The Zhuangzi, one of the two main classics of Daoist philosophy (along with the Daodejing) is a collection of reflections, dialogues, and anecdotes replete with surprises and striking imagery. It is attributed to the philosopher of the same name, who lived around the fourth century BCE, although there is close to a consensus that the complete collection is the work of several authors. [1] Reading the Zhuangzi, we are drawn into a whirlwind of transformations, confusions and clarities; into a free-flowing perspectivism that seeks to cultivate openness towards all existences, a going by them through a forgetting of the self and a cultivation of an appropriate response.

Rigid framings, be they social, moral, or even spatial, are under general threat of dissolving in this water-like free flowing. However, the Zhuangzi does not simply abandon the world of human forms, interactions, and roles. Part of the richness of the text lies in its wrestling with how to live in the human and social world while resting securely right in the whirlwind of transformations.

One anecdote in chapter five of Zhuangzi makes this tension particularly vivid. It is the encounter between the ex-convict Shen Tujia and the famous prime minister Zichan in the halls of their common master, Bohun Wuren (Eng.: Uncle Dim Nobody/Non-human), who instructs them in the Daoist practices of “sitting and forgetting,” of resting in the bright mirror-mind and the “tranquil turmoil” of continuous transformations. [2]

First, we will explore the anecdote. This will naturally give an opportunity to elucidate the Daoist practices in question and their complex relation to social space, while moving through a series of reversals and questions typical of Daoist philosophy. Following this, we will transpose gleanings from this discussion onto the parallel problems between the social and the meditative in contemporary meditative practice.

Here’s the short anecdote, slightly abridged:

Shen Tujia, a one-footed ex-convict, was a fellow student of Zichan under Uncle Dim Nobody. Zichan said to him, “When I leave, you wait behind for a while, or if you leave first, I’ll wait behind.”

The next day they were again seated side by side in the same small hall and Zichan said, “I said you should wait behind when I leave, and I’ll wait behind when you leave. Now I’m about to go—will you wait behind or not? You see a holder of political power and you don’t give way—do you think you’re on equal footing with a prime minister?”

Shen Tujia said, “Within the gates of the Master, is there any such thing as a prime minister? […] I have heard that a bright mirror gathers no dust; if dust gathers there, it wasn’t really bright to begin with. […] Now it is our master whom you claim to esteem, and yet you still talk like this. Aren’t you overstepping?”

Zichan said, “[…] In light of the condition of your own virtue, don’t you think you should ask yourself instead if you’re losing your footing?”

Shen Tujia said, “[…] Many two-footed people laugh at me for having one foot, which always used to infuriate me. But as soon as I arrived here at our master’s place, everything fell away, bringing me back to where I’d started from. […] I have studied under him for nineteen years and never once in all that time have I been aware that I was one-footed. Here you and I have been wandering together on the inner side of the corporeal—aren’t you committing a misstep in seeking me on its outer side?”

Zichan’s face changed suddenly, jolted as if by a swift kick. “Please say no more about it!” he said. [3]

Two human beings with opposite attributes are facing each other. Following sinologist Romain Graziani, we can characterize them thus: On the one hand, there is Zichan (d. 522 BCE), prime minister of Zheng during the Spring and Autumn periods, praised by Confucius for his character and his policies, notably his introduction of a public penal code. He was generally admired for his tact, his diplomatic acuity, and his refusal of violence. He was said to be a master of ritual, affirming the importance of ritual in maintaining social order and stability. In the ancient Chinese context, to master ritual also meant to carry oneself, notably one’s body and one’s gestures, in an irreproachable way. On the other hand, there is Shen Tujia, a fictional ex-convict who lacks a foot. In ancient China, amputation was a common punishment for crimes; thus, Shen Tujia does not merely have a disability, but he also bears the mark of his punishment on his body, identifying him as a ‘lowly being’ in the social hierarchy. [4] Both Zichan and Shen Tujia therefore carry their social standing in and on their bodies, in the former in the form of ritual propriety, in the latter in the form of an amputated foot marking the status of a criminal.

With this background, Zichan’s request that they not leave the master’s hall at the same time has a clear signification: he does not want to be associated with a criminal, or at least does not see it as proper. In order to maintain social form, they should not be put on an equal footing (note the punning on the theme of feet/footings in the whole dialogue).

