The Way of Chuang-Tzu
Profiles in Right-Hemispherism
Seven and a half centuries before Bodhidharma started Zen by melding Buddhism to Taoism, Chuang-Tzu danced through the world.
This sly jester is second only to the old sage Lao-Tzu in Tao greatness.
Chuang-Tzu championed wu-wei—the art of non-doing, of letting the world spin without your sweaty grip on the wheel. His wu-wei sprang from a bone-deep humility, a refusal to claw for anything, not even the shiny bauble of self-betterment.
This humility poured from his vision of the Tao, that shadowy, untouchable force that laughs at the puny nets of human understanding, especially the kind stitched from the brittle threads of logic, categories, and rules. The left hemisphere deifies those things like Polynesian primitives bowing before totem poles.
Not Chuang-Tzu.
He rejected all lures that require striving. Striving, he preached, is the sound of your own defeat. Even straining for virtue or goodness is a fool’s errand, a pompous parade of self-aggrandizement. The man who aches to polish his soul is already sneering at what he is, dreaming himself grander than the dirt under his feet. That’s pride, plain and ugly, the very poison Chuang-Tzu sought to purge.
Instead, he whispered:
Sink into your smallness.
Embrace the plain, the obscure, the unimportant.
Be content with the unremarkable truth of your existence.
In this, Chuang-Tzu’s words cut like a blade through a knot that has long strangled left-hemispheric attempts to understand Christian mystics: the paradox that yearning for selflessness is itself a selfish act.
Chuang-Tzu’s right hemisphere dissolves the paradox. Practice a humility so deep it’s content to be nothing. Rest in your simplicity, littleness, quiet, and unheralded place in the vast, indifferent swirl of the Tao.
