I was born near Sydney, Australia, in 1972.

When I was twenty-four I attempted to kill myself with sedatives. My lack of pharmaceutical knowledge meant that I survived, which was a piece of good luck. Prior to taking those pills I’d been a painfully self-conscious person. My childhood had been a violent, lonely existence, with fantasies of suicide seducing me from a young age. I’d experienced the world and human relationships as things that I looked out upon as from behind a glass wall. Way back at the beginning, from behind the glass wall, I played with Lego blocks. Later, the piano. I practised scales. Learnt Bach, and Chopin. Just prior to taking the tablets I’d completed degrees in philosophy and law. Lego blocks, scales, by any other name. Still behind the glass wall I still had not the slightest idea how to make my way in the world. My other problem was that I was in a relationship with an emotionally unstable woman. I was very attracted to her bright eyes, her emotional expressiveness, her sense of adventure—and to the unspoken contract we had: that she would take me by the hand and lead me out and into the world, and I would provide her with calm and meaning and empathy. As it turned out, that bargain didn’t work so well for me, but I’ve always been grateful that her sense of out-of-control drama helped to push me over the edge, allowed me, finally, to give myself permission to do what I’d always wanted to do: kill myself.

Being an atheist I’d expected death to be final, so it’s a curious thing that when I awoke in the afterlife I didn’t question it. I knew that I’d died, but that seemed far away and long ago. What was close and present was the peace I felt. It was a peace I’d not known before.

What was this peace?

It has taken me many years to find a language to fully articulate the change I’d experienced, but within weeks of waking up I did come up with an image that I called the ego castle. I’d never noticed that I was living in this castle, but after I woke up from taking those tablets I found myself standing outside the castle, and then I saw it. Its courtyards and rooms. Its high, stone walls. That grand realm that had once been all the world—what a small, claustrophobic structure it now seemed.

Standing in the open space of the world, my self-consciousness was gone.

The simplest things shone with vibrant beauty.

A cut orange.

A light-filled bus.

A rat in a cage.

I met the rat when I began studying psychology a few months after the suicide attempt. My task was to train the rat to push a lever. It was an easy thing to do. When the rat happened to touch the lever I rewarded it with a sip of sugar water. This reward caused the rat to keep pushing the lever. Prior to taking the suicide tablets I’d probably have seen this as a nightmare illustration of authoritarian control, or as a despairing image of how we are all doomed to follow our cause-and-effect trajectories in life like balls on a billiard table. But now, having woken up from being dead, I saw this rat’s circumstance as something divine and beautiful. I saw that we are all rats in a cage: delicate, vulnerable beings unknowingly conditioned by this and that to do this and that, feel this and that, think this and that. My heart went out to that little rat, so innocently going about its business, bright eyed and engaging with the world. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was a miracle. Consciousness engaging with the world. I felt such tender love for this rat. And wonder—in response to our innocence and vulnerability, and in response to this mystery in which we all find ourselves.

Around the same time as meeting the rat I chanced upon a story from the Chuang Tzu: the story of the wheelwright. It’s about a duke sitting up on a podium reading a philosophical book, and a lowly wheelwright down in the courtyard making a wheel. The wheelwright boldly points out to the duke that the book he’s studying is just the dregs of the lived life of the sage who wrote it. Offended, the duke threatens death. And yet—he’s curious. He offers to spare the wheelwright if he can explain himself. The wheelwright explains how he’s tried to teach wheel-making to his son, to no avail. His words were useless because wheel-making is something you have to do. The wheelwright can’t put it into words. It’s something he feels in his hands and his heart. His words are just the dregs of his lived experience.

I recognised that I was that duke. Having lived my life behind a glass wall, I knew nothing about real life. I’d observed others out in the world making wheels, conversing, playing on the beach, and not knowing how to do any of these things myself, I’d spent my life up on a podium studying the words of the sages. I’d been diligent and I was good at it. Not brilliant, but good. I’d been proud of having written prize-winning essays on how to live, and I’d argued scathingly against anyone who disagreed with me. I felt embarrassed remembering this. Those proud, prize-winning words of mine were just the rearranged dregs of other people’s lives. I was someone who knew all the theory of wheel making, but who couldn’t make a wheel.