Shen Tujia responds: “Within the gates of the master, is there any such thing as a prime minister?” During the dialogue, the two characters are in their master’s hall. They are therefore in a particular setting and spatial frame. Firstly, they both partake in its framing as a space of shared practice, as players of a game or participants in a sport also would. In both cases, the participants cannot refer to their social attributes. When playing a video game, referring to one’s social status would be ridiculous. All that counts is the skill in the game. The participants share a common as-if, with its own, set-apart dynamics: a shared subjunctive, as the scholars Seligman, Weller, and Puett, call it in their book on ritual. [5]

But in distinction to the subjunctives of games or sport, which come with their own set of rules, this seems to be one where the very notions of rules or framings (or any notion of general schemata that put situations into a certain perceptive and practical ‘key’) become problematic. [6] Not only is the existence of a prime minister within that spatial frame questioned, but a state of mind is deployed that is compared to a “mirror that gathers no dust,” as Shen Tujia notes. The image of the mirror is employed at central points in the Zhuangzi to describe the quality of the mind of the Daoist, or rather the way she practices encounters with the world:

The Utmost Person uses his mind like a mirror, rejecting nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing. [7]

Wang Fuzhi comments on the reference to the mirror that gathers no dust in the anecdote:

Each being enjoys its own enjoyment, so when one comes face to face with this mirror which retains no forms, both forget all about any gain and loss to be got from the other. [8]

The reflective openness and non-grasping nature of the mirror-like mind holds no fixed forms, no idea of gain and loss—or more radically, of good and bad or beautiful and ugly. It ‘just’ responds openly—and joyfully! —to what it encounters, without judging immediately and without reading the situation in a pre-set key. Zichan, the prime minister, certainly does not manifest this quality of mind in his encounter with the one-footed convict, as he sees him mainly through his socially mediated value judgment; Shen Tujia has a good point in suggesting that Zichan has not penetrated their master’s teaching deeply enough yet. By stepping into their master’s hall, they both engage in a practice of radical openness that should disarm attempts at making others feel their social status.

To Zichan’s answer that Shen Tujia is overstepping what his own virtue would allow him to say, Shen Tujia responds by deepening his point. In his practice with master Uncle Dim Nobody, “everything fell away” as the marks of his social condemnation were simply forgotten, “bringing him back to where I started from,” to an infant-like freshness of mind where not once was he aware that he was one-footed, an ex-convict. [9] This forgetting of the self is another shorthand for the meditative practice of the mirror-like mind, as well as a further radicalization of it. Daoists practice ‘just sitting and forgetting’:

It’s a dropping away of my limbs and torso, a chasing off of my sensory acuity, dispersing my physical form and ousting my understanding until I am the same as the Transforming Openness. This is what I call just sitting and forgetting. [10]

Everything drops away in the ‘Transforming Openness.’ Elsewhere this practice is described as a “fasting of the mind” and a “vacuity, a waiting for the presence of whatever thing may come.” [11] More ‘prosaically,’ we can summarize that the practice that Uncle Dim Nobody teaches Zichan and Shen Tujia is one of manifesting a mirror-like mind and of forgetting (identities, distinctions, forms, judgments, framings) in order to openly respond to the myriad different beings one might encounter. In meditation, Daoists practice loosening the narrow focus of attention, opening it up to the broad field in which this focus is situated. As the Daodejing (the other great Daoist classic) describes, desires, evaluations, and language make cuts in the broad field of experience, separating a valued focus from an unnoticed or even disvalued background. To be open to the whole of reality and its transformations, the task is therefore to settle into an awareness of both figure and background, of the ‘unhewn’ or the ‘uncut’ in which they ceaselessly emerge and transform. [12] We could also call this an ‘unframing’ of awareness that stays open and attentive to whatever frames may temporarily emerge. It is to be practiced and actualized not only in meditation but in everyday life as well.

These might be lofty ideals, but as ideals of everyday practice they have nothing particularly spiritual about them. And certainly, Zichan does not seem to actualize them in the way he treats Shen Tujia, receiving a well-earned lesson by the ex-convict.

