces. How ever, the specialized training required for this art is useless for measuring many things together, which requires the dao as a standard. On that arcane instru ment, the Confucian junzi is a virtuosonot a specialist, mind, but trained to an unspecialized meta expertise that makes him good at orchestrating things. Xunzi defines the sage as the artisan and manager of the Way (22.8). This sage lays out all the myriad things and causes himself to exactly match how each settles on the suspended balance (21.6). How does the perfected person become skilled in the ways of the Way? Xunzi says it requires a prepared and disciplined heartmind. That means a heart become empty (xu), unified ( yi), and still (jing ) (21.8). Emptiness here is an idea taken from the Daodejing. Xunzi seems to learn from this work while rendering its terms more prosaic and precise. He explains a tenu ous, empty mind as one that does not allow the past to bias present experience. A unified mind does not allow the perception of one thing to confuse the percep tion of another. A still mind is undisturbed by dreams and fantasies, which also bias perception. Obviously, for Xunzi, the obstacle to sagacious knowledge is any bias, especially an obsession, prejudice, or one- sided view: It is the common flaw of men to be blinded by some small point of the truth and to shut their minds to the great ordering principle [da li] (21.1). In Xunzis sight, humanity is a thorough artifactall the more so, the perfected person:
A piece of wood straight as a plumb line can, by steaming, be made pli able enough to be bent into the shape of a wheel rim, so its curvature will conform to the compass. Yet, even though it is then allowed to dry out completely in the sun, it will not return to its former straightness because the process of steaming has effected this change in it. So, too, wood that has been marked with the plumb line will be straight and metal that has been put to the whetstone will be sharp. In broaden ing his learning, the gentleman each day examines himself so that his awareness will be discerning and his actions without excess. (1.1)

The perfected person is straightness made pliable, worked into conformable shape. This person is a work of art, and the perfected persons most important function is artifice, using things artfully, judged in the light of the inherited rites and ceremonies: He is responsive to every transformation, modifying as neces sary to obtain for each thing its proper place (6.19). A superlative administrator, the sage knows how to make things happen. A superlative ambassador, he knows

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how to respond appropriately to anything: He bends and unbends as the occa sion demands . . . flexible and tractable like rushes and reeds. . . . His use of his sense of what is morally right to change in response to every situation is because of knowledge [zhi] that is precisely fitting for every occasion (3.5). He responds to things as they arrive, discriminates matters as they occur (21.6), limitlessly responsive to every transformation (31.2). In his responses to evolving phe nomena, he is quick and alert, prompt and agile, but is not deluded (12.3). He responds appropriately to every change of circumstance as easily as counting one, two (8.11). This flexibility is not considered to be a miraculous, divine, or supernatural accomplishment. On the contrary, anyone can become a sage (23.14). All that is required is a heart capable of an unobstructed response. Xunzis perfected person has not overcome desire, as if it were a culpable excrescence. Instead, a cultivated, perfected desire becomes so aligned with the changes that nothing disappoints a sage: The sage follows his desires and embraces all his dispositions, and the things dependent on these simply turn out well ordered (21.12). Xunzi says that sages observe nature but do not try to understand it (17.3). They are indifferent to the real nature of truth and falsity and the true nature of what is the case and what is not; their superiority lies elsewhere, in causing each affair and changed circumstance to obtain its proper response (8.5). In response to the myriad things of Heaven and Earth, he does not devote his attention to theorizing about how they came to be as they are, but rather tries to make the most perfect use of their potentialities (12.3). How can brooding over the origins of things be bet ter than assisting what perfects them? (17.13). Origin and nature are of little or no concern, because they depend on the misinterpretation of processes as objects; the sage sees the process under way, the apparently stable flux, and knows its ori gin to be unspecifiable or irrelevant, and its nature at most a phase. Consider the position of the first sages. Here were human beings who appeared at a time before artifice, before convention, before art and knowledge and by their deeds, such qualities and practices first appear in the world. How did the sages devise artifacts without using artifacts? The Confucian assumes they used heaven or nature as the source of patterns for analogical extension. The first artifact, the first art, is analogy, the analogical extension of natural process. The more that human practices extend natural processes by analogy, the more har monious is the economy of human and nonhuman things. The dramatic polarity that Greeks invented between nomos and phusis, say, between culture and nature, is a figment of overwrought imagination. Humanity forms a triad with heaven and earth. There is no specifically sociological origin of norms and culture within an independently constituted physical nature. The only nature we know already includes normative artifacts, which blurs its distinction from culture. There is a famous argument between Mengzi and Xunzi: Human nature

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[xing] is good [shan], Mengzi says (3A1); no, says Xunzi: human nature is bad [e] (23.1). As I understand it, Xunzis criticism is that Mengzi makes morality seem natural and easy, failing to appreciate the need of morality for laborious training in the wholly artificial framework of convention, ceremony, and custom. Our heaven- sent endowments are not enough, not the right sorts of thing, for harmonious collective existence. By submitting to ethical cultivation, we do not lose something we had as a free gift of nature, as Yang Zhu seemed to argue; we gain immeasurable artificial powers. Human nature is bad means that we are not developmentally calibrated for life with others. Only society can socialize: everything good is artificial, a work of deliberate effort (wei ). The argument is plausible, but why turn it against Mengzi? It is possible that Xunzi has missed a nuance of Mengzis thought. Mengzi thinks of human nature on the model of domesticated grain (2A2). Domestication evolves an organism whose conditions of existence include artifice. For the domesticated organism, having people weed and water it is natural, an evolved condition of existence. Mengzi says that morality is like thatwhich is what Darwin says too, explaining its evolution on the model of artificial selection; for instance, again, the domestication of grain.67 These grains are not given in nature but had to be carefully crafted. Yet, as Dar win showed, effects similar to craft can be a result of natural process.

VI Coherence is an assumption that Confucians tend to make, and wherever heaven or nature confounds this expectation it is assumed that the junzi, the perfected person, will bring coherence by completing things. So, for example, they tend to take for granted the coherence of language, ethics, and knowledge. They assume that the terms of praise and condemnation embedded in language make morally valuable distinctions, which they think the best knowledge confirms. With the classical Daoist authors Laozi and Zhuangzi, this continuity and coherence of nature and convention is thrown into doubt. These authors criticize the Con fucians optimistic expectations for language and knowledge; indeed Laozi and Zhuangzi regard ordinary moral distinctions as an obstacle to living well. There is more to knowledge than words can say, and the best knowledge does without language at all. In the image that emerges from the Daodejing (also known as the Laozi, after its legendary author), a Daoist sage is not a dramatic personality, lack ing even the charisma of the Confucian junzi.68 This sage is a fuzzy thinker

67. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, chap. 4.

68. The Daodejing seems to have reached its final form by late third century BCE. See William G. Boltz, Lao tzu Tao te ching, in Loewe, Early Chinese Texts. A bamboo

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inattentive, muddled, like a child who has not yet learned to smile. All the same, it is impossible to oppose or attack him. One cannot be an enemy to him, because he has emptied himself of the desires that fuel disagreement and thus enjoys the maximum strategic advantage of noncontention (bu zheng). You cannot strike him; nothing connects. He is never struck, because he is never stuck, never in one place to the exclusion of another one, and nothing sticks to him. Images of sage efficacy in the Daodejing include flowing water, a woman, and a mirror. Water benefits without contention; women overcome by softness; mirrors reflect anything without discrimination and are serenely empty the moment things pass them by. This emptiness or indeterminacy, and the fuzzy thinking it sustains, is not a failing or omission; it is an awesome resource, a virtual depth without actual function, such as an infant has, or an uncarved block. These are potentially any form but actually (which is to say, rigidly, clearly, and distinctly) very little at all. Growing up means getting rigid, losing potential, becoming fixed and settled, and frittering qi away in futile contention. The Daodejing makes a new connection between wu wei effectiveness and the condition it calls xu, tenuous or empty. The oldest meaning of xu is a big hill, and by extension anything vast and expansive, which implies (a kind of ) emptiness and relative formlessness.69 It is the emptiness of the sky, clouds, and steama virtual vapor that can coagulate into any form. Such emptiness is not nonbeing, but it also is not actual (formed, committed, rigid) being. The virtual, which is my philosophical gloss on Daoist xu, is a being, hence really exists. The virtual is the opposite of the actual, not of the existing or real.70 The empty is the potent virtuality of an infant, the fluid plasticity of an uncarved block, not the ontological nullity of nonbeing (we meet that kind of emptiness [kong] in Bud dhism). The images of wu wei in the Daodejing are of efficacious emptiness: the potent void at the center of a wheel, the hollow of a jar, the space between walls. Wu wei effectiveness requires that we cultivate this emptiness, empty ourselves of conventional desires, forget about words. Then the response to circumstances can be spontaneous, natural, so- of- itself (ziran), and in that sense wu wei.

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text ( Jingmen, Hubei, 1993) that seems to be an early Laozi dates to the middle or late fourth century BCE, which probably predates the oldest part of Zhuangzi. Early Dao ist texts clearly do not represent a self- conscious school or organized movement, though they display the consis tent logic of a central idea and a pattern of convictions and procedures. See N. J. Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (Hu- tun) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). The attribution of the Daodejing to a sage Laozi is almost certainly legendary. For a plau sible explanation of the legend, see A. C. Graham, The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan, in Studies in Chinese Philosophy.

69. Wu, Chinese Philosophical Terms, 82. 70. What we call virtual is not something that lacks real ity but something that is engaged in a process of actual ization following the plane that gives it its particular real ity. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 31.

Attain extreme tenuousness; preserve quiet integrity: making ourselves tenuous, we make ourselves integral and in that sense maintain our integrity, never indecisive, unresponsive, or conflicted; hence steady, constant, reliable.71 Tenuousness calls for emptiness where desire used to be; only then can you change daily with the course of things. Otherwise some interest, some clinging attachment, makes you fear change, lose impartiality, and get stuck defending a position. Until we get past that point, we are incapable of constancy and are without integrity. To be constant is not to be changeless but to respond to cir cumstances spontaneously, ziranthis is a thought new in Daoism, which Chi nese tradition will not forget. It recurs in the Zhuangzi: To be transformed day by day with other things is to be untransformed once and for all.72 Xunzi draws this maxim into Confucianism, as does Maintaining Perfect Balance. By the Song dynasty, the idea had become orthodox: Being long lasting does not mean being in a fixed and definite state. Being fixed and definite, a thing cannot last long. The way to be constant is to change according to circumstance (Cheng Yi).73 The opposite of wu wei is wei, which means purposive doing or intentional conduct and its results or artifacts. Laozi seems to say that artifice is futile, which is the argument Xunzi found so wrongheaded. All of our artifice, our planning and purposiveness, all the aggressive, knowing intentionality with which we set upon things to complete them, merely entrenches the hold of custom and lan guage on consciousness and thus on action and especially on desire (which it fuels), when the challenge is to overcome it. Wu wei is not sheer nonactivity; it is doing, but with minimal artifice and without helpan art of appearing artless, of doing not doing (wei wu wei). The issue is not one of mere efficiency; more is measured than cost and benefit. The idea is to maximize the difference between effectiveness and intervention, with doing nothing and nothing left undone as ideal limiting cases. It takes subtle eyes to see opportunities invisible to others, to discern the germ of future things and know how to modify evolving circum stances when they are pliable and easy to change: What has yet to begin is easy to plan for. Work at things before they come to be. Sages . . . study what is not studied and return to what the multitude pass by (64). This dao- art or knowledge does not require theory, science, or ontologi cal truth to support or justify it. What you need, Zhuangzi says, is to learn to
71. The Daodejing of Laozi, trans. Philip J. Ivanhoe (India napolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), chap. 16. Subsequent refer ences to this work follow this translation and are paren thetically embedded by chapter number. 72. Chuang- Tzu: The Inner Chapters, trans. A. C. Graham (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 110. Citations from Zhuangzi follow this translation, which includes a sub stantial part of the entire traditional text. References to Zhuangzi from this source are given as parenthetical page

numbers in the text. Occasionally I prefer the translation of Paul Kjellberg in Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, ed. Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden (2001; Indianapolis, IN, Hackett, 2005), 207254. For the Chi nese text, I follow the bilingual edition of Zhuangzi, trans. Wang Rongpei (Changsha: Hunan Peoples Publishing House, 1999). 73. Cheng Yi, as cited in Zhu Xi, Reflections on Things at Hand, 13.

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breathe from your heels, which suggests taiji and the knowledge of a martial artistknowing how to respond flawlessly to the smallest change, with an effec tiveness it is impossible to contend with.74 We transcend nothing except the banal and accustomed. We remain on the plane where we have always been but learn to move like a pivot in any direction. We are able to do so because our action is unconditioned by selfish desire, but one can work on reducing desires without having to idealize the transcendence of desire or any pure and unearthly state. When Laozi says that sages desire to be without desire, I take him to mean that they have the second- order desire to be without first- order desires of a particular kind, such as the desire for precious goods.75 Sages desire to be without desires [ yu bu yu] and show no regard for precious goods (64), he says. Selfish desires are not those that flow from a being called self, a reification that the Chinese avoid. A selfish desire is, I think, an excessive desireunbalanced, rigid, resistant to change, reactive, premised on fear. The art of the dao, of transforming with changes, is in part an art of know ing what is not known and what not to do. To remain fluid and capable of seizing opportunities when they are easy is in part knowing how to evade the need to act at all. A kind of not- k nowingknowing how not to act; what not to determine; when not to continue; when to defer, refrain, or consultseems indispensable to sagacious action: To know what one does not know is best. Not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease (71). A Confucian might agree: Kongzi himself explained wisdom as recognizing what you know and what you do not know (2.17). The Daodejing seems to break new ground, though, when it says, Those who know are not full of knowledge. Those full of knowledge do not know (81). Here the work introduces an interesting distinction between saga cious knowledge and something called knowledge by people who do not know. For the first time in Chinese intellectual tradition, there can be a philosophical mistake about knowledge; and Laozi is saying that Confucians (those who are full of knowledge) actually make it. The not- k nowledge of those who are not full of knowledge is not nescience or brute ignorance; it is a kind of knowledge, as not- doing is a kind of doing. We are admittedly on the verge of paradox. Par

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74 . I am not implying an ancient connection between Daoist classics and taiji, which develops only much later (Qing Dynasty) and gets associated with Daoism later still. During the time of taiji s maturation (in the nine teenth and early twentieth centuries), to say something was Daoist was to say that it was Chinese, the Man chu rulers having coopted Buddhism and Confucianism. Douglas Wile, Taijiquan and Daoism, Journal of Asian Martial Arts 16. 4 (2007): 845. Ironically, non- Chinese ethnic groups played a significant role in Daoism from the beginning, and Daoism remains influential among ethnic

minorities within and outside China. See Terry F. Klee man, Ethnic Identity and Daoist Identity in Traditional China, in Daoist Identity: History, Lineage, and Ritual, ed. Livia Kohn and Harold D. Roth (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). 75. Second- order desires are desires to have particular desires, or desires to have a particular desire be ones will. See Harry Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Con cept of a Person, Journal of Philosophy 68.1 (January 1971): 520.

menides warned Western thinkers about the not: Say and think only this: being is.76 If reality is to be knowable, it must be what it is without qualification: it cannot not be in any respect. That, in any case, is Platos understanding of Par menides: How should something that is not be known? . . . What is completely is completely knowable, and what is in no way is in every way unknowable.77 Fuzziness is proof that the object is unreal. Blur is the nemesis of knowledge. However, the Daodejing does not operate with a dualism between being and notbeing. What is not is not actual, not yet, not finished; it is becoming, potential, virtual, latent. Not- k nowing, or knowing what is not known, means knowing this incipience, discovering an unexpected resource in the tenuous blur. Knowing what is not known does not mean knowing that which is not known, which is surely an impossibility. Rather, it means knowing how to rec ognize limits as limits and ignorance as ignorance. I do not have to see over the horizon to see that the horizon is a horizon and that there is more than I see. Not- k nowledge is not transcendental knowledge of the limits of possible knowl edge, but astute knowledge of the current limits of real knowledge. That kind of not- k nowing prevents one from getting stuck in knowledge. The more you think you know, the less you know what you do not know and the more stuck you are in your knowledge. The better your not- k nowledge, the more you know what is not known and the less stuck you areall of which keeps you flexible and undog matic, hence more spontaneously responsive, therefore more effective. Problems arise not from what we do not know but from not knowing what we do not know, which is the only way to know the good questions and what is worth knowing. That is how I understand chapter 38 of the Daodejing: The ability to predict what is to come [qian shi] is an embellishment of the Way, and the beginning of ignorance [ yu ]. A prediction is valuable only as part of a plan, and a plan is a plan (not a spontaneous response) because it is worked out, discursively articulated, with prediction playing a role in the reasoning that makes the plan seem feasible. That is the beginning of ignorance because it is the beginning of reliance on what we know, forgetting what is not known for the sake of acting decisively, even if it means becoming mired in knowledge. That may also be the reason why Zhuangzi says the perfection of knowledge is knowing the not- k nown (zhi bu zhi): To know what is Heavens doing and what is mans is the utmost in knowledge. Who ever knows what Heaven does lives the life generated by Heaven. Whoever knows what man does uses his knowledge of the known to nurture his knowledge of the unknown against premature death. That is the perfection of knowledge (84).