Inspired by the wheelwright story I went to the library and found a translation of the Chuang Tzu. (This was back in the days before internet.) The translation, in hindsight, was poor. But even in this poor translation I sensed that here was the language, here were the images that expressed what I’d awoken to, and what I now needed to learn.

The Chuang Tzu’s opening story struck me. An unfathomably large bird rising from the northern darkness, its wings spanning to the horizon. Having recently stepped out of the ego castle I recognised that this bird represented awareness, the field of consciousness, the spaciousness I was now awake to.

Immediately following the story of the large, silent bird was a story about a little, chirping cicada. I knew this cicada well. I’d lived with him all my life. This chirping cicada was my chirping brain, ceaselessly theorising about this and that.

So, I’d now met the duke and the wheelwright, and the cicada and the bird.

I kept reading—this poor, in hindsight, translation, but this translation that was good enough to engage me, to let me know that its author knew what I had awoken to (awareness) and was now wanting to know (how to live in the world). Here was a book that might show me how to put down books and how to pick up a mallet and make wheels.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was to spend the next twenty-five years learning Classical Chinese and working on translating Chuang Tzu’s imagery.

That’s quite a gap, yes? Twenty-five years from my initial awakening to producing this translation. Why so long?

My life since stepping out of the ego castle has zig-zagged here and there. Although free of the ego castle, although having awoken to the spaciousness of the world, I still had a lot to learn about myself and others and the world. Learning to make wheels takes hands-on practise and time.

After a brief stint as a plain-language legal drafter, I picked up a part-time job at a drug detox-centre as a lowly (by society’s standards) detox worker. My feeling was, ‘I could be dead, yet here I am.’ The whistle had blown, the points tallied, the crowd had left the stadium; and the groundskeeper had graciously granted us some extra time to play at our leisure. So I worked at the detox centre. I studied psychology, one unit at a time: at first on campus, and then by correspondence. I took up yoga. I played around with the Chuang Tzu—not translating it (at this time the idea of learning Classical Chinese was no more in my mind than the idea of flying to the moon), but rewriting this and that story from the existing translations, creating renditions that spoke to me. I left the city and moved to a beachside hippyville, my head filled with vaguely-sketched visions of free love and philosophical comradeship.

All up, this simple joy of playing in the world lasted four years. Then my demons returned. One by one they snuck up on me. Loneliness. Frustration with the New Age nonsense that was the native language in the hippyville. Resentment over not having a lover. Yoga became a chore. One missed day became two, which became three, which became—. When I’d moved to the hippyville I’d happened to land a dream job as a counsellor at a famous drug-rehab centre, only to find that I was out of my depth. I remember one day looking at a psychology study and thinking, ‘I just can’t do this. This inane study is in no way helping me to function as a therapist.’ I put the paper down and I picked up a joint. I quit my job at the rehab centre and I walked into the social security office. Thoughts of suicide returned. I’d awoken to awareness and yet my needs were not being met. I felt like the king who had discovered a pure spring up in the mountains and who then saw that the villagers were drinking from a poisoned well that was making them all a bit mad. When the king told the village folk about the pure spring, they just looked at him quizzically. Sometimes a concerned, well-meaning soul would rush to the poisoned well to get him a drink. He tried building an aqueduct to direct the mountain water down into the village, but the task was beyond him. After four years of this his loneliness started to get to him and create its own sort of madness. It started to seem to him that if he was to cleanse himself of the toxic effects of loneliness he’d have to go down into the village and drink from the poisoned well that everyone else was drinking from. This dilemma marked the beginning of the next phase of my awakening.