However, this is not the end of the story. These Daoist practices are associated by Shen Tujia with the realm of the inner, while the social judgments about form, appearance, and status are situated in the realm of the outer. And here is where it gets more complicated, as Romain Graziani notes. [13]

With the distinction of the inner and the outer, Shen Tujia sets off the master’s hall as a specific spatial frame. There, we are in the realm of the inner, of Daoist cultivation of mirror-like mind and forgetting, while outside awaits the normal social world with its distinctions, forms, and framings. The gates of the hall separate these two spaces. Now, during the dialogue, the two characters find themselves in a peculiar moment: they are about to leave the hall, i.e. they are about to leave the open, formless space of the inner for the social, structured space of the outer. If we take this separation seriously, meaning that the ‘outside’ world of forms and distinctions will continue to obtain when the two step outside of the hall, a slight reversal of our judgment of Zichan’s wish might occur. That is, he is sitting right next to the convict, accepting his co-presence and the fact that they share the same master; yet knowing that outside other rules are at play and that he has to fulfill his role as an exemplary political figure, is it not a reasonable wish not to be seen together? Could one not even sense a hint of courteousness in his proposal for Shen Tujia to leave first, him waiting behind?

Of course, Zichan’s reaction to Shen Tujia’s last response, feeling “jolted as if by a swift kick,” [14] betrays the fact that some form of arrogance or feeling of superiority has been shaken in the conversation, so we should not exaggerate his generosity. Still, there is a problem. If the open, non-judgmental space is ‘inner’ and identified with the master’s hall, and the ‘outside’ space of form and social appearance with the exterior of that hall, we face several difficult questions. Is the hall merely a small refuge from the social world, providing a short-lived escape from it? What will persist from the mirror-like mind and the forgetting of the self when one steps out through the gates? Is not the hall of practice just a physical place, so clearly also part of the ‘outside’ world? How can there be a master in this inner space where all distinctions fall away and all selves are forgotten? Which conditions have allowed this space to exist and these specific students to learn with a Daoist master? Are these also ‘forgotten’ when engaging in practice?

A further complication comes from the fact, noted by Romain Graziani, that by stepping through the gates into this ‘inner realm,’ the two characters follow two different, diagonal social trajectories. Shen Tujia, by forgetting his lowly social standing and his being marked as a criminal, gains; Zichan, by abandoning his social status, loses. [15] From a less-than-nobody, Shen Tujia rises to become a nobody; from a definite, universally admired someone, Zichan descends to become a nobody. From this point of view, Shen Tujia’s insistence on the equality in the ‘inner’ could be seen as insistence on his own gain and Zichan’s loss. Does he not then just want to impose his space of preference on Zichan? Would it have been a more skillful response to generously grant Zichan his wish, responding to his manifest needs? Or could he have shown more subtlety: “Sure, if you think I might taint your reputation, I’ll be happy to let you leave first”—or something of the like.

Finally, one might introduce yet another reversal: Since, in Brook Ziporyn’s translation, Shen Tujia is speaking of the inner and outer side of the corporeal, one might read this as acknowledging that they are two complementary sides of the same bodily realm. Does he then not just remind Zichan to mind both sides of reality when he exaggerates the outer side of forms? Considering that, in most life situations, the outer space of distinctions prevails, a frame like the practice hall is a necessary counterweight. This does not mean that one could not live every situation with a mind turned both to the outside of appearances and the inside of empty(ing), equalizing openness. Elsewhere in the Zhuangzi, this simultaneity is called “Walking Two Roads” and explained with another short parable:

Once a monkey trainer was distributing chestnuts. He said, “I’ll give you three in the morning and four in the evening”. The monkeys were furious, “Well, then,” he said, “I’ll give you four in the morning and three in the evening.” The monkeys were delighted. […] He just went along with the “thisness,” relying on the rightness of the present “this.” Thus the Sage uses various rights and wrongs to harmonize with others, and yet remains at rest in the middle of Heaven the Potter’s Wheel. This is called Walking Two Roads. [16]

Rather than judging others for the partiality of their perspective, one might accept their idiosyncrasies and respond appropriately. In this case, Shen Tujia would only need to respond appropriately to the monkey in front of him. An open, broad mind and non-judgmental reaction can take on quite diverse forms in different situations—it can also demand of the Daoist practitioner not to judge the one that has a narrow-minded attitude.

Yet,—another reversal—would this not be mere opportunism, lack of courage to stand up against wrongdoing? Or even a form of lofty, arrogant withdrawal? Then, Shen Tujia would seem wise in his choice to confidently stand up for himself and to make Zichan aware of the partiality of his perspective, also in order that he too might participate more openly in the flow of perspectival transformation, starting with openness toward Shen Tujia.