76. Parmenides, fragment 6; in Karen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre- Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 43.

77. Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, in Complete Works, 477a.

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VII The title of the first of the Zhuangzis so-called inner chapters is typically trans lated as wandering free and easy, wandering at ease, without destination.78 Wandering refers to a heart or mind free to turn in any direction, twist in the wind, go with the flow. Doing so is harder than it sounds; to really wander requires an unlimited capacity for impartial response, and so, to do it consis tently you have to be a sage. Nothing disturbs your balance, no change holds a threat. In attaining this condition, the sage does not transcend appearance, experience, becoming, or the body; he transcends limited views and rigid forms, makes himself as changeable as the world and at home anywhere. He does not see the world from beyond the world. A sage does not really see the world at all, not if that means having a settled perspective. The transcendence of the sage is the immanent transcendence of the virtual in relation to the actual, which implies a certain indifference to actuality or to what in appearance seems defini tive, settled, or clear. It is disconcerting yet entirely in character that this masterpiece of Chinese thought begins with a fish story. There was a fish named Kun (minnow), so big that nobody knew how many thousands of miles around it was. It lived in the North Ocean and had a wonderful capacity for transformation. Simple as that, fish Kun turns to the sky and becomes a bird named Peng, also enormous. When Peng puffs out its chest and departs for the South Ocean, its wings are like clouds hanging from the sky. The text relates these changes without any suggestion of magic. They are no more marvelous than any other transformation. The word that Chinese thinkers use for spontaneous transformation is, again, ziranhap pening so of itself.79 The changes are, of course, effects of earlier causes and are not spontaneous in the Western sense of an unconditioned cause. Unplotted and purposeless, the transformations from fish to bird, north to south, sea to sky, just happen to happen, with no cause other than a totality of circumstances. . . . A cicada and a dove watch Peng rise into the sky. Whats the big deal? the cicada wonders. Way up there the sky still looks blue. A bird way up there still needs the wind. Whats so great about Pengs greatness? At this point, our author, Zhuang Zhou, breaks in: What do these two creatures know? Literally little: being little, they know the little. Little knowledge [xiao zhi] does not measure up to big knowledge [da zhi] (44). He repeats this interesting distinction (in verse) in the next chapter: Great knowledge is effortless, / Petty knowledge picks holes. / Great speech is flavorless, / Petty speech strings words (50). As I understand it, this great knowledge knows the art of transforming

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78. The text of the Zhuangzi as we have it consists of thirty- t hree chapters, of which only the first seven are believed to be written by Zhuang Zhou. These are the ear liest core of the work, referred to as the inner chapters.

79 . Franois Jullien glosses ziran in the Zhuangzi as immanence. Jullien, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 141.

spontaneously, ziran, in response to any circumstance. Words of great knowledge lack flavor. They are not passionate, committed, decisive, or precise. To be any of those takes little knowledge. Little knowledge is good with language, know ing how to do things with words. It is the knowledge that gets you through the day (or through school). Great knowledge gets you through life, knowing the art of nourishing life. It is not- k nowing, knowing how to avoid contention, how to accomplish without needing to act or seeming to, knowing how not to act yet leave nothing undone. The promise of such knowledge is not the certainty of a difficult and precious access, whether to God or to the Self (leading incentives of Western theory), but something more realistic: to prolong your vitality to the limit of human capacity. Following Zhuangzis disparagement of little knowl edge, we read: Thus it is said that perfect people have no self [wu ji]; spiritual people have no accomplishment [wu gong]; and sagely people have no name [wu ming] (45).80 What is this self that perfected people lack? It is not a Platonic, Cartesian, or Hindu (atman) self. Unlike Plato, Descartes, or the Indian think ers, Zhuangzi does not work up a theory of the self as the substance of the per sonthe personal reality. The closest in his thinking to such a self is simply the living body (shen), and that is precisely what he says we should care most for (though in just the right way). The self to get over is the fond belief that you are different from others, that you have your own likes and dislikes, that some changes are preferable to others, that there are some bends and twists in the road, some weathers, that you would rather die than go along with. To overcome self is to blend with others, abandon right and wrong, go along with anything, be flavorless in speech, and vanish into things. To attain so much is the gongfu, the spiritual exercise, the adepts paradoxically deconstructive work on the self. Self- centered desires are self- defeating. They leave us exhausted by contention and prove that we do not know how to take care of ourselves. Vitality demands a capacity to evolve. Immo bilized in a position, captured by cupidity, limited to a perspective, lifeas Fran ois Jullien observesceases to feed itself because it loses its virtuality, bogs down, becomes stalemated, and no longer initiates anything new.81 While life is irreversible change, desire is liable to become anxious clinging. The problem is not the changes but the clinging. To be constant, one has to change without clinging. To reach that point, we have to do something about the desires that make us hate change and fear fuzzy, in- between states. The Zhuangzis first chap ter introduces the difference between big and little knowledge. The next chapter is a critiqueskeptical, relativistic, even nihilisticof little knowledge, or of
80. The translation is Kjellbergs. See also Chris Jochim, No Self in Zhuangzi, in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 81. Jullien, Vital Nourishment, 31.

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what scholars (and common sense) regard as knowledge. One line of argument emphasizes the relativity of linguistic distinctions. Is Mt. Tai big or small? Choose your perspective, and either statement is true. Apparently the same goes for any use of language and so for any expression of (little) knowledge. Whether a person knows or not depends on where one is and who is describing. What we call knowledge is ignorance or foolishness from another perspective: What is It is also Other, what is Other is also It. There they say Thats it, thats not from one point of view, here we say Thats it, thats not from another point of view. Are there really It and Other? Or really no It or Other? (53). Nothing is defini tively this and not that; nothing said, nothing distinguished, nothing recorded in words is exclusively, nonrelatively one thing and not its opposite. If the it is really it, there would be no longer a disputable difference from what is not it; if the so is really so, there would no longer be a disputable difference from what is not so (60; modified after Kjellberg). It is in this context that Gaptooth asks Wang Ni what he knows about knowledge. Wang Ni tries to evade the question, but Gaptooth wont let go. Finally, Wang Ni says:
Let me try to say itHow do I know that what I call knowing is not ignorance? How do I know that what I call ignorance is not knowing? Moreover, let me try a question on you. When people sleep in the damp, their backs hurt and they get stiff in the joints; is that so of an eel? If they sit in trees they shiver and shake; is that so of the ape? . . . In my judgment the sprouts of benevolence and righteousness and the path ways of right and wrong are inextricably confused: how could I know how to discriminate between them? (58; modified after Kjellberg)

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Being, nonbeing, right, wrong, same, differentthere is little knowledge to be found in these distinctions: To discriminate between alternatives is to fail to see something (57). Such distinctions have their origin in language, but the constant words of lessons and books are ill suited to a world of transformation without substance: The Way has never had borders, saying has never had norms (57). There is no right or wrong except for someone poised on the brink of trans formation, a circumstance for which there are no rules. Anything one decides will be right in one way, wrong in another. The idea of ceremonious propriety, of handling things as they ought to be handled, is nonsense. Our concern in han dling things should be vitality rather than righteousness (and truth is a kind of righteousness). We are no good dead. To expend vitality contending over which of an opposite pair of names applies to a given case is to be much too serious about wordslike the monkeys in the tale, Three in the Morning: A monkey keeper handing out nuts said, Three every morning and four every evening. The mon keys were in a rage. All right then, he said, four every evening and three every morning. The monkeys were all delighted (54).

It is inherent in a thing that from somewhere thats so of it, from some where thats allowable of it; of no thing is it not so, of no thing is it unallowable. Therefore when a Thats it which deems picks out a stalk from a pillar, a hag from beautiful Xi Shi, things however peculiar or incongruous, the Way interchanges them and deems them one. Their dividing is formation, their formation is dissolution; all things whether forming or dissolving in reverting interchange and are deemed to be one. (53)

Zhuangzi is not saying all things are one, a proposition that, as Graham observes, immediately distinguishes itself from the world which is other than it.82 Rather, there are no things, not if a thing is a being, definitely this and not also the opposite. Rather than a unity of all (reified) things, the point here is original becoming, a becoming that is older than any being and eliminates the possibility of anything being what Western thought has assumed a being has to be. Contending parties do not really disagree; they divide changes from dif ferent standpoints. We are enjoined to waste nothing on disputation. When someone clings to assertions, despite changing circumstances, or insists on unconditional validity, despite the conflicting judgments of others, he is guilty of contrived affirmation (wei shi). If he changes judgments with circumstances and refrains from disputation, he practices adaptive affirmation ( yin shi). Guo Xiang explains the difference in his early commentary: If one takes a temporary abode in a thing and then moves on, he will silently understand. If, however, one stops and is confined to one place, he will develop prejudices. Prejudices will result in hypocrisy and hypocrisy will result in many reproaches.83 Instead of taking oppositions seriously, we should emulate the dao, which is like a pivot: its capacity to turn freely allows it to respond to incitement from any direction. The pivot is beyond perspective, not because it has transcended space and time, but because it can turn in any way and adapt to anything: Where neither It nor Other finds its opposite is called the pivot of the Way. When once the pivot finds its socket it
82. A. C. Graham, in Harold D. Roth, A Companion to Angus C. Grahams Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 112. 83. Guo Xiang, in A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, ed. Wing- t sit Chan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 335.

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For Plato, opposites must exclude each other; for Hegel, they overcome each other in a higher synthesis. But for Zhuangzi, opposites imply, presuppose, even generate each other. Approval engenders disapproval, right engenders wrong, birth engenders death. Work to make these sharp and clear and you merely mul tiply differences and become the occasion of opposition. The trick to living well is to not permit oppositions to weary or confuse you. Put all such distinctions on one level:

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can respond endlessly. Whats right is endless. Whats wrong is endless too (53; modified after Kjellberg). Another argument in this chapter resembles one familiar from Western skepticism: knowledge requires a criterion, for there must be a way to distinguish it from no knowledge; but to function, the criterion has to be one that we know. We have to know that, say, conditions a and b are criterial for knowledge. So before we can know, we have to know what knowing is.84 The argument exposes a contradiction in the very idea of knowledge. Here is a comparable argument from Zhuangzi:
You and I having been made to argue over alternatives, if it is you not I that wins, is it really you who are on to it, I who am not? . . . Whom shall we call in to decide it? If I get someone of your party to decide it, being already of your party how can he decide it? If I get someone of my party to decide it, being already of my party how can he decide it? If I get someone of a party different from either of us to decide it, being already of a different party how can he decide it? If I get someone of the same party as both of us to decide it, being already of the same party as both of us how can he decide it? Consequently you and I and he are all unable to know where we stand, and shall we find someone else to depend on? (60)

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Zhuangzi, like Sextus Empiricus, aims to induce uncertainty of the kind that leaves one reluctant to trust anything anyone claims to know or even anything that one thought one knewand each man claims that his argument is not a dogmatic declaration that knowledge is impossible. 85 Despite these parallels, however, Sextus seems serious about so- called knowledge in a way that Zhuangzi is not. Sextuss arguments rest entirely on assumptions about knowledge and truth found in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The argument of Sextus is that we cannot know whether any supposed knowl edge really is knowledge (that is, truly adequate to things in themselves). Assume that knowledge is the truth of a thing, and we must conclude that knowledge is impossible. The skeptic gets impressive effects and seems to undermine knowl edge only when these assumptions are not (and they rarely are) made explicit and problematic. The arguments of Sextus are supposed to impart a consciousness of profound ignorance about whether anything is good or bad, right or wrong, so or not so. Zhuangzi has a more insidious aim and is less a skeptic than a nihilist.86
84. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism I.14. 85. For more on this theme, see Paul Kjellberg, Dao and Skepticism, Dao 6 (September 2007): 28199; Lisa Raphals, Skeptical Strategies in the Zhuangzi and Theaetetus, Philosophy East and West 44.3 (July 1994): 50126; and Russell B. Goodman, Skepticism and Realism in the Chuang Tzu, Philosophy East and West 35.3 ( July 1985): 23137. 86. Deborah H. Soles and David E. Soles, Fish Traps and Rabbit Snares: Zhuangzi on Judgement, Truth and Knowledge, Asian Philosophy 8.3 (1998): 14964.

Following his argument, we become uncertain not that knowledge is possible but that it matters, that it is worth contending for. Knowledge, so- called, is not enough, not even the right sort of thing, to make us good at living well. That is not the argument of Western skeptics (Sextus, Descartes, or Hume) and is new in European tradition with Nietzsche. Yet the concurrence of Nietzsche and Zhuangzi has been denied. For Nietz sche, as Philip Ivanhoe observes, facts are precisely what there is not, whereas he thinks Zhuangzi affirms the world as it really is. Zhuangzis sage not only sees the world as it really is and provides a standard for determining what is and what is not the case, but in reflecting the world, the sage responds to each situation in a highly effective and efficient manner.87 However, I doubt there is common understanding between Nietzsche and Zhuangzi about exactly what we say when we say the world as it really is. Presumably it would not occur to Zhuangzi that this really is is an essence, a true being with an identity of its own, a finished form to which knowledge must be adequate. But exactly that is the metaphysical and epistemological context of the remark Ivanhoe alludes to from Nietzsche: Against positivism, which halts at phenomenaThere are only factsI would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot estab lish any fact in itself : perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.88 In a sepa rate note from about the same time, Nietzsche writes, Everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through. . . . The apparent inner world is governed by just the same forms and procedures as the outer world. We never encounter facts.89 Fact here seems to mean something nonperspectival, a simple presence, a finished forman idea, whether Platonic or Cartesian. Nietzsche expresses implacable skepticism regard ing such things; and it is difficult, at least for me, to imagine Zhuangzi wanting to disagree and stand up for what really is. I do not think there is any content to this really is apart from as the sage spontaneously responds. A sage response is active and knowing, never a fearful or resentful reaction. Zhuangzis ideal, I think, is that a sages response be as focused as possible on the specificity of the stimulus, responding precisely to the event and its changes, and not to what we fear, presume, or overlook. (Deleuze calls such a response counter- actualization 90 and attributes it to the Stoic sage.) Thus Zhuangzi and Nietzsche seem closer here than Ivanhoes metaphysically inspired opposition allows. The passage of Chinese philosophy most famous in the Westthe but terfly dreamoccurs in this chapter of the Zhuangzi and is worth a closer look in our context. Qu Que, a (fanciful) student of Kongzi, tells Chang Wuzi that he
87. Philip J. Ivanhoe, Zhuangzi on Skepticism, Skill, and the Ineffable Dao, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61.4 (1993): 647. 88. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 481. 89. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 477.

90. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Les ter (1969; New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 148.

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has heard the following teaching about sages: In saying nothing [the sage] says something and in saying something says nothing, and roams beyond the dust and grime. When Qu Que reports this teaching to Kongzi, the master dismisses it as a flight of fancy, but Qu Que still thinks there is something to it. Chang Wuzi is unsurprised by Kongzis reaction: expecting him to understand is like expecting eggs from a rooster. Then Qu Que and Chang Wuzi begin to discuss dreams. The latter makes three points during their conversation. First, in a dream you do not know you are dreaming; second, a dream may include its own interpreta tion; third, after waking you know a dream to have been a dream. Then Chang Wuzi gets prophetic. He says there may come a day, perhaps after ten thousand generations, when a great sage arrives and the people undergo an awakening. At that time, we would realize that all this history that seems so real to us is a dream. This very conversation we are having and this philosophizing is a dream interpreting a dream. Of course, stupid people dismiss the possibility. They are like the cicada mocking the great bird Peng. They think they know it all, but their knowledge has the strength of a tree that breaks in the wind because it does not know how to bend. This passage establishes waking from a dream as an image of transforma tion to a higher condition of knowledge and life. Following it, after a passage on the futility of distinctions, we are back to dreamsthis time, the butterfly dream. Zhuang Zhou, we are told, dreams he is a butterfly. While he dreams, he has no awareness of himself (thus confirming the first point made in the preced ing discourse on dreams). When Zhuang Zhou wakes up, he knows (confirming the third point of the preceding discourse) that he is Zhou. He knows that he is not a butterfly. But then he begins to reflect. Does he know that this supposed knowledge is not nonknowledge? Might this supposed waking be a dream? What if he wakes from that dream? Is it possible that, after that awakening, there is no Zhou (as after his recent waking, there is no butterfly)? Could he not be some thing entirely differenta butterfly, saydreaming that he is a man? According to the third point of the earlier discussion, we know we are awake when we are awake. But what if that is little knowledge, no better than a dream interpreting a dream? What if we dream that we know we are awake when we dream that we wake up? We do not really know we are awake because we are not awake, and merely dream that we are not dreaming. When we really awaken, we will know so, and we might be butterflies. By raising the problem of whether our everyday waking might be a dream, and by questioning the common sense that knows it can distinguish dreams from waking, the butterfly dream contributes to the skepticism of the Zhuangzis second chapter. But there is more going on: the text continues with the reflection that there must be some difference between Zhou waking from a dream (when he

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knows he is Zhou and has been dreaming of butterflies) and the great awaken ing on the other side of the dream that we call history. As of course there is: it is the difference between little knowledge and great knowledge. As we can awaken from a dream, so might we awaken from little knowledge to a more competent awareness as different from anything we know as a worm is from a butterfly. The arguments of Zhuangzis chapter make us unhappy with language, skeptical of its terms; unhappy with morality, skeptical of its distinctions; unhappy with the learned, feeling they may be stuck in their so- called wisdom. But do these arguments make us unhappy with knowledge? How could they, when they are themselves a profound accomplishment of knowledge? It takes precisely knowl edge to be so dissatisfied with what the world calls knowledge. You have to know a lot about what is not known. What the arguments of this chapter do, then, is show us the difference between little knowledge and something greater. They do not fill in that greater knowledge but hint that it exists and make us dissatisfied with anything less. What seems to impress Zhuangzi about skilled artifice is the fluid, flexible response to change that it enables. The artisans perception is unencumbered by conventional thinking or scholarly baggage. Zhuangzi and Laozi both sug gest that life can be lived in much the same way. There is an art to response, an art of replies, of resonance, a dao- art of transforming with changes. References to artisans or masters of notable skill occur many times in the later parts of the Zhuangzi. Chapter 19 mentions five such figures. Kongzi interviews a hunchback who is enormously skilled at catching cicadas. How does he do it? He practices concentration. Kongzi draws the moral: Intentsustained, undividedwill verge on the daemonic (138, clarifying punctuation added). Artisan Chui draws perfect circles without a compass. He attributes his skill to the power to forget. While traveling, Kongzi sees a man in dangerous waters above a fall and supposes he is drowning. It turns out that he swims at ease in the treacherous current. He explains that he accommodates to the water and does not make the water accom modate him. The extraordinary works of Carpenter Qing are said to be the fruit of concentration, dispelling thoughts of the outer world, becoming impercep tible, closing the gap between nature in us and nature in the material. Horse man Dongye does the opposite in driving his horses until they all die. There are further variations in chapter 22, where a buckle makers skill is said to come from negligence; and in chapter 31, where a sage fisherman tells Kongzi that his teach ing merely augments the disorder it is directed against. Kongzi hears that he is like a man who fears his shadow, and so runs; despises his footprints, and so walks faster. The solution is to rest in the shade. Jullien suggests that, for Zhuangzi, wisdom is a matter of freeing oneself from all internal obstructions and focal izations in order to recover the communicative [that is, resonant] aptitude of the

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qi.91 This aptitude must not be allowed to stagnate, must be kept alert, free of encumbrances, free to respond, inventive, evolving. The art of the dao is an art of finding the unobstructed way. This attitude is sometimes compared with Stoic detachment, but the sim ilarities are superficial. Both the Stoic and the Daoist see flexibility as a neces sary virtue, given the interdependence of things. Both teach against being so invested in anything that you become reluctant to let it slip away. Stoics say we should detach from everything that is not up to us, which is to say everything external. Stoic detachment withdraws from anything risky, anything uncertain, anything beyond the control of reason. The fuzzy can be fatal. But this detach ment is one- sided; seen from another perspective, it intensifies attachment. Per haps the Stoic is not attached to externals, but his attachment to his own will is overwhelming. Zhuangzi expects detachment to include that will, that self, and its prohairesis.92 Forget about what is up to you. Why be up to anything? Deliberation and calculation are not the best, most effective ways to govern activity. It is not attachment to externals that is the problem; it is attachment per se. Zhuangzi says that perfect people have no self, spiritual people have no accomplishment, and sagely people have no name (45). Why distinguish the loss of name and credit? Are they not automatic consequences of selflessness? The reason may be that detachment itself can become an attachment. Suppose someone acquires a name for himself as a paragon of detachment. Detachment from self is then dangerously incomplete. In chapter 6, Kongzi and his favor ite disciple, Yan Hui, discuss the behavior of Meng Sun at the funeral of his mother.93 He cried without tears, showed mourning without feeling anything. He has become indifferent to change, does not know whether he changes or remains the same. Yet Meng Sun is attached to his detachment. He does not mind people seeing detachment in his countenance. Arranging the funeral and pretending to mourn reveals Meng Sun still attaching significance to change. He can bear the death of a parent but cannot fail to arrange and show up for a ceremony that others expect him to attend. So he is stuck there, attached to his detachment, entangled, unable to reach enlightenment. This problem, which arises only for one drawn to enlightenmenta spiri tual junziis introduced in chapter 1 of the Zhuangzi, in a passage about the magician Liezi, who has learned to ride the wind: But though he manages to avoid walking he still relies on something. If he could chariot the norms of heaven

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91. Jullien, Vital Nourishment, 77. 92. John M. Rist explains prohairesis in Epictetus as per sonality, moral character, and ones entire spiritual being, equating it with the hegemonikon of the Old Stoa. Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 229.

93. My reading of this passage is influenced by Robert E. Allinson, Chuang- tzu for Spiritual Transformation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), chap. 11.

and earth and ride the changes in the six mists to wander the inexhaustible, then what would there be to rely on? (44; trans. Kjellberg). Liezi is not entangled in affairs, not stuck in one place, yet still he depends on somethingthe invisible, formless wind. He is stuck, as Meng Sun is stuck, on his way to enlightenment. The problem of getting stuck comes up again in chapter 4, where we meet Zhili Shu, a cheerfully ironic hunchback. He knows that his deformity makes him ugly and that his ugliness keeps him unmarried and impoverished, but the deformity has also made him useless for the army and corve labor. So his life is a lesson in the usefulness of the useless. It is impressive that he can hold this attitude and enjoy life, but he still depends on somethingthat virtue, that inner power of his: If you make a cripple of the power in you, you can do better still (74). Suppose his circumstances change and people begin to hate him. What if he is inexplicably subject to bad luck? Would he remain bemused and ironic? Or does he depend on his deformity, so that he cannot be happy without it? What if a benevolent osteopath untwists him? Then he would be fit for the army and could work. Could he ride that change too and not lose his balance? Or would he be one more obstructed spiritual junzi like Meng Sun and Liezi, stuck on the way to enlightenment? Detachment means stopping: Meng Sun stopped feeling grief for a parent, Liezi stopped relying on his feet, Shu stopped caring about his hideous appear ance. But stopping comes to nothing without the step that completes the trans formation, which is to stop stopping:
You have heard of using wings to fly. You have not yet heard of flying by being wingless; you have heard of using knowledge to know, not of using no knowledge to know. . . . The blessed stop stopping. Not stop ping means galloping while you sit. . . . This is the transformation of ten thousand things, the secret of the ancient sages. (69; modified after Kjellberg)

Elaborating, in his influential commentary, Guo Xiang says:

Having no deliberate mind . . . [means] not only to discard right and wrong, but also to discard this discarding. They are discarded and again discarded, until no- discarding is reached; only then do we have noth ing discarded and nothing not- discarded, and right and wrong vanish of themselves.94

The Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi end as they began, with a tall tale. The Emperor of the North Sea and the Emperor of the South Sea are friendly with
94. Guo Xiang, as cited in Brook Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo- Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 117.

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the Emperor of the Central Sea, whose name is Chaos (huntun). They pity their friend because, unlike them, he has no apertures, no orifices. So they decide to help him. Every day they make a hole, and on the seventh day Chaos died. Why did he die? With apertures comes differentiation; with differentiation comes spe cialization; with specialization comes a fixed form, the expectation of certainty, and all the accomplishments, such as they are, of little knowledge. Chaos lost his chaos, the virtual source of his virtue. He lost his chaotic capacity for limitless change, and therefore the changes killed him.

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VIII The earliest commentary on the Zhuangzi that we possess is by Guo Xiang and dates from the Jin dynasty. It is among the most remarkable speculative products of Chinese thought. One hesitates to use the word metaphysics, but there are in Guo ideas that will remind a Western reader of Plotinus, Leibniz, or Hegel. A principle for Guo is that there is no causation, no determination, no conditioning of one being by another. Nothing is made to be as it is by something else; every thing is spontaneously self- so, from itself, its activity unfolding without external determination. Guo thinks through the implications with impressive speculative rigor. One result is a new understanding of dao. All things are self- so. There is nothing needed to make things as they areand the dao is the nothing needed for things to be as they are: The dao has no power. When the text [Zhuangzi] says, They attained it from the dao, this is merely to show that they spontaneously attained it.95 Human beings are no less self- so than anything else, except that we have a bad habit of repressing our spontaneous ziran responses and reacting instead to the traces (ji) of ziran activity in other things. We act not from our selves but in reaction to traces of anothers activity. The only knowledge avail able to us is a things traces. Awareness of traces is not a cognitive error or defec tive knowledge. It is cognition itself as error (a view we also find in Nietzsche).96 There is no superior cognition. Knowledge at its best cannot penetrate ziran process, which will not stop long enough to constitute an object. Every object is a phase of a network that has already transformed. Nothing endures; all that is left are footprints (ji). It is these that language names. Cognition (or one kind of knowledge) is recognizing what names name. But those names are artifacts of perspective, conveying an empty image of what has come and gone. The alternative to cognition of traces is to vanish into things. Brook Ziporyn brilliantly translates Guos use of the character ming as to vanish into.
95. Guo, as cited in Ziporyn, Penumbra Unbound, 41. 96. See Nietzsche, On Truth and Lying in a Non- Moral Sense, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Ray mond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

In a more prosaic context, ming might mean dark, obscure, distant, hard to see; but it is used by Guo as a transitive verb (to darken something), referring not to the darkened thing, though, but to the agent of the eclipse, which vanishes into its objects as the moon does into the sun. To vanish into things is to interact with them without obstructive, forceful desires and without a self. To achieve this trackless mind is to overcome the mind, to have no- mind (wuxin). The self is not gone, only become imperceptible. Knowing, cognition, consciousnessthese appear when vanishing fails. Awareness indicates that something does not fit. No one is aware of comfortable shoes: Cognition is born out of a loss of proper match, but it is destroyed in vanishing into the ultimate limits. Vanishing into the ultimate limits means to allow ones utmost determinacy to run its course while adding not the slightest fraction of an ounce to it. . . . This is the secret of nourishing life.97 It is also the secret of wu wei, though we can no longer say wu wei effectiveness, since for Guo effectiveness is precisely what there is not. When we respond ziran, we do wu wei. Nonaction means not acting on traces. Sagacious nonactivity fits and forgets, flowing from self- rightness (to do as one does) and ignoring traces: To do as one does is the true activity; to do this true activity is nonactivity.98 The way to do nothing is not to do; that is, not to react. Wu wei intentionality is creative, not representationalinventive action that does not merely react to the action of another (compare Nietzsche again). This nonaction is disengaged from efficacy, though it retains a connection with what we mistak enly thought we wanted efficacy for; namely, limitless well- being and harmony: Only he who vanishes into things and follows their vast transformations is able to be unconditioned and always unobstructed. . . . Having no right and wrong, blending them into oneness, we can ride on the transformations and allow the changes to proceed, encountering all things without fear.99 Vanishing into things requires, not knowledge, but the loss of knowledge. We must overcome the limitations that make us think in terms of is and is not, or in terms of boundaries and forms rather than relations and evolution. Instead of knowing things (knowing their names and how to talk about them), we spontane ously change with them, become a part of their economy:
The sage has no self. . . . Thus he penetrates all things, ribald and shady and grotesque and strange as they are, and makes them one; he lets all their differences each rest in what it rests in, and all the different people not lose what they affirm. Thus he does not use his self on things, but lets all the ten thousand things use their own uses on themselves. When all things use their own uses, which is right and which is wrong? Thus even the perversions of dissipation, the strange and twisted differences

97. Guo, as cited in Ziporyn, Penumbra Unbound, 73. 98. Guo, as cited in Ziporyn, Penumbra Unbound, 127.

99. Guo, as cited in Ziporyn, Penumbra Unbound, 71.

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of things are curvingly followed along with and given over to their own uses. Hence although there are ten thousand differences among their uses, each illuminates itself in perfect distinctiveness.100

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We may wonder whether knowledge is destined to reaction and confined to traces. Is not knowledge as self- so as anything else? What is knowledge when it is self- so, when it is not merely reacting to traces? What knowledge seems to know when it is self- so is how to overcome the self, see through boundaries, and not get stuck in names. Here Guo seems close to Zhuangzis distinction between big and little knowledge. Little knowledge is everyday trace- cognition. Big knowledge sets that aside for knowledge that nourishes life. The Zhuangzi, chapter 33, describes this knowledge and its mastery:
Within yourself, no fixed positions: Things as they take shape disclose themselves. Moving, be like water, Still, be like a mirror, Respond like an echo. Blank! as though absent: Quiescent! as though transparent. Be assimilated to them and you harmonize, Take hold of any of them and you lose. (281)

The Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo writes of this vanishing too and of its singular productivity:
When Wen Tong painted bamboo He saw bamboo and not himself. Not simply unconscious of himself, Trance- like, he left his body behind. His body was transferred into bamboo, Creating inexhaustible freshness. Zhuangzi is no longer in this world, So who can understand such concentration?101

