Because It Is Useless Timber, It Lives Out Its Years

answered by Zhuangzi, "The Mountain Tree"

기원전 4세기경

🎬 TODAY'S FILM — IT ASKS THIS

Chihwaseon (2002)

dir. Im Kwon-taek · South Korea

Turning his back on rank and the approval of the gentry, a painter wanders his whole life chasing only his own brushwork. The world calls him self-indulgent, yet it is only within that self-indulgence that his painting comes to completion.

THE QUESTION THE FILM ASKS

To turn one's back on social recognition and chase one's own artistic soul — is that self-indulgence, or freedom?

THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER · ORIGINAL

此木以不材得終其天年。

📜 THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER

This tree, precisely because it was useless as timber, was able to live out the full span of years given to it by heaven.

💡 TL;DR

Zhuangzi said that only the useless tree, unfelled, lives out the full span heaven gave it.

📝The Classic Answers

Zhuangzi said that only the useless tree, unfelled, lives out the full span heaven gave it. A painter who wandered with nothing but a brush, indifferent to status and propriety, was, by the world's measure, useless timber. But because he was never confined by propriety, he could push his own brushwork all the way to its end. Paintings that could never have emerged had he stayed within society's fixed frame of usefulness were born from that freedom which looked like self-indulgence. Whenever someone's art looks irresponsible to me, I look again to see whether that very irresponsibility is, in fact, the freedom they have kept.

— ONGO · Curator

🌱Apply It Today

If you meet someone's seemingly 'useless' devotion today, consider what freedom it is actually protecting.

📖 Classic Source: Zhuangzi, "The Mountain Tree". Ancient text in the public domain; rendered and interpreted independently by ONGO.
The film is honored as an equal questioner; its plot is rendered only as a universal dilemma. The classic source is an ancient text (Public Domain), and the reflection is 100% original ONGO content.