That one is thrown in a series of reversals is characteristic of the Zhuangzi. It emphatically affirms that the only place of rest to be found is right in the middle of the “Radiance of Drift and Doubt,” the “Shadowy Splendor,” the “Tranquil Turmoil”—“in the middle of Heaven the Potter’s Wheel,” endlessly spinning, redistributing, and transforming beings and their perspectives. [17] It is the point where different modes of existence and of awareness meet and transform, where they can open up and into each other; where figure and background are in touch and where they might reverse—“the axis of courses [daos],” of different paths that one might follow. [18] Thus, Daoism intertwines confused obscurity and bright, open awareness. It invites us to pay close attention to these points of contact, confusion, and reversal, and even to settle into them as a center from which to perceive and act.

In any case, the encounter brings both Zichan and Shen Tujia endless opportunities to engage, to learn, and to openly transform. One can at least argue that the practice hall has facilitated these possibilities. In fact, we can now see it as a meeting place between two beings with very different perspectives and social standings; between the ‘outer’ social world with its framings and the ‘inner’ world of empty forgetting. In the practice hall, one is right at the threshold of these opposing ways of being, at the confusing point where they touch. It is both a counterweight to the outer world of forms and framings (as a place of mirror-like emptiness) and a peculiar site where both worlds meet.

Now let us jump over to our times. Buddhism, and especially Zen Buddhism, which is largely influenced by Daoism, is continuously, if slowly growing. [19] It has become one of the most popular forms of meditative practice in ‘modern’ societies.

The way Zen meditation is taught and practiced is very reminiscent of what we have encountered in the Zhuangzi. The image of a mirror-like mind is often employed, or of an empty sky that welcomes everything without retaining it. It is often termed ‘just sitting,’ and a ‘forgetting’ of the self is a basic Buddhist practice. A contemporary teacher, Christian Dillo, describes it as becoming intimate with the ‘field of mind,’ in which new foci continually emerge. The practice lies in not getting narrowed down and clinging on the focus (habits, desires, and language tend to have that effect), but to maintain the whole open field of awareness, to get a ‘feel’ for it—just as was described above in relation to the Daodejing. This is notably a somatic practice, or rather a practice of the whole body-mind, which are not separated in Buddhism: it cultivates bodily and perceptive awareness down to its most subtle variations. [20]

Zen is also replete with engagements of the relation between the empty, transforming openness (practiced in particular in seated meditation), which knows no names or hierarchies, and everyday life with its distinctions and roles. This tension is notably discussed as the relation of emptiness and form. [21] The Zen ideal is actualizing emptiness in all encounters with the world of form—that is, acting from a generous and broad openness, while being maximally responsive to the particular energies, existences, needs, affects—situations—at hand; a maximum openness to the interrelatedness of and with all beings one encounters, including one’s own self in its multiplicity, and a great welcoming of them with clarity. [22]

In what settings and forms is Zen being practiced today? The main places of Zen practice are Zen centers in urban areas and Zen monasteries, often situated in more rural or natural settings. More specifically, the zendo is a dedicated hall or room with places for seated meditation and a shrine. Zen communities range from the more traditional to the more flexible. Some are tied to large church-like institutions, such as the Japanese Sōtō school, or to global associations like the Korean Kwan Um School. Some (like Sōtō) place heavy emphasis on ritual: dress codes; which foot to use to step into the meditation hall; how to bow; how to hold one’s hands; where practitioners of different seniority should sit, etc. On the other hand, secularized groups can be laxer, only ensuring that participants can quietly sit in a circle.

In any case, the meditation hall is treated as a special frame, where emptiness and openness are cultivated. Participants are mostly silent, except for chanting, talks by teachers, and time for questions. Exchange between participants is reserved for tea after meditation in urban centers and to special periods during the day in monasteries. A certain discreetness concerning personal matters is often advised in order to give all practitioners a sufficient space of silence. In all these variations of the practice, we can recognize the centrality of building a space where social or more generally symbolic framings can be forgotten.

It is important to note, then, that what might seem apolitical or set apart from the ‘real’ world is thus first of all a space of utopian potential: an open, empty space, welcoming all practitioners regardless of the conditions that have influenced their lives so far—just like the master’s hall in the Zhuangzian anecdote. Yet, upon closer look, similar paradoxes come to the fore.

