Omitted material

In the book, there are 70 pages of omitted material, with discussion about why the material is omitted. Here’s a sample to show you the sort of reasoning I use.

#5

Chapter 1, section 3, following
Everyone vies to match him.
Pitiful, no?
I’ve omitted

[A]

Ah, this is what Tang’s questions to Chi were about.¹

[B]

In the barren north there is a dark sea, the lake of heaven.
There is a fish in it.
His width is many thousands of miles.
No one knows his length.
His name is Speck of Roe.

There is a bird in it.
His name is Of a Flock.
His back is like Mount Tai.²
His wings are like clouds arcing across the heavens.

He catches a spiralling ram’s-horn air-current to ninety thousand miles.
When clear of the clouds, with the blue sky on his back, he sets course for the south and goes to the southern darkness.

Dismissive Quail laughs at this, saying:
Where’s he going?
I do a hop and a skip and up I go, not more than a few yards, and then down I go, soaring among the weeds and brambles.
This is the ultimate in flying.
So where’s he going?

[C]

These are the disputations about small and large.

Rationale. We seem, here, to have three separate sections of text: an editorial comment [A], a story [B], and an editorial comment [C]. The story [B] is surely extraneous material that has been editorially inserted. Graham³ proposes that it might be an early draft by Chuang Tzu of the chapter’s opening material. It strikes me as being someone’s poor imitation of Chuang Tzu’s text. Note how it includes phrases from the chapter’s opening section, as well as phrases from the material in #1 and #2. This text completely lacks the mythic mood and majestic pace of the opening sequence. In terms of specific imagery:

  • The mysterious ‘northern darkness’ is here replaced with a literal ‘dark sea’.

  • Whereas the lake of heaven is earlier identified with the southern darkness (#1), it is here identified with a dark sea in the barren north, which is confusing.

  • Speck of Roe’s metamorphosis into Of a Flock is here absent.

  • Speck of Roe’s size—it spans I don’t know how many thousands of miles—is here a more modest ‘many thousands of miles’, and Of a Flock’s size is a much more modest ‘like Mount Tai’ (an actual mountain).

The presence of this material plays havoc with the following paragraph about people whose knowledge suffices to carry out the duties of some office, and which ends with the comment that ‘their self-regard is just like that’. With the above material in place, the ‘that’ in this sentence refers to Dismissive Quail’s satisfaction with his little life, and his dismissal of Of a Flock’s large flight. But then it makes no sense that Master Honourable Sung laughs, because Master Honourable Sung’s life is no larger than Dismissive Quail’s, and he shows no appreciation of Of a Flock. As Chuang Tzu says, there’s something in which he hasn’t put down roots. Master Honourable Sung does not laugh at people’s being dismissive of Of a Flock’s flight, he merely laughs at how people believe their social positions to be a big deal when in fact they are small. What this comical conceit is like is the folly of people vying to match Grandfather Peng. People think that Grandfather Peng’s eight hundred years are large, which is comical given how small these years are compared to larger lifespans. The ‘that’ in ‘their self-regard is just like that’ refers to the self-regard of people who vie to match Grandfather Peng.

Footnotes

1. Tang founded the Shang dynasty (eighteenth century BC). Chi was one of his wise ministers. The Lieh Tzu (an AD third century text), Chapter 5, narrates Tang asking Chi a number of questions about the nature of space and time.

2. Mount Tai … A large mountain in the Kingdom of Chi.

3. Graham (1981) p. 45.

~

Graham, A. C. (1981). Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book of Chuang-tzu. Republished in 2001 under the title: Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co Inc.