溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is Life as Brief as a White Colt Darting Past a Gap?
If a life is as brief as a shadow flashing past a crack, with what shall we fill that instant?
Human life between heaven and earth is like a white colt darting past a crack.
Zhuangzi's image of "a white colt darting past a crack" became a wellspring of Eastern literature singing life's transience. Yet Zhuangzi's conclusion was not sorrow over transience but the detachment of accepting life and death as a natural alternation like day and night. This view differs in grain from Ovid or Seneca, who sang the same brevity — where the Western carpe diem said "it is brief, so seize it," Zhuangzi said "it is brief, so do not be bound." Whether to grip or release before a fleeting life split into different wisdoms, East and West, watching the same light pass a crack.
In an age heavy with the haste to cram a brief life full, this question — that life is like light past a crack — makes us pause again between filling and letting go.
Zhuangzi carves the brevity of a life in a dazzling image: the instant a white colt darts past a crack in the door — just so is the time a human abides between heaven and earth.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Zhuangzi carves the brevity of a life in a dazzling image: the instant a white colt darts past a crack in the door — just so is the time a human abides between heaven and earth. It comes in the blink of an eye and vanishes as suddenly. I sense this question does not end in a sigh of emptiness. Rather than fear this brevity, Zhuangzi urges us to accept life and death as one fold of nature and loosen the bound heart. What am I filling that light-like instant past the crack with? I look back too.
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