Taking one place of practice that I have spent several months at as an example, the French-German Sōtō monastery in Alsace, Ryumonji, gives a good feel for the paradoxes at hand. The monastery housed a quite diverse group of residents, both in terms of nationality and of socioeconomics. Everybody was welcome to join for a while, as long as they contributed to communal practice, including communal work. However, residents had to pay a small fee for rent and only some could be offered a salary by the monastery. Hence, some had to live on benefits, if not lucky enough to have their own financial means. The monastery mainly financed itself through donations, small subsidies from the region, and the contributions of the many people coming for short retreats. These were mostly educated and middle-class, and very diverse in age. The groups were reasonably racially and ethnically mixed, but much less so than the makeup of German and French populations would suggest, there being a predominance of White people.

While at the monastery, people could mostly leave their social selves behind, as one could very well avoid talking about one’s private life, although exchange was possible during breaks, and most participated in it with curiosity. The formalization of bodily postures in different settings also served this ‘forgetting,’ although it might be questioned how equally accessible it was for people of different backgrounds.

The organization of the monastery was a mix of hierarchical and democratic: the more senior residents had more authority, with the abbot at the top, but there also were regular meetings for collective decision-making. A clear distinction was also made in who was allowed to teach: only nuns and monks had the official authorization, passed on to them by a Zen master.

Thus, the monastery, more specifically the meditation hall, represented a place of practice empty of the hierarchies and conditions that frame people’s lives, at the same time, it was intricately intertwined with them. The emptying openness was a place of refuge, often for people in moments of crisis seeking a place where they could find a new opening: a rare sanctuary. But it was also at risk of hiding real and important differences in this forgetting.

Some forms of practice at the monastery cultivated the simultaneity of emptiness and form: communal work practice for the maintenance of the monastery, for instance, or the attention paid to ecological questions and interspecies cohabitation, and the chaplain work of some monks and nuns.

Such turning outwards is even more emphasized by proponents of Engaged Buddhism, for instance of the Plum Village school of Thich Nhat Than. It has engaged in anti-war activism, refugee help, and (offers of) special programs for educators or climate activists.

It is interesting to note that, from one of the movements that has been the most criticized for being apolitical or even reactionary, the ‘mindfulness’ movement, have issued several initiatives aimed at the socioeconomically disadvantaged, such as the Radical Mindfulness Training project. [25] It seeks to combine a practice of awareness of one’s body, feelings, and thoughts with awareness of the interpersonal, institutional, and systemic factors entering into and conditioning one’s situation, notably through open discussions. This initiative has achieved impressive results: marginalized persons feeling more connected to their situation and like having a clearer view of the broader factors that brought them to where they are; blaming themselves less; and being more confident to stand up for themselves. They speak for the fact, that in order to practice the broad, welcoming openness at the center of both Daoist and Buddhist meditation, one might need to go some way to acknowledge the myriad relational factors that make up individual human beings. In one way, this is no surprise, as dependent origination is one of the main teachings of the Buddha. However, it stands as a reminder that the mirror-like mind cannot stop at the personal and local, but has to be broad, that the forgetting has to be keenly aware of what it is forgetting.

A letting go, an equalizing opening up, still begins from a multitude of different paths and positions that might need to be articulated and confronted—somewhat like in the dialogue between Shen Tujia and Zichan. The Daoist and Zen Buddhist practices of emptying and forgetting, of resting in a broad awareness of the unlimited field in which existences, foci, evaluations, and judgments continually emerge, transform, and vanish, have inestimable value in refining a sensibility for the ways our experience and thinking is continually shaped by ever newly emerging framings, none of which final. Therefore, places of practice, like Ryumonji, where this empty openness is cultivated carry utopian potential with regard to the framings of societal life, so often hierarchical, marginalizing, and exploitative, and the habits of judging and evaluating which actualize them. Together with emancipatory thought, they can offer an important counterweight to the powerful energies of judgment and evaluation—even going deeper into the body, its habits and desires, than thought is most often capable of.

However, these places cannot but be paradoxical in their status. They are still human spaces, with all the habits, the desires, and the conditioning of thoughts and perceptions human beings bring with them, and interrelated with their surrounding societies and ecologies. Often, the paradox is resolved toward the apolitical or quietism, helped by an anti-intellectualist reading of Zen (‘let go of thinking’) and its tendency to emphasize the ‘here and now,’ which when glossed over too quickly can lead to a devaluation of the ‘elsewhere,’ so important for critical thought about structural relations of domination, exploitation, or marginalization. The Zhuangzian anecdote, as well as the examples of Engaged Buddhism and the Radical Mindfulness Training project, show ways in which emptiness, forgetting, and mirror-like openness can be combined with critical reflection and thus brought into the middle of the tangles of society.

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