IX Joseph Needham observed that probably no country in the world has so many legends as China does about heroic engineers.102 The usual word for technical artifice is gong but the oldest is jiang, attested in the oracle bones (the earliest
100. Guo, as cited in Ziporyn, Penumbra Unbound, 73. 101. Su Shi (Su Dongpo), Painting Bamboo, Early Chinese Texts on Painting, ed. Susan Bush and Hsio- yen Shi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 212. 102. Joseph Needham, The Great Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), 181.

source for Chinese writing), where the character shows a man holding a carpen ters square. Compendia on farming, sericulture, and crafts were the mainstay of Chinas (and the worlds) first commercial printing, from the tenth century.103 The Daoist- leaning Huainanzi reminds readers that Shen Nong, the legendary sage inventor of agriculture and medicine, thoroughly investigated the suitability of land for cultivation, trying and tasting plants, streams, and springs, to teach people what to use and what to reject: He suffered poisoning seventy times a day.104 The Zhuangzi dramatically reverses scholarly values, making the impos sibility of verbal description evidence of superior knowledge. In the famous con versation in chapter 13 between a wheelwright and a duke, the duke is reading the words of a sage. The wheelwright boldly calls such writings rubbish. The duke demands an explanation and receives this reply:
I see it in terms of my own work. If I chip at a wheel too slowly, the chisel slides and does not grip; if too fast, it jams and catches in the wood. Not too slow, not too fast; I feel it in the hand and respond from the heart, the mouth cannot put it into words, there is a knack in it somewhere which I cannot convey to my son and which my son cannot learn from me. This is how through my seventy years I have grown old chipping at wheels. The men of old and their untransmittable message are dead. Then what my lord is reading is the dregs of the men of old, isnt it? (140)

According to the Warring States period Book of Artisans (Kao Gong Ji): All that is done by the hundred artisans was originally the work of sages. Metal melted to make swords, clay hardened to make vessels, chariots for going on land and boats for crossing waterall these arts were the work of sages.105 Some prac titioners took exception to this legend about sagely origins: artisanal accom plishment, they held, is learned not from sages but from metal, wood, and clay. The Huainanzi combines and reconciles the two positions. Most arts are attrib uted there to ancient sages, but the sages learned how to use things from the things themselves: When Yu drained the flood, he followed the water as his master. When the Divine Farmer sowed grain, he followed the seedlings as his teacher.106 Moreover, some say, what the sages did in antiquity, sage technicians can do today. According to a Song dynasty alchemical work, sages appropriate the mechanisms of the shaping forces of nature [zao hua zhe] and [make] them
103. Joseph Needham, Mechanical Engineering, in Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4, part 2 (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1965), 170. Printing from wood blocks was fully developed from the tenth century. Tsien Tsuen- Hsuin, Paper and Printing, in Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1985), 159. 104. Huainanzi 19.1 (767). 105. Needham, Mechanical Engineering, 12. The Book of Artisans is a section of the Zhou Li, which modern scholar ship dates to the mid- t hird century BCE. 106. Huainanzi 1.6 (55); see also 13.2.

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work for human benefit. Furthermore, the sage can rival the skill of the shap ing forces.107 Needham suggests that operations like smelting and steelmaking, in which Chinese were early masters, persuaded some that they could imitate natural processes and even improve them; sagacious artisans can stand in the place of nature and bring about natural changes at a rate immensely faster than natures own time.108 Those attracted by such thinking would probably fit the stereotype of Daoist. Yet scholars also see hostility to technics in Daoist thought. Needham finds in Daoism an anti- technology complex, an ambivalent attitude to those techniques which the society of force and dominance could use for its own ends.109 Machines make things happen that would not happen ziran, by them selves, as a spontaneous evolution of circumstances. Better to become adept at letting things happen and going with the flow. Machines teach people that they do not have to wait for things, that they can make things happen. The more machines do for us, therefore, the more dissatisfied we are with what actually happens. Mechanism always comes too late, when things are in a solid, resisting phase, requiring force to move them. A greater art would work with the sponta neous self- organization of nature, not in defiance or ignorance of it; and then, the Daodejing avers, all obstacles can be overcome (59). Furthermore, there are mechanisms that Daoist authors praisebolts, locks, hinges, triggers, and axles, among them. These are machines that work by remaining inconspicuous and completely still, letting things move around them. Take Laozis image of the empty center of a wheel. Without its motionless void, the rigid mechanism would tear itself apart. Anti- technology is therefore an unsatisfying attribu tion. Ambivalence is no better, as it implies indecision on the part of these thinkers, as if they were unable to find their way to a coherent understanding of this vital component in their civilization. It may seem advisable to distinguish between tools and machines. If there can be a dao of fishing, butchery, or carpentry, and if the practice of these arts is an image of wu wei effectiveness, then perhaps there is an important distinction between tools we work with our hands and machines that go on their own. The stroke of a knife or the draw of a plane can be spontaneous and highly effec tive. That combination seems impossible for a water- driven saw, for instance,
Knowledge: The Chinese Experience, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 12.4 (December 1985): 33369. 109. Needham, History of Scientific Thought, 125, 126; also Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, trans. Karen C. Duval (1982; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 197; and Harold D. Roth, Original Tao (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 56, 58.

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107. Joseph Needham, Physiological Alchemy, in Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 293; and Apparatus, Theories, and Gifts, in Science and Civilization in China, vol. 5, part 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 261. 108 . Needham, Apparatus, Theories, and Gifts , 243. On the relationship between Chinese cosmology and their advanced metallurgy, see Ursula Franklin, John Berthrong, and Alan Chan, Metallurgy, Cosmology,

where the price of effectiveness is the exclusion of spontaneity. How could any thing be spontaneous and mechanical, effortless and calculated? Hence the shame in using machines; doing so is a confession that anything more subtle is beyond you. However, the distinction between tools and machines is not so unproblem atic as this argument assumes. Historians of machinery find they have to dispense with it: tools are machines, mechanically speaking.110 The shame of using machinery is the theme of a tale in chapter 12 about an encounter between Kongzis disciple Zigong and an old man watering vegetables. Zigong is traveling when he encounters the old man laboriously drawing water. He tells the old man about a machine, the well sweep, that can raise enough water for a hundred fields in the time it takes him to water one. As the old man listens, his face grows red, and he begins to grimace. He tells Zigong that he knows all about this machine and would be ashamed to use it. He says he was taught that ingenious machines (ji xie) require ingenious minds ( ji xin); that ingenious minds cannot be pure and simple (chun bai), they are restless; and that no restless mind (shen sheng bu ding) moves with the dao. I do not think this attitude is the simple Ludditism it may seem. Think of what a Daoist might expect of engineering. Could there be a dao of technology? Some lines of the Daodejing seem to suggest it:
Push far enough toward the void, Hold fast enough to quietness, And of the ten thousand things none but can be worked on by you. (16) Sometimes diminishing a thing adds to it. (42) The most supple things in the world ride roughshod over the most rigid. That which is not there can enter even where there is no space. This is how I know the advantage of nonaction. (43)

How might such principles be applied to mechanical problems? Consider this explanation from the Huainanzi of the wei (doing) in wu wei action:
If you use fire to dry out a well or use the Huai [River] to irrigate a mountain, these are cases of using personal effort in contradiction of the natural course. Thus I would call [them] taking deliberate action [ you wei]. But if on the water you use a boat, in the sand you use a [sledge], in the mud you use a [sleigh], in the mountain you use a [litter], in the sum mer you dig [ditches], in the winter you pile up [dikes], in accordance with a high place you make a mound, and following a low one you dig a pond, these are not what I would call deliberate action [wei].111
110. See Barry Allen, Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), chap. 2, and Abbott Payson Usher, A History of Mechanical Inventions, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1959). 111. Huainanzi 19.2 (77071).

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The old man says ingenious machines are products of ingenious minds, a notion that he turns against them. How should we understand ingenious machines ( ji xie)? The phrase has something of the sense of mechanical machines or machinish machines, the words ji and xie both meaning machine when used alone (as indeed they are and are so translated elsewhere in this pas sage). The old man does not say that all machines are ingenious, or all the work of impure hearts. Only the really machinish ones are ingenious and (therefore) impure. I think that he means machines lacking subtlety, being obviously con trived to force what would otherwise not happen. Not all machines do so, and there is nothing really ingenious about the ones that do. Another kind of machine might be more subtle, more artful dao- engineering; I do not take the old man to say that such an art is impossible. On the contrary, if there were no other kind of machine he need not have qualified his curse against ingenious ones. What offends him about the well sweep may be that it is not ingenious enough. It is too crude, obvious, and rigid. It is artless. Bad engineering.112

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X Doing not doing is neither an esoteric mystery nor a philosophers fantasy. The pragmatic meaning of wu wei is to use creative (rather than reproductive) artifice toward an effect out of all proportion to visible, calculated intentionality. The great discovery of the Chinese art of war is that victory in battle can be the outcome of just this sort of nonaction. Attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence, Sunzi says: Subjugating the enemys army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.113 The best general, as Jullien explains, has no definite, fixed goals in mind, or even, strictly speaking, any aims. Instead, he evolves so he can exploit the potential of situations in which he recognizes the benefit . . . or, failing that, so that he can exploit his adversarys potential by turning the tables on him, transforming the situation. War becomes a process not so much of destruction as destructuration.114 A wise or artful victory does not crush the adversary with overwhelming violence; instead it systematically delays the arrival of conditions under which he can win, until finally he defeats himself. The greatest work of the Chinese military tradition is also the oldest that we know ofthe famous Art of War (or Military Methods) attributed to Sunzi. For Sunzi, there is no glory in war, and only barbarians praise bravery. The weak are only weak when they lack resources; if they can make their adversarys resources

112. I elaborate on these ideas about dao- engineering in A Dao of Technology? Dao 9.2 (Summer 2010): 15160.

113. Sunzi, Art of War, book 3, in Sawyer, Seven Military Classics, 161. 114. Jullien, Vital Nourishment, 108.

a liability to him, then they cannot be defeated. There is only one way for the disadvantaged opponent to accomplish this strategic reversal. He must make use of deception. Blur, the fog of war, must be for him a resource and not an obstacle. Deceive the enemy into overestimating his strengths and not seeing his weak nesses, and he is already defeated. Deception is not merely one component of warfare, as it is in modern Western military doctrine. Sunzi says deception is the very dao of warfare. The art of war is to manipulate conditions where the enemy thinks his advantage lies, so that he wears himself out lunging at shadows, strain ing vainly to reify fuzzy objects into stable ones, while exposing his weakness to attack.115 The Sunzi and all texts in this tradition praise the value of flexibility, of being free to change in response to circumstances. Unforeseen circumstances cannot inconvenience one who remains uncommitted, when precisely the unfore seen, in the fog of war, becomes an advantage. To be good at unscripted transfor mation lets one respond effortlessly to passing circumstances, while rendering ones own position obscure. A good strategist alters his management of affairs and changes his strategies to keep other people from recognizing them.116 The flexibility comes from a kind of emptiness, a featureless fluidity in the deploy ment of forces that never stops, a restless potency that never is one form to the exclusion of an opposite. A critical concept of this military philosophy is shi: One who excels at warfare seeks victory through the strategic configuration of power [shi], not from reliance on men.117 Shi may be rendered as position, circum stance, power, potential, or influence. The semantic kernel is the idea of tendency (as in, water finding its level). According to Wang Fuzhi, who is thought to supply the fullest account of shi: All talk about shi is to do with what flows smoothly and is not opposed.118 To exploit powers latent in a situation, you have to be like water, endlessly flexible, effortlessly responsive to change. Like all the best thought of this tradi tion, the water imagery appears already in the Sunzi:
The armys disposition of force [xing] is like water. Waters configura tion [xing] avoids heights and races downward. The armys disposition of force avoids the substantial and strikes the vacuous. Water config

115. Admiration for deception is a source of tension with Confucians, who subordinate zhi to ren, humanity or benevolence, and consider cunning inimical to a gentle mans use of knowledge. 116. Sunzi 11, as cited in Ralph D. Sawyer, The Tao of Deception: Unorthodox Warfare in Historic and Modern China (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 180. 117. Sunzi 5, as cited in Sawyer, Tao of Deception, 166. On the value of position, I follow Zhang, Key Concepts,

23334 ; Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study of Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 6671; and Franois Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking, trans. Janet Lloyd (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), and The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 118. Wang Fuzhi, in Zhang, Key Concepts, 238.

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ures its flow in accord with the terrain; the army controls its victory in accord with the enemy. Thus the army does not maintain any constant strategic configuration of power [shi]; water has no constant shape. One who is able to change and transform in accordance with the enemy and wrest victory is termed spiritual!119

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According to the Six Secret Teachings, attributed to Taigong, the semilegendary strategist of the Zhou defeat of the Shang: In employing the army nothing is more important than obscurity and silence. In movement nothing is more impor tant than the unexpected. In planning nothing is more important than not being knowable.120 A general should be as unfathomable as his plans, and not just to the enemy but also to his own troops. According to a Ming dynasty commentary, Only when there is no constancy can the mysterious be preserved in the mind. Therefore it is called subtle.121 The appropriately obscure Ghost Valley Master (Guiguzi) states that the best strategy is to adapt: transformations follow one upon another without interruption every time there is a particular configuration with a particular potential. You determine whether to go one way or another, depending on the situation.122 Successful strategies are always unorthodox, born in the obscurity of the fuzzy, tenuous, and virtual. Sun Bin, a supposed descen dant of the Sunzi author, writes: Whoever has form can be defined, and whoever can be defined can be overcome.123 Perhaps the most famous unorthodox strategy in Chinese history is the empty city ploy of Zhuge Liang (Chinas most storied general), immortalized in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a Ming dynasty novel. Zhuge is left in West City with a small force of twenty- five hundred while the rest of his army redeploys. An unexpected diversion of some hundred and fifty thousand enemy troops under Sima Yi is approaching. Advance spies have already told Sima that Zhuges soldiers are few and weak. Since Sima thinks Zhuge is weak, Zhuge reinforces the assumption by withdrawing his battle flags and silencing the drums. He commands the inhabitants to remain indoors. The city is eerily silent and apparently deserted. At this point, he has the city gates thrown open and the ground before them ostentatiously swept and sprinkled: Then Zhuge put on his famous cloak of crane feathers and his silk scarf and ascended the wall with two boys who carried his zither. Reclining on the parapet in front of a watch tower, he burned incense and played his zither.124 Fearing ambush, Sima moved on.
123. Sun Bin, 30, in Cleary, Art of War, 404. 124. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as cited in Saw yer, Tao of Deception, 368. Zhuge Liang (181234 CE) is the unique example of an art- of- war general who is also a hero to Confucians. His legendary cleverness made him the figure most associated with knowledge in Chinese lit erature. Raphals, Knowing Words, 133.

119. Sunzi 6, as cited in Sawyer, Tao of Deception, 168. 120. Six Secret Teachings, 26, in Sawyer, Seven Military Classics, 69. 121. Sawyer, Tao of Deception, 308. 122. Ghost Valley Master, in Jullien, Efficacy, 181.