Years passed. Five, ten, fifteen. Early on I realised that if I was going to make proper sense of Chuang Tzu there was nothing for it but to learn Classical Chinese. There I was searching for Chuang Tzu in other people’s translations, and of course it was ridiculous. We don’t know our friends by second-hand reports. If I was to know what Chuang Tzu says, I would have to read his words. But O, to learn Classical Chinese—that was a daunting prospect. And yet—others had managed it, why not me? I have a brain, and time on my hands. So I got myself a Chinese-English dictionary, a Classical Chinese grammar guide, and a copy of the Chinese text and began, sinograph by sinograph, phrase by phrase, learning Classical Chinese. At some point I studied Gestalt psychotherapy and spent years seeing now this, now that therapist. I took up jogging. And meditating. I bought an old timber house and learnt how to use a saw and how to turn a wall into a window. I cycled through relationships and aloneness. I worked as a disabilities support worker, a mental health support worker, a youth worker, a dish pig. I studied nursing and, degree fresh in hand, neck deep in the hierarchical social madness of a medical ward, learnt that my calling really is psychotherapy after all—so I went back and finished the psychology degree. This time round I was ready: I wasn’t looking for approval; I wasn’t looking for guidance; I was simply looking for an arena in which to act. So I dutifully jumped through the inane hoops of university study, snatched the piece of paper, and landed a job as an addictions counsellor at my local health service. This time round, working as a psychotherapist was as effortless as a duck wading on water. Somehow all those lost years of loneliness and wandering, of jogging out into the countryside and committing to a meditation practice, and learning to use a saw, and to give an injection, and to navigate the coastlines and inlets of relationships—these activities and experiences had developed my sense of place and competence in the world.

Through it all Chuang Tzu was my companion. It has taken me twenty-five years to produce this translation, not because it has taken me twenty-five years to learn Classical Chinese, but because it has taken me twenty-five years to discover and embody in my own life the wisdom that Chuang Tzu’s stories express.

Sitting here now, twenty-five years on from having found myself on the outside of the ego castle, I can say that I have never re-entered that prison. Stepping out of that castle was a threshold step, a one-way step into freedom and spaciousness. But looking back over the past twenty-five years I see that ego takes on many forms. By a gift of pure luck—of grace—I’d escaped the ego castle, and what would you know? It turns out that ego has little huts scattered about here and there. Since finding myself on the outside of the ego castle I have now and then taken up lodgings in this and that little ego-hut. Wallowing in self-pity over not having a lover. Resenting the worldly success of people I judge to be unworthy of it. Lamenting that all the world is drinking from a poisoned well.

But I kept at it, experimenting and exploring.

I learnt that mere awareness of awareness easily becomes passivity and resignation, and that out of passivity and resignation grows resentment and despair. And gradually, bit by bit, I learnt how to make space for pain and doubt, how to actively engage with the world with skill, gratitude, and good humour. Bit by bit I began to value and trust myself, and to allow that others sometimes simply lack the capacity to see what I see. Ironically, this freed me to value and trust others. I came to see that I am a precious child of Nature, and that others, too, are her precious children (my brothers and sisters), and that just as kookaburras and echidnas have different ways of going about things, so too do I and others. Kookaburra doesn’t lament that Echidna is an echidna. Kookaburra greets the dawn with a joyful heart and sings his song. He keeps an eye out for other kookaburras and when among his own kind plays kookaburra games, but being a sociable type he also learns the ways of the other bushland folk. Echidnas in particular are enticing and tricky playmates. They have soft, adorable snouts, but also a maddening habit of curling into a ball and communicating with quills. Those quills have a sting to them, no mistake; but Kookaburra is quick on his feet and when the play becomes too tiresome, he has his wings.

I’ve laid out these details, these thinly sketched excerpts from the zig-zag of my life, because I think they illustrate an important aspect of what awakening involves. For me, awakening has been a two-step process. First was the initial awakening: stepping out of the ego castle and into the spaciousness of the world. That was a sudden, good-luck, all-changing experience. A gift of grace. Step two has been a longer, drawn-out process of gradual exploring and clumsy trial-and-error learning. It’s a process that is ongoing, that continues to this day. Like wheel making. Your first wheel is a mess. And your second. And with practise you get better at it. And even when you think you’ve mastered it; even when, indeed, you have mastered it—for let’s not be falsely, stupidly modest; let’s not put up before us unrealistic ideals of what it means to master life—there is always this: each new piece of wood presents new challenges. 

