溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
His Wife Has Died — Why Drum on a Pot and Sing?
Before the death of the closest one, is the state of receiving it calmly, beyond grief, like the turning of the seasons — coldness, or a deeper love?
When she first died, how could I alone not grieve? Yet looking back to the beginning, I saw there had been no life to begin with.
This question split East Asian thought over how to meet the grief of death. The Confucians bade one render death its due grief and rites, and the three-year mourning and the ritual wailing were a way of honoring human feeling. Zhuangzi went to the opposite place — life and death are one great change alternating like the four seasons (the gathering and scattering of vital breath), so do not clutch death as a special tragedy but release it as the course of things. This was not a coldness that suppresses grief, but a peace reached at the end of gazing at it. Later Tao Yuanming carried on this spirit, singing that he would "yield to the waves of the great change, neither glad nor afraid." To render grief its rites or to release it as nature's course — Zhuangzi's song at the pot most beautifully held one pole of that fork.
For us who easily either choke down the grief of parting or clutch it without end, Zhuangzi's song — passing through grief to release it into the great current — quietly teaches another texture of mourning.
When his friend Huizi came to mourn, he found Zhuangzi, his wife just dead, drumming on a pot and singing.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
When his friend Huizi came to mourn, he found Zhuangzi, his wife just dead, drumming on a pot and singing. To the friend who reproached him as heartless, Zhuangzi answered — at first I too grieved, but life comes from where there was none and returns there again, and now my wife rests easy in the great chamber of heaven and earth. To wail and follow after her would be to fail to know the mandate. I sense this song does not deny grief but passes through it to another place. The calm of receiving death like the seasons is not coldness but a peace at the end of long looking. I stand before this question too, still wavering between the heart that weeps clutching the one who left and the heart that releases them into the great current.
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