XI If you did not know that Zhuge Liang was a Three Kingdoms- era generalif you knew about him only that, clothed in a cloak of crane feathers and a silk scarf, he climbed a wall with two boys who carried his zither, then reclined on the parapet, burned incense, and played his instrument in the face of an overpowering armed forceyou might well assume that he was a mad monk in the Chan (Zen) tradition. Zhuge is no Buddhist, but that the story brings mad monks to mind is not coincidental. The ideal effortless efficacy cultivated in the Chinese martial arts and in the art of waras among Daoists and, in their way, Confuciansrecurs in the Chan path to Buddhist enlightenment. My concern is specifically with the Chan school, because it absorbs and appropri ates from Daoist classics and understands Indian Buddhist sources, such as the texts of Nagarjuna, in those terms. I single out this one thread of genealogy not because of the story that the legendary founder of Chan, Bodhidharma, followed Nagarjunas Madhyamaka Buddhism, but because I believe that Nagarjunas ideas help us to appreciate what is philosophically at stake in Chan thought about emptiness (kong). For Nagarjuna, emptiness means an absence or lack of svabhava, mean ing self- nature, inherent existence, or own being.125 A thing has svabhava when a specific characterizing property individuates it and renders it nameable and knowable. Chandrakirti, in a classical commentary on Nagarjuna, states that this is the definition of it: Svabhava is not artificially created and not dependent on anything else.126 Svabhava is, to borrow Greek philosophical language, auto kath autoitself from itself, self- identical, enjoying a substantial, nonrelational identity and existence.127 We spontaneously conceive of objects as enduring rather than as an unrelated momentary arising and ceasing, and we think that enduring things exist apart from our perception of them. The conviction that something, somewhere, at some level, enjoys svabhava is both an ontological error and a faulty cognition, an addition that we unwittingly project on phenomena. Emptiness is presented as a deduction from dependent origination, or the reciprocal causal dependence of all things on each other. Of this Nagarjunian argument, Chandra

125. I draw from Jan Westerhoff, Nagarjunas Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press, 2009), esp. 1213, 49. 126. Westerhoff, Nagarjunas Madhyamaka, 25.

127. For auto kath auto, see Plato, Phaedo 78d, 100b; Parmenides 128e29a; Timaeus 51d; and the analysis in Greg ory Vlastos, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 7276.

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Zhuge does practically nothing and is victorious without firing a shot. His trick is a masterpiece of indirection. The trick is to make his opponent think there is a trick. The trick is that there is no trick.

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kirti says: The one who sees dependent origination correctly does not perceive a substance even in subtle things.128 Things (what we call things) have no latency, no virtuality, no nature or principle; there is nothing to them that was not already actual in their causes. Everything is what it is conditioned to be, which leaves everything altogether empty of substantial being and identity. Change is noth ing but first this, then that. There is nothing more to causality than concomitance. Emptiness reigns everywhere we think that being is, which may seem to make emptiness a new name for being, but Nagarjuna evades this objection. His is not a self- refuting irrealism: If I had a proposition, he writes, this defect would attach to me. But I have no proposition at all.129 All concepts, all terms, including sunyata (emptiness, void), are incomplete symbols composed of provisional names. Emptiness is neither a metaphysical conception nor an ontological reality; it is not the ultimate truth of the world and not a name for being. Nagarjuna mentions ultimate truth only to say that it is empty, which does not mean that emptiness is the ultimate truth. The higher truth is that there is no higher truth: No truth has been taught by a Buddha for anyone, anywhere.130 There is no self- nature, only emptiness of self- nature; therefore, no ultimate truth, only a provisional passing- for- t rue, of which this teaching on emptiness may be an example. Conventional truth is like paper money. A note has currency if it passesthat is, by usageand not through its having a relation to anything of intrinsic value. The same may be said for what passes as true. What is important (to pragmatic functionality) is that others accept what is said.131 It would be impossible for Nagarjuna to be clearer about what he is not saying: It is empty is not to be said, nor that something could be non- empty, nor both, nor eitherthis is his famous tetralemma. But how can all those pos sibilities (all the possibilities that there are) be excluded? Because, he explains, empty is said only in the sense of conceptual fiction.132 We think, Either p or not- p: any state of affairs has to be one or the other. But what if p depends on an assumption? If not- p depends on the same assumption, then anyone who rejects the assumption must deny both p and not- pwhich is what Nagarjuna does. Either cold or not cold? To be cold is to be a body; if something were not a body it would be neither cold nor not cold. Either empty or not empty implies that some thing enjoys svabhava being, and Nagarjuna rejects that assumption. I mentioned the early Parmenidean instruction, to which our tradition has for the most part been true, to say and think only this: being is (fragment 6).

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128. Westerhoff, Nagarjunas Madhyamaka, 47. 129. Nagarjuna, as cited in Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, The Dialectical Method of Nagarjuna (Delhi: Motilal Banar sidass, 1978), 23. 130. Nagarjuna, as cited in Westerhoff, Nagarjunas Madhyamaka, 18.

131. I draw from Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007). On passing for true, see Allen, Truth in Philosophy, chap. 7, where I develop the comparison between truth- values and money. 132. Nagarjuna, as cited in Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, 204.

With Nagarjuna, the apothegm would be, to say the least, more ambiguous: Do not say or think: nothing is. Any is presupposes a not. To think x is to think that something is x, which is to think there is something that x is not and from which it is differentiated. Buddhists can be as touchy about this dualism between being and not- being as the Eleatics were. Parmenides says we must suspend the not, say and think only being. Adhere to that logic, and we are promised access to reality and its truth. For Nagarjuna, though, the emptiness of not- being does not imply the ultimate reality of being. Rather, the distinction is defective. But it will be objected that Parmenides made the same point. The difference is that, for Parmenides, nondifferentiation (saying only being is) is truethe ultimate truth, disclosing the monadic essence of being. Nagarjuna never says emptiness is the truth. He says that nothing is true in the sense that Parmenides requires. It is because Parmenides believes in ultimate truth that he thinks we face a momen tous decision, that we have to choose between two ways, two paths, those of being and not- being (which Plato will link to reality and appearance). To insist on these distinctions, to say that we must make them and make them clear, might look (to alert Buddhist eyes) like clinginglike fixation on a delusion. Another word for emptiness is nonduality. The usual contrary of dualism is monism; for instance, materialist theories of nature in the West from Democritus to Diderot. However, monism is not the same as nonduality; indeed, monism is dualistic through and through, since it discriminates and attacks dualism. The most consistent nondualism is not monism but the notion of emptiness (and the practice of emptying out). First, you overcome all the distinctions, then you overcome your overcoming, overcome thinking of yourself as having overcome something, of having realized something others have not. Duality may seem inextricable from thought. What would we think if we made no distinctions? But of course nondualistic thought would have to be nonobjective too. It is not thinking emptiness (as a paradoxical object); it is emptying thinking (of objects), emptying consciousness of objectivity, forgetting about distinctions, even the distinction between is and is not. It is not just that thought has no objects; one is not interested in them, does not care about objectivity or the lack of itwhether objects are the same or different, better or worse. Chan is a Buddhism for spiritual virtuosi. First, one eliminates views, then one eliminates the elimination. We saw something like this double, reflexive enlightenment in Zhuangzi. Virtuosi are left not with a knowledge of emptiness but with the emptiness of knowledge. Among the attachments that are shed is the need to make sense. That an enlightened being would speak with one still in fetters is a pure act of compassion for the others unknowing suffering. The expectation of communication is delusional, and there is no ultimate truth at stake between opposed views, whatever they may be. Making sense is a kind of clinging, a compulsion to be understood that gives others power over you and

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submits you to their delusion. Consider the famously absurd Zen koan; think in relation to each koan what presupposition makes it absurd. It seems often to come down to the assumption that there is a self- nature, an ultimate truth, a way the world is. That assumption spins the trap you are stuck in. It is the trap of knowledge, of the expectation that the koan is not empty, that on the contrary it can make sense of things and lead to your liberation. It cannot. Knowledge is the problem, not the solution. To ask a serious question of a Chan master and expect a serious answer is a serious misunderstanding from the start (like offering a bribe to a judge in open court). Take me seriouslyshare my delusion! No wonder the masters resorted to blows. The Chan Platform Sutra says, Dont try to see the true [zhen] in any way. If you try to see the true, your seeing will be in no way true.133 Chan is not a metaphysical idealism; it does not teach that objects belong to consciousness or are constructions of the mind. It is not an ontology and does not claim to be the ultimate truth about reality. If we must have a Western term, Chan seems like a nonintentional phenomenology, which is a paradox inasmuch as phenomenology is the science of consciousness, and consciousness is defined by intentionality or by reference to an object. But Chan is a chastened phenomenology of the blur, the vanishing object, of the seen- through, senseless, unfulfilled, void, and vacant. For an example of Chan analyses, I turn to the Platform Sutra, attributed to Huineng, sixth in the line of Chan Patriarchs back to Bodhidharma. Its prin cipal teaching is identified as no- t hought (wu nian).134 As wu wei does not mean no action but rather a special kind of action with a peculiar intentionality, so wu nian does not mean no thinking, but rather, thought of a peculiar quality: No- t hought is not to think even when involved in thought.135 The idea is to eliminate the sort of attachment that is characteristic of thought. Western theory calls it reference or the intentional relation to an object. The Buddhist claim is that this relation is a kind of clinging and a delusional, empty nonrelation to nothing at all. No- thought, then, is thinking without clinging: The Dharma of no- thought means: even though you see all things, you do not attach to them.136 You see things, or what the world calls things, but they are not accepted as reidentifiable referents of egocentric attitudes, because they have not become objects for thought to cling to. A critic versed in Western psychology might say that this objectless thought is impossible. Consciousness is defined by intentionality, which means about

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133. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, trans. Philip Yampolsky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 175. 134. The no- t hought idea neither distinguishes Chi nese from Indian Buddhism nor is it unique to Chan. See Yun- hua Jan, A Comparative Study of No- T hought

(wu- nien) in Some Indian and Chinese Buddhist Texts, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 16.1 (March 1989): 3758. 135. Platform Sutra, 138. 136. Platform Sutra, 153.

ness or reference to an object. Franz Brentano writes, Every mental phenom enon is characterized by . . . immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself.137 For Edmund Husserl, In every wakeful cogito, a glancing ray from the pure Ego is directed upon the object of the correlate consciousness for the time being.138 However, it is the unin tentional contribution of Chan to reveal this so- called intentionality thesis as optional and burdened with baggage that the wise will not bear. Buddhists say the delusion of objects is a karmic effect of clinging and selfishness. Referring to the reckless fabrications of worldly discourse, the eighth- century Surangama Sutra, a defining work for Chan, says that the establishment of perceived objects such that they exist separately within your awareness is the foundation of igno rance. Objects and intentional reference are not transcendental presuppositions of thought. They are selfishness and ignorance in their most entrenched form: Because you have lost touch with your minds true nature by identifying your self with the objects you perceive, you keep on being bound to the cycle of death and rebirth. Those who have mastered correct practice are able to redirect the attention of their faculties inward to the faculties source . . . [and] no longer pay attention to objects of perception.139 We have not to stop thinking but to stop clingingto stop stopping over things. The Platform Sutra says, If one instant of thought clings, then succes sive thoughts cling; this is known as being fettered. If in all things successive thoughts do not cling, then you are unfettered.140 In Huangbos later words, Your sole concern should be, as thought succeeds thought, to avoid clinging to any of them.141 Intentional thought is fettered. Thinking of some objectan object of knowledge, description, desire, or purposeis a form of clinging to a moment, the delusion of presence, a reidentifiable object with a nature of its own. Successive thoughts that do not cling are unburdened by objects. You are think

137. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C. Rancurello, Dailey Burnham Ter rell, and Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995), 88. 138. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), 243. Perception without an object, for instance sensing not- sensing (sensing the lack of sight in a dark room, for example), is a theme in Aristotelian psychology. See Daniel Heller- Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 139 . The Surangama Sutra , trans. Surangama Sutra Translation Committee (Burlingame, CA: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 2009), 74 , 193, 46, 32728. The Surangama directly concerns the value of knowl

edge. The sutra is spoken in response to a lapse by the disciple Ananda, who was seduced by a prostitute while begging alms. Ananda, famous for his erudition, paid too much attention to learning and not enough to meditation practice, which left him with inadequate concentration to resist the prostitutes spell. Erudition merely led him into idle speculation; all his knowledge is not equal to a single day of correct practice (165). See also Jiang Wu, Knowl edge for What? The Buddhist Concept of Learning in the Surangama Sutra, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33. 4 (December 2006): 491503. 140. Platform Sutra, 138. 141. Huangbo, Transmission of the Mind, in Zen Sourcebook, ed. Stephen Addiss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008), 35.

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ing, there are thoughts; but you are not clinging, they are not your objects, you do not know or care whether they are the same again or different. No object is posited, thought is without a thesis, it is mind alone, then emptinesswhich is not catatonia. The awakened are not incapable of ordinary (seeming) action. The Chan Blue Cliff Record depicts an awakened being as like the sun and moon moving through the sky without ever stopping. . . . In the midst of no activity, he carries out his activities, accepting all unavoidable and favorable circumstances with a compassionate heart.142 According to the Lankavatara Sutra, liberation is not the cessation of [the] perceiving functions but the cessation of [the] dis criminating and naming activities. It is expected that a novice may stumble here: Disciples may not appreciate that the mind system, because of its accumulated habit- energy, goes on functioning, more or less unconsciously, as long as they live. . . . The goal of tranquilization is to be reached not by suppressing all mind activity but by getting rid of discriminations and attachments.143 Moreover, the masters seem to agree that purpose, intention, and effort are inherently counter productive. The liberated are constantly thinking, yet nothing is pursued.144 Linji (of if you meet the Buddha, kill him fame) was asked: What was the purpose of the Patriarchs coming from the West? The Master said: If he had a purpose he couldnt have saved even himself.145 This purposelessness is not an unconscious, mechanical, unthinking reaction to uncomprehended causes. It is consciousness of vanishing intentionality, vanishing referencethe conscious mind vanishing into the emptiness of things. There do not seem to be important differences between Huinengs no- thought and Huangbos later no- mind teaching: No mind is the absence of all kinds of discriminating mindthat is, all kind of referential consciousness. Simply do not give rise to conceptual thoughts, thinking in terms of existence and nothingness, long and short, others and self, subject and object.146 Mazus ordinary mind ( ping chang xin) is another version of Chans no- thought thought: What do I mean by ordinary mind? It is a mind that is devoid of contrived activ ity and is without notions of right and wrong, grasping and rejecting, terminable and permanent, worldly and holy.147 Mazus Chan emphasizes the Mahayana insight that opposing nirvana to samsara (conscious appearance) is just more futile

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142. Blue Cliff Record, 80, as cited in Urs App, Master Yunmen: From the Record of the Chan Master Gate of the Clouds (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), 68. 143. Lankavatara Sutra, trans. D. T. Suzuki, ed. Dwight Goddard (Clear Lake, CA: Dawn Horse Press, 1983), 86, 143, 11213. 144. Xian Zong Ji, as cited in Robert B. Zeuschner, The Hsien Tsung Chi: An Early Chan (Zen) Buddhist Text, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3.3 (June 1976): 258.