One reason I love Chuang Tzu is that he doesn’t shy from the realities—the complexities and hardships—of life. He doesn’t badger us with Pollyanna platitudes and solutions. Any monkey can do that. I myself have been one of those monkeys, badgering myself and others with my Pollyanna—my pedestal—wisdom, my ‘You should be this. Just do that. All is well, so just be happy.’ No, Chuang Tzu is not a Pollyanna monkey. He does not preach from a pedestal. Chuang Tzu is a compassionate companion. A fellow traveller. He does offer answers, but his answers are the sort that allow us to make peace with uncertainty and unwanted circumstances. And in the depths of our uncertainty, our now-and-then despair, he helps us to once again see the nurturing, ever-present light of love and wonder. The straight line in the zig-zag. He reminds us how to remain engaged, how to remain connected with a sense of play.

This, then, is what I have learnt from Chuang Tzu, and what I hope to share with you. That you, if you have not already, can step free of the ego castle and into the spacious wonder of awareness. And that you can learn to navigate the little ego-huts and engage with the beauty of your here-and-now circumstances. And that you can find a faithful companion in Chuang Tzu. A companion who acknowledges your hardships, who is at peace with the zig-zags of life. A companion who, through his companionship, turns hardship into gratitude and play.

~

Now that you know a little about me, you might be wondering: Who are you, Mr Tricker, to translate Chuang Tzu?

It’s a fair question. I’ve asked it myself.

It’s especially fair because my interpretation of Chuang Tzu is in some ways unique. Most unique is that I interpret the large bird Of a Flock (Chapter 1.1) to be a metaphor for awareness, the field of here-and-now consciousness. No native Chinese scholar has ever interpreted Of a Flock in this way. (For that matter, no Western scholar has either.) Which raises the question: How likely is it that I, a nobody Australian, have discovered in Chuang Tzu things that native Chinese scholars have not? Isn’t it more likely that I’m misreading Chuang Tzu, that I’m projecting thoughts onto his writing that he didn’t think?

I’ve come to see that modern English speakers are no less qualified to interpret Chuang Tzu’s Classical Chinese than are native Chinese folk. To use an analogy, here’s why:

Consider the Old English poem Beowulf, written sometime around AD 1000. Here’s the opening line:

Hpæt pe garde na ingear dagum þeod cyninga þrym ge frunon huða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

OK, this comparison is unfair because Classical Chinese uses the same sinographs as modern Chinese. So let’s replace the Old English words with modern English words:

What we spear-dane plural in-days gone people kings glory hear past-tense how princes valour accomplished.

For we modern English speakers, Old English is a foreign language. And AD 1000 Great Britain is a foreign land. Were a native Chinese person to try their hand at translating and interpreting Beowulf they’d be no less qualified than a native English person who set themselves the same task. Both the native Chinese person and the native English person would have to apply themselves to learning a long-dead language from a long-dead land.

My fellow native English speaker, how’d you go with that sentence of Old English? Well, with a good dictionary, an Old English grammar guide, some background research into AD 1000 British history, and an ear for poetry, you might come up with something like this:

Behold! We spear-Danes in days of old heard the glory of the tribal kings, how the princes did courageous deeds.

It may indeed be that I’ve projected thoughts onto Chuang Tzu’s writing that Chuang Tzu didn’t think. And it may be that I haven’t. It may be that, until me, the sort of scholarly person who has bothered to learn Chuang Tzu’s Classical Chinese has not been the sort of person you need to be, and has not lived the sort of life you need to live, to see what Chuang Tzu saw. Dear reader, if you do decide that I’ve projected thoughts onto Chuang Tzu’s writing that Chuang Tzu didn’t think—fair enough. But the reason you come to that conclusion should not be that I’m not a native Chinese scholar. The native Chinese scholar, no less than me, is just a person who has learnt a foreign language from a foreign land. A long dead language from a long dead land.

We translators, Chinese and English alike, are on equal ground here. We are archaeologists doing the best we can, as studiously as we can, to recreate a lost world.

A world, as it turns out, that is here-and-now present.

A world that you, you who have eyes that see, can see.

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