145. The Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Lin- chi Hui- chao of Chen Prefecture, trans. Ruth Fuller Sasaki (Kyoto: Insti tute for Zen Studies, 1975), 20, 21, 33; emphasis added. On meeting a buddha slay the buddha. . . . By not cleaving to things, you freely pass through (25). 146. Huangbo, as cited in Mario Poceski, Ordinary Mind as the Way: The Hongzhou School and the Growth of Chan Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 185, 170. 147. Mazu, as cited in Poceski, Ordinary Mind, 183.

dualism. There is no specifiable difference whatever between nirvana and sam sara, Chandrakirti says, expounding Nagarjuna: there is not even the subtlest difference between the two.148 Enlightenment is not a goal (that is, an object), and Chan enlightenment is not knowledge. In the words of the Surangama Sutra, This is a teaching that must be left behind, and the leaving behind, too, must be left behind.149 I take this passage as the cognitive complement of the thought that detachment requires detachment from detachment. You have to throw away detachment, with its implicit dualism of the detached and the clinging, to van ish into careless consciousness. That attainment comes from understanding, but what is understood is what is not understood; what is understood is our condition of not understanding. There is no understanding, understand? This freedom from obstruction, having stopped stopping, sustains the affinity between Chan/Zen and the martial arts. This association is improbable, given that violence is contrary to Buddhist law, and weapons and fighting forbid den to monks. Nevertheless, the association is no myth. Shaolin was a Chan tem ple where martial arts were taught and practiced at the highest level for centuries, and it was not the only one. In an Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method (1610), Cheng Zongyou calls their fighting technique unsurpassed Buddhist wis dom. He claims that Shaolin monks consider martial training a technique for reaching the other shore, and describes his own mastery of their techniques as a sudden enlightenment.150 Takuan Soho, a seventeenth- century prelate of the Zen Rinzai sect, uses the no- t hought teaching to develop the comparison between Zen and martial arts. He begins his Mysterious Record of Immov able Wisdom, which is addressed to a Japanese martial master, with an episte mological prologue. Ignorance, the obstacle to enlightenment, arises from and feeds delusion. But delusion does not mean untrue representation, or appearance instead of reality. To be deluded is to have a mind that stops, and every stopping point is a delusion. Stopping can be fatal to the martial artist, if his mind gets stuck on the adver sary, his sword, or his attack: In Buddhism we abhor this stopping and remaining with one thing or another. We call this stopping affliction. It is like a ball riding a swift- moving current: we respect the mind that flows on like this and does not stop for an instant in any place. Be like water, even in your mind, especially in your mind: In not remaining in one place, the Right Mind is like water.151
148. Chandrakirti, Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way, trans. Mervyn Sprung (Boulder, CO: Prajna Press, 1979), 259. 149. Surangama Sutra, 164. 150. The Exposition of the Original Shaolin Staff Method is cited from Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts (Honolulu: Univer sity of Hawaii Press, 2008), 62.

151. Takuan Soho, The Mysterious Record of Immov able Wisdom, The Unfettered Mind: Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master, trans. William Scott Wilson (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1986), 26, 32. Compare Platform Sutra: Being apart from the environment and putting an end to birth and destruction is like going along with the flow of water (147).

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It is not a question, in martial arts, of being fast. It is more a matter of almost supernatural calm despite imminent violence. The belief that speed is important is an insidious liability: When the mind stops, it will be grasped by the oppo nent. On the other hand, if the mind contemplates being fast and goes into quick action, it will be captured by its own contemplation. One must stop stopping: While hands, feet, and body may move, the mind does not stop any place at all, and one does not know where it is.152 Such a mind is unmovable precisely because it never stops. Moving implies stopping, moving from one stop to another. What never stops is thus unmovable; and the wise never stop.

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XII The problem in Buddhism is never with views, whether they are right or wrong. The problem is with peoples attachment to views. Nothing in Buddhism must be allowed to become an attachment. For instance, speaking of dependent origina tion (a key concept of Buddhism, if there is one at all), the Buddha says: Even this view, which is so pure and so clear, if you cling to it, fondle it, if you treasure it, if you are attached to it, then you do not understand that the teaching is similar to a raft which is for crossing over, and not for getting hold of.153 Even depen dent origination, apparently the foundation of much Budd hist analysis, is not an ultimate truth; it is not even a concept (which would posit an object and imply truth- value). It is an expedient, a skillful means. Skillful means translates a Sanskrit expression, upaya kausalya. The word upaya is usually translated as means, device, expedient, stratagem; and upaya kausalya, as skill in means, skill with devices. The Chinese translation is fang bian, an ordinary expression for method or convenience. Buddhism is not a theory or conceptual construction, implying a worldview and an ontological truth. It is a toolbox, a collection of expedient means.154 This understanding of Buddhism seems to trace back to the Lotus Sutra, a Sanskrit work of the second century CE, with a Chinese translation by Kumarajiva. The second chapter is entitled Skillful Means. The message is repeated in the Perfection of Insight Sutras, also translated by Kumarajiva:
Skillful means is to see that there are ultimately no dharmas and no living beings, while saving living beings. . . . The Buddhas have the power of countless skillful means, and the dharmas are indeterminate in nature; so to bring nearer all the living beings, the Buddhas sometimes

152. Soho, Mysterious Record, 2627, 24. 153. Buddha, in John W. Schroeder, Skillful Means: The Heart of Buddhist Compassion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 25.

154. Michael Pye, Skilful Means: A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 5152.

Skillful means is the Buddhist alternative to concepts, with their clamorous objec tivity and pretension to ultimate truth. Perhaps there is nothing in Buddhism that is not skillful means, which would make everything we think of as Bud dhist religion an expendable artifact and not a precious traditionan implica tion that the Lotus Sutra is not reluctant to draw: Apart from the skillful means of the Buddha, there is no other vehicle to be found.156 Buddhism is indifferent to the dualism of true and false and thus can offer no truths. It offers something else entirelyas Mazus school expressly teaches, True words cure sickness. If the cure manages to bring about healing, then all are true words. If they cannot effectively cure sickness, all are false words. True words are false words insofar as they give rise to views. False words are true words insofar as they cut off the delusions of sentient beings.157 We witness a Chan author using Daoist ideas about skillful means in order to enhance the appeal of Buddhism in a work entitled Illuminating Essential Doctrine (Xian Zong Ji). The text is attributed to Shenhui, a disciple of Huineng and possibly the real author of the Platform Sutra.158 Illuminating Essential Doctrine makes an unexpectedly strong case (in Chan terms) for the value of knowledge. This knowledge may not be what the world calls knowledge (not learning or a craft), but it is a subtle, enlightened, esoteric knowledge that turns out to resem ble nothing so much as the knowledge that Daoists require to do wu wei (which is how Chinese Buddhists translated the Sanskrit word nirvana).159 Nevertheless, it seems important to observe the difference between Buddhist kong- emptiness and Daoist xu- emptiness.160 Daoist emptiness is actually empty and virtually replete. Knowledge of this emptiness is knowledge of the world in virtual depth rather than actual configuration. When we see things, we need not see merely their geometry; and indeed, a mind and an eye trained to perceive in such a way may very often see nothing but blur. Still, beyond lines or shapes, we can perceive stabilities and instabilities, obstacles and tendencies, actual things and virtual shadows, how things can change and respond to other changes. This depth is the
155. Prajnaparamita Sutra, as cited in Pye, Skilful Means, 104, 108. 156. Lotus Sutra, as cited in Pye, Skilful Means, 39. 157. Baizhangs Record, as cited in Poceski, Ordinary Mind, 165. 158. Zeuschner, Hsien Tsung Chi, is a complete transla tion; parenthetical references are to this source. On Shen hui as probable author of the Platform Sutra, see Yampol sky, Platform Sutra, 114.

159. Henri Maspero, Taoism and Chinese Religion, trans. Frank A. Kierman, Jr. (Amherst: University of Massachu setts Press, 1981), 259. 160. I develop this argument in The Virtual and the Vacant: Emptiness and Knowledge in Chan and Daoism, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37.3 (2010): 45771.

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declare the reality of all things and sometimes their irreality, sometimes that things are both real and unreal, and sometimes that they are nei ther real nor unreal.155

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virtual and potential, the past and future, of what is extended and present; and its percipient perception can be trained, enhanced, made skillful, even sagacious. Such knowledge is apophatic, achieved through emptying, overcoming obstacles that confine the mind to a perspective. The knowledge is a kind of emptiness, empty of actuality, actual form, hence not equivalent to a formula or representa tion. It is an improvisatory knowledge, does not reiterate, and functions in the fog of incipience, where being vanishes into becoming. Such knowledge continues to function after enlightenment. Indeed, the point of pursuing enlightenment is to master a knowledge that continues to function and enhance ones efficacy. Daoists want to overcome little knowledge to get to the great knowledge that feeds life and does not exhaust it. Theirs is an art of subtle efficacy, proved by the productiveness with which they vanish into things. But Buddhists do not want to vanish into things. Things too must vanish.

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XIII It is a commonplace to say that, in the centuries following the collapse of the Han dynasty, Confucian thought declined in significance, while kinds of Buddhism and kinds of Daoism competed with each other and were syncretized. Confucian ism in this long period is largely thought of as a prosaic mode of self- cultivation and a set of conventions associated with study for government service. Buddhism in China is usually said to have reached its creative apogee during the Tang dynasty (618907), but a reaction to this alien (which is to say, Indian) reli gion set in during the Song (9791279) and was accompanied by a resurgence of Confucianism, though in a context of thought that was by that time in large part Budd hist. From the tenth to the seventeenth centuries, the Confucian classics were reread with the unique scope and radicalism of Chan Buddhism in mind. Neoconfucianism, in its several varieties, moved to counter the Buddhist empha sis on emptiness and its demand that adepts transcend all viewpoints, offering instead what most Sinologists would call impartiality and that Jullien calls glo bality.161 Globality is objectivity in the absence of objects (or finished forms) and with no stipulation of transcendence. Instead of rising above perspectives, the Neoconfucian adept refuses to limit himself to only one. The elusiveness and allusiveness of Chinese literature, avoiding the explicit and definitive, is an hom age to globality, in this sense. A statement has not much value unless it works in many contexts. The more explicit words are, the less allusive power they have, hence the less you can do with them and the fewer contexts in which they can be wise. The Mohist demand to make meaning explicit is aberrant in Chinese tradition. Spell everything out, as Mohists do, and once you have done so, you
161. Jullien, Detour and Access, 311.

are stuck. Mohists apart, Chinese thinkers seem to prefer statements to resonate and admit of recontextualization, expanding the original wisdom: The sages remarks are continuously modified and never come to a standstill.162 Globality, according to Jullien, is a tendency of all traditional Chinese thought, but it is particularly relevant to the Neoconfucians. I would like to discuss two relatively late cases, the Ming dynasty thinkers Wang Yangming (14721529) and Luo Qinshun (14651547). Commentators writing for a West ern readership often describe Wang as an idealista problematic attribution. Idealism is an ontological thesis, a thesis about being. The Greek version identi fies the real with the rational, intelligible, logical, and infallibly knowable. What most veritably is, what is in being about a being, is that for which there is a rational account, an intelligible form, an idea. In Greek idealism, nature is a system of such ideas. To know the truth of nature is to defy the siren song of the senses and turn ones mind toward these incorruptible forms, the souls true home. The ide alism of modern philosophy is subjectivism, putting the individual subject and its representations at the center. This idealism is a monological philosophy of con sciousness based on the fiction of a solitary subject reasoning with itself. Beings are ideas, ideas exist only for consciousness; to be is to be perceived. Given this background, A. C. Graham must be right in his admonition that it is important to keep Chinese concepts as far as possible free from contamination by the Being of Western philosophy.163 We must therefore be wary of the suggestion that Wang is a metaphysical idealist. Still, even his contemporaries seem to have detected something para doxical in his views, as others do in idealism. Consider this exchange between Wang and a disciple:
The Teacher was roaming in Nanchen. A friend pointed to flowering trees on a cliff and said, You say there is nothing under heaven external to the mind. These flower trees on the high mountain flower and drop their blossoms of themselves. What have they to do with my mind? The Teacher said, Before you look at these flowers, they and your mind are in the state of silent vacancy [tong gui yu ji ]. As you come to look at them, their colors at once show up clearly. From this you can know that these flowers are not external to your mind.164

The flowers are not external does not have to mean that they are internalin the mind. It can also mean that your minds perception is out there with the flowers; seeing happens out there, not in here. Before you look, you and the flowers are silently vacant to each other. There is as yet no resonance, no incita

162. Jullien, Detour and Access, 298. 163. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 99.

164. Wang, Instructions, 222.

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tion and response, no history, memory, karma as it were, between you and those hitherto unnoticed flowersuntil, of course, you begin to look. The seeing is an interaction, a relay, or an exchange, each responding to the other, each chang ing the other. Does seeing the flowers change you? Surely it does. You are not a disembodied Cartesian subject, contemplating a decontextualized representation. There is no flower- in- itself waiting for vision to disclose it. What we recognize as anything (a flower, its color) is a differentiation worked out in the transac tions that precede recognition. It may seem a simple thing to look at the flower ing tree. But if we examine this act in any depth (for instance, neurologically or quantum mechanically), it is a very complex exchange and cannot be analyzed with nuance in the impoverished terms of a conscious subject representing an objective thing. But does your looking at them change the flowers? I take the reference to vacancyWangs language (tong gui yu ji) is quite different from Daoist xu or Buddhist kongto mean that perception activates a resonance that did not actually exist (exist as an actuality) before that exchange. An eye is not a monistic entity complete in itself: it cannot be what it is unless it is (virtually) seeing the other. Elsewhere Wang says that the eye has no substance [ti ] of its own. It regards as substance the color of all things. The ear has no substance of its own. It regards as substance the sound of all things.165 A perception is a response; per ceptual qualities are resonant pluralities, not simply present singularities. They have no nonrelational existence, neither in the subject nor in the object. They do not exist until they arise from the exchange between vision and the visible. The quality in the flower is a potential of which the perception of the eye is a condition of actuality. It is for Wang as for Bergson:
Every attentive perception . . . is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and remain in the depths of the mind [as a mere secondary quality]: it must always find its way back to the object whence it proceeds.166

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Wang is not equating being and idea. If we must have metaphysical terms, he is saying (as Bergson does) that there is no thing- i n- itself and no representa tion; that perception is a resonant response, not the reception of a form. Wang is rightly untroubled by what an incautiously Westernizing commentator has called the epistemological paradox in Wangs Neoconfucianism: how, just by

165. Wang, Instructions, 223.

166. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (1896; Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 124, 127.

knowing my heart (Wangs innate knowledge [liang zhi]), can I know anything about the world?167 That paradox is a problem only if know means adequately represent, which it never does in Chinese thought. If, however, know means (as it does in Wang) know what to do and do it, then this paradox turns out to be the Socratic thesis that sagacious knowledge is inherently motivating. Wangs thought, as I understand it, is not that by attending to the heart we acquire objec tive, factual knowledge of things. We attend to the heart instead of attending to objective, factual things:
Without the innate knowledge inherent in man, there cannot be plants and trees, tiles and stones. This is not true of them only. Even heaven and earth cannot exist without the innate knowledge that is inherent in man. For at bottom, heaven, earth, the myriad things, and man form one body. The point at which this unity is manifested in its most refined and excellent form is the clear intelligence of the human mind.168

For Wang, mind (xin) and principle (li ) are not merely inseparable (the usual Song Neoconfucian view); mind and principle are the same, two words for one reality: The mind is the nature, heavens imperative, the one, pervading man and things, reaching out to the four seas, and filling heaven and earth.169 We know that Wang studied Chan for many years.170 The Platform Sutra says that self- nature [zi xing neng] contains the ten thousand thingsthis is great. The ten thousand things are all in self- nature; all things [wan fa] are included in your 171 own natures [zi xing]. Before we read Wang as a crypto- Buddhist, however, we should consider what Chan Buddhism might have taken from classical Chinese thoughtin this case from Mengzi: The ten- thousand things are all complete within me (7A 4). Of course, Huineng in the Platform Sutra and Mengzi are not saying the same thing. The Buddhist probably means that any object is no more than a dream. Once we realize that all things are self- nature, we are halfway to realizing that there is nothing except mind alone, which is halfway to realizing that mind alone is empty. Neither Mengzi nor Wang is likely to envision anything so other worldly. For Wang, the only things that matter are affairs, concerns, problems; and he is not stating an ontological thesis about being. His thought is rather an ethics of attention, in the context of a tradition for which knowledge begins and ends in a blur.
167. Wen, Confucian Pragmatism, 102. 168. Wang, Instructions, 22122. 169. Wang, Instructions, in William Theodore de Bary, The Message of the Mind in Neo- Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 82. 170. On Wangs involvement with Chan, see Tu WeiM ing, Neoconfucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang- mings Youth (14721509) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 6372. 171. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra, 146, 171.

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XIV A contemporary of Wangs, Luo Qinshun is a Ming dynasty adherent of Song Neoconfucianism. His evocatively titled Knowledge Painfully Acquired (Kun Zhi Ji) seeks to define the immanent economy of the world, its unity from withinnot as imposed or transcendentally conditioned. This aim is alien to Buddhism. Distinctions among things are, in Luos understanding, not delusions of karmic consciousness. Rather, they are ziran differentiations, fluctuating coagulations of qi that owe their coherence to the economy where they have their norm. This qi is an energetic mass that completely fills the world (comparable to the Stoic pneuma). Luo traces the genesis of qi to the primordial interaction of the empty and the full. The concentrated disperses, the dispersed reconcentrates; empty and full spontaneously transform into each otherthe empty thickening into actual ity, the actual decaying into virtual emptiness. The oscillations quasi- materialize, generating the energetic ether of the qi, whose passage through an endless series of transformations defines our actuality. Is this process not the blur that this symposium is about? Another crucial and related term is li, principle: Whether in the imme diacy of a single day or in the remoteness of a millennium, emptiness and fullness, concentration and dispersal, mutually create the cycle of interaction which is li.172 The li are resonances whose ripples reach everywhere, like veins coursing through jade. There is nowhere that they do not lead, nothing they do not weave into an economy with others and ultimately with everything. They make things, not what they are (as would a metaphysical essence), but what they are good for, which is the condition of their adaptation in the economy of the world. The li are patterns, yes, and coherence, but not a finished pattern suitable for contemplating whole. The li are not actualities; they are the trajectories of actualities and are per se virtual, ideal, an unregulated regularity, the tendentious blur of becom ing. For Luo as for earlier Song thinkers, the Confucian injunction to investi gate things means to investigate the li and study the adaptation of things. With such knowledge comes right use, harmonious interaction: To say that the sage regulates and brings [things] to completion means that he follows their seasons, accords with their principles, and establishes regulations and measures so as to further human interests.173 According to a statement in the late- classical Confucian Great Learning, Those of antiquity who wished that all people throughout the empire would let their inborn luminous virtue shine forth simply extended knowledge to the
173. Luo, Knowledge Painfully Acquired, 115.

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172. Luo, Knowledge Painfully Acquired, 98. On the Chi nese concept of principle, see Brook Ziporyn, Form, Principle, Pattern, or Coherence? Li in Chinese Philoso phy, Philosophy Compass 3.3 (May 2008): 40122; and Li (Principle, Coherence) in Chinese Buddhism, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30.34 (September 2003): 50124.

utmost. The text goes on to define this extension of knowledge (zhi zhi) as the investigation of things ( ge wu). Only after things are investigated does knowledge become complete, bringing in train a state that is well governed and an empire that is tranquil.174 The Neoconfucians read a lot into these words and considered the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge to be a major tenet of their philosophy and its way of life. Furthermore, they usually understood this knowledge in the wu wei terms we have seen in earlier thinkers. The accomplishment that proves sage knowledge is seeing the tendencies of com peting futures in the small things, where efficacy is easy. That is the aspiration of the adept who conscientiously investigates things and extends knowledge, as Zhu Xi confirms: we must understand the subtle, incipient, activating forces of the order and chaos shown. . . . This is the investigation of things.175 Luo sees in Wang a baleful subjectivism that Luo thinks Buddhism has encouraged even among Confucians, undermining their commitment to investigate things and extend their knowledge. Luo is not saying that Wang is a Buddhist but that Wang and the Buddhists make the same mistake. Wang identifies mind and prin ciple, which is perhaps his major divergence from Song Neoconfucianism. He concentrates everything on the mind, securing its commitment and sincerity. Chan too concentrates on the mind, though the point is to empty the mind and derealize objects. A Buddhist might think that Wangs innate knowledge were better called innate delusionwhich is to say, karma. Luos point is that, differ ences aside, the concentration on mind in Wang and in Buddhism rationalizes an indifference to nature. It is our whole nature (xing), one with the nature running through all things, and not specifically mind (xin), that embodies and expresses the li, the virtual tendency of the ten thousand things. The priority of nature over mind is the priority of life over consciousness. We should not expect to know anything about the heart or about human nature, except by knowing about life and the economy of humans and nonhumans. Luo returns the investigation of things to empiricism. The mind is not a given, innate, as it is for Wang; the heart, the mind, is a process within the given. This point dramatically differentiates Luo and Wang. Wang looks subjec tivistic to his critics, including Luo, whose own approach is a kind of naturalism: the heart is already outside, its principle already implicated with everything else, its responses an adaptation to the whole economy. The more knowledgeably we investigate, the more we lose ourselves in the unity of heaven and earth. In a let ter to Wang, Luo writes:
174 . The Great Learning, in Gardner, Four Books, 45. Tradition attributes the Great Learning to Kongzi as recorded by Zeng Shen, though it seems to be the work of Yuezheng Ke, a student under Mengzi, c. 260 BCE. Joseph Needham, Botany, in Science and Civilization in

China, vol. 6, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 214. 175. Zhu Xi, Reflections on Things at Hand, 119.

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What is of value in the investigation of things is precisely ones desire to perceive the unity of principle in all of its diverse particularizations. Only when there is neither subject nor object, neither deficiency nor surplus, and one has truly achieved unity and convergence, does one speak of knowledge being complete.176

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Luo follows the older Song line in regarding the investigation of things as a program of self- c ultivation: in the process, we subdue the self and return to propriety. The self needs subduing, because we have lost the Way inherent in us originally. A subdued self is a vanishing self, a paragon of objectivity in a world without objects. Luo explains the ge (investigation) of ge wu as penetrating everywhere with no separation. . . . When my endeavor approaches completion, it will involve penetration with no separation. Then things are myself and I am things, altogether unified without any differentiation.177 To arrive at (know, act from) the li in things, you have to get past the self, overcome the limitations of any particular standpoint, not through transcendence but by the achievement of an untrammeled immanence that is at ease in any perspective and stuck in none. Versions of this same goal, it should by now be evident, appear in every permuta tion (including otherwise opposed ones) of the Chinese intellectual tradition. The unity of the li that Luo infers is not monadic or incompatible with plurality. It is not a finished unity already accomplished on the plane of essences, but rather a virtual unity, whose actuality has to be creatively extended from one moment to the next. We all participate in extending it; perfected people do so perfectly. Do we already know what entities there are? No, otherwise investiga tion would be superfluous. Do we already know the conditions of their unity? No, otherwise the extension of knowledge would be superfluous. Investigation reveals new entities for extension to normalize and unify. The work is endless, but so is life. According to a second- century CE author, the astronomical regularities are demanding in their subtlety. . . . Success and failure take their turns, and no tech nique can be correct forever. . . . When the technical experts trace them through computation, they can do no more than accord with their own time.178 Knowl edge is no more finished than its objects, which are not things in themselves but problems of adaptation in an economy of humans and nonhumans. Is the Confucian investigation of things seriously an empiricism? Natu rally, something depends on how we understand the term. Gilles Deleuze sug gests that the fundamental proposition of empiricism is that relations are external to ideas: Ideas do not account for the nature of the operations we perform on

176. Luo, Letter to Wang Yangming, 1520, in Knowledge Painfully Acquired, 177. 177. Luo, Knowledge Painfully Acquired, 58.

178. Cai Yong, as cited in Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 192.

them, and especially of the relations that we establish among them.179 When relations (including sameness and difference) are external to ideas, nothing can be known about things a priori, by reasoning from concepts alonewhich under cuts the usual reason for postulating innate ideas and eliminates a priori knowl edge. What makes relations external to ideas is that relations cannot be deduced from an adequate conception of their terms. To know what is related to what, we must examine things, which requires mediation, observation, investigation. Furthermore, once we understand that relations are external, it is apparent that there are no relationsno actual relationsthat escape the economy of human and nonhuman things. To think that we are so entwined with things is not sub jectivism or even anthropocentrism. To be included is not to be at the center. It is to be a partner with heaven and eartha part of the circumstances. For Luo, Heaven and man, things and the self, inner and outer, beginning and end, darkness and light, the lessons of birth and death, and the conditions of positive and negative spiritual forces should form an all- pervading unity with nothing left behind. Thus, when we speak of the myriad things, is there any that is after all external to our own nature?180 To say that nothing is external to our nature means there is nothing whose being and identity are radically independent of the natural history that includes us. All these relations are external to their terms (not inherent or a priori) but also coevolving with our life and practice. Nothing has to be related to anything else. Things are related because they evolve together, contingently coming to share conditions of existence. You cannot deduce such relations from pure concepts, but nothing exists apart from them; and they can only be investigated, not known by mind alone. This profile of empiricism is at once familiar and new. If empiricism is the thought that relations are external to their terms, then its antithesis, rationalism, assumes that some or all relations are internal, meaning that if we thoroughly understood an idea we would know its relations, including its truth, its causes and effects. The first rationalists (logikoi ) of the Western tradition, physicians of the fifth century BCE, thought they could attain knowledge of the cause of disease through logos and dialectic.181 Spinoza is the summit of this rationalism, and Hume the most intense empiricist reaction. All events, Hume says, seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another, but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined but never connected.182 Loose and separate does not mean unrelated; but it does mean not internally related, which
179. See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constan tin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 9899; and Hume, in Pure Immanence, 38. 180. Luo, Knowledge Painfully Acquired, 55.

181. See Michael Frede, The Ancient Empiricists, in Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 182. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1977), section 7.2 (49).

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subverts Spinozas assertion that nothing in nature is contingent, but all things are from the necessity of the divine nature determined to exist and to act in a definite way.183 Without wanting exactly to disagree with Hume, Luo might find his point puzzling. What is the difference between conjunction and connection? In Con fucian tradition, correlation is the connection par excellence. Also puzzling is Humes supposition that his antirationalist argument reveals unity to be a fiction, a naive if inevitable mistake. For Hume, plurality excludes unity, which can only be conventional and properly a fiction. But why is unity more than harmony, and why should multiplicity exclude harmony? According to the Song Confucian Zhang Zai, Ultimate harmony is what is called Dao. Unless it is like wild horses, fusing and intermingling, it does not deserve the name ultimate harmony.184 A stampede is a luminous image of what Confucians mean by harmony. Each horse is charging fast, with a great deal of energy, close together, running hard. Yet there is no collision, no horse trips another; and they make their way unstop pably around any obstacle. Their unity, their harmony and organization, does not preclude differentiation or multiplicity, and they are an object of knowledge not in spite of but because they are a blur and impossible to hold still. A stampede has no being at an instant. Stop it and it ceases to exist. Its harmony (he) is not the monotonous sameness (tong) of a clear and distinct idea. Differences are not reduced or eliminated but encouraged to resonate, adapt, and find their niche in the heavenly economy of human and nonhuman things. I raised the question of whether the Confucian investigation of things is seriously an empiricism. Possibly Luo is even more consistently empirical than Hume. Hume looks to human naturespecifically, to the imaginationfor the source of relations, yet that imagination is itself constituted in the given. The principles of imagination do not exist, as a substance does, in advance of func tion. Imagination is not a spiritual agency but an artifact of nature, and not a specifically human nature (which for Hume imagination largely constitutes); it must rather be an artifact of the wilder chaosmos in which our imagination has its unimaginable conditions. If all our objects are imaginary constructions (as Hume says), then what constructs imagination? What constructs human nature and its principles? Nature there is beyond investigation and unknowable, though only if we think of knowledge in the way that Hume doesas a Cartesian representa tion (even if there are no objects to represent, the objects of knowledge being, for Hume, imaginary). Unburdened by the thesis of representation, Luo may be the more consistent empiricist. Relations can be out there, in nature, without

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183. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics I, Proposition 29, in The Ethics and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1982), 51.

184. Zhang Zai, as cited in Zhang, Key Concepts, 22. The image occurs earlier in the Zhuangzi: A things life is like a stampede, a gallop, at every prompting it alters; there is never a time when it does not shift (148).

inhering in things essentially, because all relations pass through us and we com plete the economy of nature by responding well (with propriety and humane righteousness) to the instigations of things. For Hume, our nature has principles that can be known introspectively, independently of external nature; whereas, for Luo, we cannot know anything about human nature except by studying how things respond to us, and we to them. There is no knowledge of human nature that is prior to the knowledge of things generally. By investigating things, we learn about ourselves; by investigating ourselves, we learn about things. The blur of nature and convention is not an obstacle to knowledge but rather a condition of its humane application. Confucians can grant to Hume the points he fought hardest forthose respecting substance, the self, representation, causation, and all their antiratio nalist implicationswhile evading his notorious skepticism. Skepticism is evaded because the Confucians have no hostages to rationalism. They do not conceive knowledge as a logos, an unfolding of implications, a disclosure of the neces sary reason for things. Throughout Chinese intellectual tradition, knowledge is understood as a spontaneous but wise response to fuzzy circumstances always in flux. The proof of knowledge is the relative effortlessness of a life- enhancing response. There are competing ideas of just what enhances life and how best to pursue such knowledge. But that this is the point and value of knowledge seems a constant in the tradition. Those unaccustomed and untrained in such responsive ness, incapable of vanishing into things, have no alternative but to rage against the blur that defies their futile passion for precision.

XV Things are not complete and knowledge not extended until our interaction with anything becomes natural and effortless. We complete things by turning them into black boxes with which people operate harmoniously, using them without force. Once these usages are known, anyone can do it; but it takes wise investiga tion to find them when they are unknown. Sages can do so, can see through the full to the emptiness it responds tosee not frozen fact or actual relation but the virtual continuum on which tendencies evolve. Incipient actualizing admits mul tiple futures, with opportunities for effortless intervention at bifurcations that are in themselves chaotic. Such action is easy, almost nothing, wu wei, provided one has penetrating insight into opportunity and can really see the little things. This discernment lets sages respond to circumstances with spontaneous appro priateness, deliberately doing very little, almost nothing, while leaving nothing not done. In the theory of the Huainanzi, the early Han compendium I have men tioned, patterns of relation have to be searched out; these most subtle essences

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link things, and make them resonate in inconspicuous ways: Mountain clouds are like grassy hummocks; river clouds are like fish scales; dryland clouds are like smoky fire; cataract clouds are like billowing water. All resemble their form and provoke responses according to their class. The burning mirror can draw fire; the loadstone can draw iron; crabs spoil lacquer; and sunflowers incline to the sun.185 You cannot guess these things or learn them from books: That things in their cat egories [lei] are mutually responsive is dark, mysterious, deep, and subtle. Knowl edge [zhi] is not capable of assessing it; argument [bian] is not capable of explaining it.186 Knowledge here means perceptual and linguistic knowledge: Investigations by ear and eye are not adequate to discern the [resonance] of things; discussions employing the mind and its conceptions are not adequate to distinguish true and false.187 It is impossible to know a priori what the categories of the world are: Cor relative categories cannot necessarily be inferred. You have to look and see: The resemblances between things and categories that cannot be externally assessed are numerous and difficult to recognize. For this reason they cannot but be investi gated. The obvious inferences can be completely wrong: Tile is made in fire but you cannot get fire from it; bamboo grows in water but you cannot get water from it. But if you put your heart into it, the resonance among things can be discerned: Lead and cinnabar are of different categories and have separate colors. Yet if one can use [both of] them to produce scarlet, it is because one has grasped the tech nique. Thus intricate formulas and elegant phrases are of no aid to persuasion. Investigate what they take as the basis; that is all.188 Perfect that knowledge and from what is within the palm of ones hand, one can trace [correlative] categories to beyond the extreme endpoint [of the cosmos]. Heaven and Earth revolve and interpenetrate; the myriad things bustle about yet form a unity. If one is able to know this unity, then there is nothing that cannot be known; if one cannot know this unity, then there is not even one thing that can truly be known.189 We also have an account of where these resonances come from. They begin with the primordial movement of the ethereal qi, an original oscillation between the empty and the full (which I gloss as virtual and actual). These two strange attractors maintain the qi far from equilibrium, creating laminar flows and tur bulent instability, which are expressed in the world as the changes of yin and yang. Yin- yang implies nonantagonistic gradients on a scale, not diametrical opposition. Phenomena analyze into shifting proportions; a predominantly yin phenomenon always has a germ of yang, and vice versa.190 Everything is made of qi, everything

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185. Huainanzi 6.2 (217), 6.3 (219). The reference to crabs is not absurd. Shellfish produce enzymes that prevent lac quer from drying, and they were carefully prohibited from places where lacquer is manufactured (219 n. 34). 186. Huainanzi 6.2 (216). 187. Huainanzi 6.3 (219).

188. Huainanzi 17.109 (685); 18.27 (755); 17.110 (686 ); 18.26 (753). 189. Huainanzi 6.2 (217); 7.5 (245). 190. See John S. Major, Heaven and Earth in Early Han Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

bears a distinctive yin- yang signature, and everything interacts, becomes cor related, and resonates according to category. Everything that moves is a poten tial stimulus, every stimulus instigates a response, and all things communicate, though in irregular, obscure, subtle patterns. If the dao is a flow, no one should think it is without turbulence. The thought of resonance ( ganying) seems to begin with Zou Yan, of the so- called Jixia Academy in the third century BCE.191 An innovation of the Huainanzi, in the second century, is to interpret wu wei in these new terms: effort less efficacy becomes an art of resonances. By the Song dynasty (if not earlier), Confucians like Cheng Yi were thinking in these terms too: Whatever moves stimulates, and what is stimulated must respond. That to which it responds again stimulates it, and when stimulated it again responds, so that the process is endlessor, as we might say, nonlinear.192 To appreciate these resonances and be able to orchestrate them is what the Huainanzi calls genuine knowledge: Only when there is a zhen ren [genuine person] is there zhen zhi [genuine knowl edge]. This is the knowledge of those who can return to that from which they were born, as if they had not yet acquired a physical form. Who are genuine people? The Genuine are those who have not yet begun to differentiate from the Great One.193 They vanish into things, but nothing is extinguishednirvana this is not. On the contrary, everything is concentrated, vibrant, big with trans formation. We peer into a virtual landscape, the dwelling place of Total Dark ness, and contemplate the lodging place of Total Brightness. We roam in the fields of the Nebulous, plunge into the Fathomless, take rest in the realms of the Unfettered, and enter the Nonexistent, the Great Beginning (tai shi )the phase space of the world, the blur of becoming, where the chaotic huntun, a body without organs, subsists as a purely virtual whole (tai yi).194 It was Needham who first proposed to translate ganying as resonance, acknowledging Chinas tradition of experimental acoustics. The Huainanzi is an early expression of what Needham called the Chinese preference for ideas of wave- motion through a continuum, rather than direct mechanical impulsion of particles.195 Technically, resonance is a rise in amplitude of oscillation that occurs when a system is exposed to a periodic force whose frequency matches its own. Resonance arises everywhere, because everywhere, at every level, sys tems interact and evolve with other systems, introducing diffusion, uncertainty, time- irreversible nonlinearity into every environment, making all things virtu ally responsive to each other. Resonance couples all kinds of processes, just as it
191. Major, Heaven and Earth, 44. 192. Cheng Yi, as cited in A. C. Graham, Two Chinese Philosophers: Cheng Ming- Tao and Cheng Yi- Chuan (London: Lund Humphries, 1958), 3839. 193. Huainanzi 2.8 (96); 14.1 (537). 194. Huainanzi 7.7 (250). 195. Needham, Great Titration, 75.

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couples harmonics in music; and because resonant systems oscillate at their maxi mum amplitude, even small forces can induce large vibrations.196 A stiff breeze can bring down a steel bridge (as happened at Tacoma Narrows). The circadian sleep- awake cycle, which is technically an oscillator, and the rotation of the earth (another oscillator), resonate and have become entrained, creating an adaptive coordination of metabolic rhythms and seasonally changing daylight.197 Here is a highly effective (adaptive) result coming from a very weak cause, hardly a cause at all, the coupling energies being so slight. That small forces have only small effects is an assumption of classical physics that is now refuted. The Chinese never made that assumption. On the contrary, it has long been proverbial in China that an infinitesimal misstep at the beginning leads to infinite error later on. We now say, sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Despite their attraction to organismic models, the Chinese never dreamed the Western dream of teleology, in which nature is itself one system, organized by a transcendent purpose. That may be humanitys most flattering cosmos, suf fused with intentionality, logos, rationality, presence, and purpose, all qualities consciousness most recognizes as its own. The Chinese cosmos is autistic by comparison. There is no intentionality behind transformation, which is ziran, from itself, an unregulated regularity, immanently ordered but transcendently lawless. It seems unlikely that the thinkers I have considered would balk at the idea of evolution. To say that nature has a history, that species transmute, that the contours of the earth were once quite different, populated by different spe cies, most of which are extinctnone of that has to be received as sterile paradox and might even sound attractive, especially to Daoists. They might agree with Spinoza and Darwin that there is no design or purpose in nature. Natural events happen not from agency or intentionality but ziran, from themselves, by a virtual potency that things inherit with qi. The absence of purposiveness is recognized, even idealized in the wu wei eclipse of purpose, when intentionality vanishes into the evolution of things.

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XVI Order is a special case of chaos, and being is a special case of becoming, which makes order and being not so special, certainly not thoughts highest values. To dream of being and truth is to dream of stopping. Learn to see unity in the stam pede of wild horses and you can gallop while you sit. The priority of being (and the shame of blur) are deep- lodged in Western thought, as is the complementary idea of becoming as change, something that contingently happens to beings. First
196. Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature (New York: Free Press, 1997), 4244, 12227. 197. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002), 114.

there are beingsdeterminate, self- identical; then there is change. Becoming and change are not the same, however. What is becoming does not change; on the contrary, it maintains itself (it is, or is the same) only by ceaseless differentia tion. Only what constantly differs is transforming and becoming; never having been, neither does it change. To change is to stop being one thing and begin to be another, an uncanny transition, blurry, a kind of death: Whatever by being changed passes outside its own boundaries, at once this is the death of that which was before (Lucretius).198 Hence the mortuary logic of our logos: A man should make all haste to escape from earth to heaven, Socrates tells his friends. It seems likely that we shall, only then, when we are dead, attain that which we desire and of which we claim to be lovers, namely, wisdom. . . . Either we can never attain knowledge or we can do so only after death.199 Chinese thought is an inimitably antithetical example of original becom ing. What to Western understanding is a self- identical, reidentifiable thing is for Chinese thought a phase of a relatively slow, relatively local process. Individuals at any level are multiplicities one level down. The potency of transformation haunts actual form. In painting, ideal form is considered relatively easy to depict; it is living, transforming form that is difficult, making rock or bamboo a greater technical challenge than the ahistorical figure of a classical nude. In the words of the Huainanzi, When one paints [a picture] of the face of Xi Shi, it is beautiful but cannot please; when one draws with a compass the eyes of Meng Ben, they are large but cannot inspire awe; what rules form [ junxing] is missing from them.200 Change is inevitable but not inevitably viable; to transform with the dao is to change without sacrificing viability. For us, viable transformation depends on knowledge. That is not true for all things, but it is true for human beings; and now, more than ever. It is the price we pay for release from relatively inflexible responses. For us, to do what comes naturally is not to rely on thoughtless instinct but to interpose artifice. This interposition creates problems because it can be more or less artful, and there is no preestablished harmonypreestablished harmony is precisely what we have forsaken. Viability, adaptation, symbiosisthese are technical problems, not (as they are for other species) gifts of nature. Symbiotic, broadly viable solutions to problems of artifactual interpositionsuch is the accomplishment of sagacious knowledge in a world where so much depends on what we are technically able to do. The proof of such knowledge is resilient form. Form is resilient when it is soft and not easily distinguished from its environment, somewhat blurred, without

198. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse and M. F. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), bk. 1, l.67071. 199. Plato, Theaetetus 176ab; Phaedrus 66e.

200. Huainanzi 16.91 (649). See also Franois Jullien, The Impossible Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics, trans. Maev de la Guardia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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sharp edges. In the real world, any form is a complex nonlinear system, massively interacting with other such systems. Everything that makes form soft, fuzzy, or blurred contributes to ecological adaptation. The softer it is, the fuzzier, the more tenuous the distinction between it and its surrounding; hence the more condi tions of existence it must share with the rest of its environment and, therefore, the more resilient it is. A fuzzy form withstands the forces of its environment not by superior rigidity but by adaptation, deriving durability not from willful conatus but from convivial symbiosis. The obstacles to sagacious knowledge, for us if not for all time, are not those identified by our classical philosophy: the body, its senses, and its suscepti bility to pleasure and pain. Rather, they are the obstacles to cooperation, commu nication, and the prevalence of long- term perspectives; in other words, political obstacles, obstacles of the mind and not the bodyfor example, the economy of the disciplines and the specialist principle in research and teaching. Knowledge cannot be as wise as we need it to be if it does not include knowing what is not known, knowledge of gaps and limits. Interdisciplinarity magnifies these and develops means of investigating them. The presumptive truth of knowledge (or of the best knowledge) is another obstacle to interdisciplinarity and therefore to making knowledge wise; hence the connection between the fuzziness of subject matter and the fuzziness of the best methods by which to pursue it. According to G. E. R. Lloyd, the original motivation for the idealization of truth in ancient Greece was political; it was a way of disqualifying competitors like poets and sophists.201 We have the truth, the philosophers say, you have mere opinion. We know, you merely believe. We are in touch with reality, you are sunk in shad ows. Obviously, this ideal of truth is a way of evading communication, fending it off, setting up barriers to questions posed by othersand moreover, a way of denigrating shadows, fuzzy objects, blur, states of change and flux. One thing we have learned, however, since ancient times is that it is the mixture of methods and the blurring of boundaries, rather than the rigorous defense of purity, that make knowledge effective. It is not pure chemistry with its purely chemical truth or pure biology with its purely biological truth, but rather the impure, mixed, translated, hybrid knowledge of biochemistry that brought the phenomena of life into the collective as objects of knowledge and targets of power. There are many other examples in the history of the sciences. The moral seems to be that knowledge becomes effective through translation, in the wide, literal sense of being taken over from one place or form to another, despite (or perhaps because of) the fog and blur characteristic of in- between states during transit. In this sense, translation includes all connecting and extending of net

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201. G. E. R. Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

works, all communication and multiplying of media. This translation is inciden tal to Truth, which has to be preserved, kept pure, whereas the effectiveness of knowledge lies in the efficacy of translationwhat it connects, how it resonates, what correlation it exploits, what network it expands. Dao means way, though the oldest, philosophically most relevant image is not a road or path but a river or canalthe way of flowing water.202 Method (methodos) also means way. Method, as we have understood it since Descartess time, is the geometrically straight path of light or falling bodies, the efficient economy of means, the rationality of a plan. This method belongs to the tradition of looking at systems locally, isolating mechanisms, and adding them together. It presupposes control and works only through constant control. To transform with the dao is to overcome the need for what method promises. Method presupposes obstacles, and it promises to surmount them; dao is without obstacles, an ulti mately irresistible transformation. With force one can erect local obstructions, but it is only a question of time and scale. What happens ziran, by the spontane ous organization of nature, ultimately conditions everything, circumscribing all our art and knowledge. Dao- k nowledge is not an alternative to method; it is art and knowledge at the limit of method, knowing what methods cannot master. Methods are for fol lowers. They reliably lead to places we have visited and found worth returning to. But what about what we do not know? A logic of discovery has often been promised, but nothing has come of it. To go where we have never been and to discern what we do not know, we have to be adept at vanishing into things, for which there is a dao (an art and ethics) but no method. By vanishing into things, I mean mixing viably with them. Sugar vanishes into water but is not gone, merely rendered imperceptible, while transforming the water with new potential. To mix is to mix well; what does not mix well is not mixed at all, is immiscible, stubbornly self- identical, resisting transformation. What becomes imperceptible offers no resistance to the mixing that distributes it. Its form is a phase, its identity experi mental, its nature unsettled, a blur. We begin to vanish into things when what things do, their economy, blurs into what we do, our life. We vanish by synthesis, symbiosis, synergistic transformation. We mix well, not losing ourselves despite losing the boundary that seems to separate us and the illusion that made us think we were subjects confronting objects. The only self that disappears is the one that was an obstacle to discerning the subtly incipient and virtually invisible. We become softer, fuzzier, less distinct, less well defined, yet also larger, more com plex, more integral, and effortlessly effective.

202. The oldest use of dao seems to occur in the Book of Documents, where it refers to cutting a channel and leading a river to prevent the overflow of banks.

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Glossary
bian bu zheng cai cheng cheng wu chun bai da li da zhi dao e fa fang bian ganying ge wu gong gong gongfu Guiguzi hao he huntun ji ji ji ji er zhi zhi tian ye ji xie ji xin jianai jiang jing junxing junzi Kao Gong Ji kong kou Kun Zhi Ji lei li li liang neng liang zhi li ren discrimination, argument, disputation do not contend capability truthfulness, sincerity the completion of things pure and simple great principle great knowledge way, path bad, evil standards skillful means (Sanskrit, upaya kausalya) resonance investigation of things artisanal work impartiality effort, exertion, practice, work Ghost Valley Master love harmony chaos / incipient planning traces  Knowing it by observing its inchoate beginnings is heaven/nature ingenious machines ingenious minds impartial care artisanal work still what rules form gentleman, perfected person Book of Artisans empty mouth Knowledge Painfully Acquired category principle rite, ceremony innate ability innate knowledge, pure knowing beneficial to people

Common Knowledge

l ming ming mou ping chang xin qi qian shi qian zhi qiao ren shan shen shen sheng bu ding shi shi shuo suo yi taiji tai shi tai yi ti tian tong tong gui yu ji tui wan fa wei wei shi Wuxingpian wu bu wei wu zhi wu bu zhi wu ci wu ji wu gong wu ming wu nien wu wei wuxin xian zhi Xian Zong Ji xiao zhi xin xing

thinking dark, darkening, a vanishing into things clear vision, enlightenment planning ordinary mind energy, air, breath, spirit, material force predict what is to come foreknow skill humane, human- hearted, benevolence good (living) body restless mind arrow position, strategic situation explanation reasons supreme ultimate; calisthenics great beginning great unity body, substance heaven, nature sameness state of silent vacancy inference all things act, deed, deliberate effort contrived affirmation Chapter on the Five Forms nothing not done not ordered/managed nothing not ordered/managed lacking valid arguments without self without accomplishment without name no thought nonaction, effortless action no mind foreknowledge Illuminating Essential Doctrine little knowledge heart- mind form, body

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xing xiushen xu yi yin shi yin yang yu yu bu yu you wei zao hua zhe zhen zhen ren zhen zhi zheng bi zheng ming zhexue zh zh zh zhi zhi zhi bu zhi Zhong He Ji Zhongyong ziran zi xing neng zi xing

Common Knowledge

the nature of a thing self- cultivation empty, tenuous unified adaptive affirmation ignorance desire no desire useless action shaping forces of nature genuine, real, true genuine person genuine knowledge contending arguments rectification of names philosophy noun: knowledge, wisdom verb: to know; noun: knowledge, wisdom commitment, resolution, will extension of knowledge knowing the not- known Book of Balance and Harmony Maintaining Perfect Balance spontaneous, so of itself self- nature own nature

532