Play seems to constitute an important part of a flourishing human life. Most of us experience play through things like simple childhood games of hide-and-go-seek or more intellectual activities like chess or go. What these experiences of play have in common is that they are circumscribed in various ways to the times, places, and circumstances established by the boundaries and rules of those games. But what if the attitudes that we bring to play were applied to our lives more broadly? In this episode we explore the concept of play as a way of life. We explore it with Professor Pauline Lee (Saint Louis University), an expert in Chinese thought, focusing on the famous “gourd passage” from Chapter One of the Zhuangzi.
Please check out Professor Pauline C. Lee’s faculty profile and list of publications here.
Key passages
The gourd passage (Zhuangzi, chapter 1)
惠子謂莊子曰：「魏王貽我大瓠之種，我樹之成而實五石，以盛水漿，其堅不能自舉也。剖之以為瓢，則瓠落無所容。非不呺然大也，吾為其無用而掊之。」莊子曰：「夫子固拙於用大矣。宋人有善為不龜手之藥者，世世以洴澼絖為事。客聞之，請買其方百金。聚族而謀曰：『我世世為洴澼絖，不過數金；今一朝而鬻技百金，請與之。』客得之，以說吳王。越有難，吳王使之將。冬，與越人水戰，大敗越人，裂地而封之。能不龜手一也，或以封，或不免於洴澼絖，則所用之異也。今子有五石之瓠，何不慮以為大樽而浮乎江湖，而憂其瓠落無所容？則夫子猶有蓬之心也夫！」
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “The king of Wei gave me some seeds of a huge gourd. I planted them, and when they grew up, the fruit was big enough to hold five piculs. I tried using it for a water container, but it was so heavy I couldn’t lift it. I split it in half to make dippers, but they were so large and unwieldy that I couldn’t dip them into anything. It’s not that the gourds weren’t fantastically big—but I decided that they were of no use, so I smashed them to pieces.”
Zhuangzi said, “You certainly are dense when it comes to using big things! In Song there was a man who was skilled at making a salve to prevent chapped hands, and generation after generation his family made a living by bleaching silk in water. A traveller heard about the salve and offered to buy the prescription for a hundred measures of gold. The man called everyone to a family council. ‘For generations we’ve been bleaching silk, and we’ve never made more than a few measures of gold,’ he said. ‘Now if we sell our secret, we can make a hundred measures in one morning. Let’s let him have it!’ The traveller got the salve and introduced it to the king of Wu, who was having trouble with the state of Yue. The king put the man in charge of his troops, and that winter they fought a naval battle with the state of Yue and gave them a bad beating. A portion of the conquered territory was awarded to the man as a fief. The salve had the power to prevent chapped hands in either case; but one man used it to get a fief, while the other never got beyond silk bleaching—because they used it in different ways. Now you had a gourd big enough to hold five piculs. Why didn’t you think of making it into a great tub so you could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things! Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!”
(Zhuangzi, chapter 1, Burton Watson’s translation)
The last part of the monkey-trainer passage (Zhuangzi, chapter 1)
名實未虧，而喜怒為用，亦因是也。是以聖人和之以是非，而休乎天鈞，是之謂兩行。
This change brought them no loss either in name or in fact,
But in one case it brought anger and in another delight.
He just went along with the ‘thisness,’ relying on the rightness of the
present ‘this.’ Thus, the Sage uses various rights and wrongs to harmonize
with others, and yet remains at rest in the middle of Heaven the Potter’s
Wheel. This is called Walking Two Roads.
(Zhuangzi, chapter 2, Brook Ziporyn’s translation)
Sources and phrases mentioned
Pauline C. Lee, “Zhuangzi at Play 遊” (draft from February 9, 2024)
Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water
Thomas Pynchon (author)
Haruki Murakami 村上 春樹 (author)
Robin Hobb, Liveship Traders (book series)
Robert Graves, I, Claudius
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Li Zhi 李贄/李贽 (Ming-dynasty philosopher)
-Lee’s book on Li Zhi, Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire
Cool Runnings (film)
Eddie the Eagle (Michael David Edwards, British ski jumper…there’s a film on him too)
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (on the magic circle)
Edward Slingerland, Trying Not to Try (presents Huizi and Zhuangzi as exemplifying “categorical inflexibility” and “categorical flexibility,” respectively)
The Windsor Pumpkin Regatta (they can serve as watercraft)
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good
“The Bell Stand Maker” (“Woodcarver Qing,” Zhuangzi, chapter 19)
Li Zhi, “On the Childlike Mind” (translated by Lee in this book)
Helen De Cruz and Pauline Lee, “How to Be Useless”
This Is the Way, Episode 1: Daoist Detachment (episode in which we previously discussed “The Monkey Trainer” passage)
Tianjun 天鈞, “Heaven the potter’s wheel”
Liangxing 兩行, “walking two roads”
Thi C. Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art
Daoshu 道樞 (The axis of the Way, the pivot of the Way)
The Mozi, “Against Fate” (passage on the danger of trying to establish standards “on a spinning potter’s wheel”)
Mengsun Cai 孟孫才 (ch. 6, section 7, the “ideal” mourner who doesn’t actually feel sad about the people he’s mourning)
David Nivision, The Ways of Confucianism (see chapter 7 on the continuities between Zhuangzi and Xunzi)
Images
Picture of Pauline Lee from her Olympic era (1987 Skate America Championships):
A memento from Lee’s meeting with the Jamaican bobsled team of 1988:
Figure skater Debi Thomas spinning (Stanford ’91 😊, Olympics in 1988, bronze medalist – on the ease of movement upon finding in one’s center):
zhuangzi teaches huizi about compounding capital
in modern economic terms, huizi was trying to maximize the immediate utility of the gourd, while zhuangzi emphasized the returns from growth and innovation/creativity
Thank you for this stimulating new episode. As a basic interpretation matter, how can we say that in the Zhuangzi the character 遊 means “play”? This character 遊 (and not 游) appears around 90 times in the text, and many if not most of the times it is not related to any sort of “carefree manner” (i.e., 逍遙) or “joy” (e.g., 樂) or even to a sage who might enjoy a certain amount of “joy” (樂) and thus may be said to be at least typically “at play.”
Instead, this character 遊 is used in connection with a cardinal direction like 东, a specific place like 堯之門, or a particular area like 緇帷之林. Based on such usages, how does this character 遊 not simply mean “to journey” or “to travel”? Why in the text would “play” necessarily come into it?
Again and as this episode also gets into, for a sage this “journey” may entail a certain “play” as well as a further “playfulness.” The Zhuangzi Chapter 18 entry “The Death of Zhuangzi’s Wife” (莊子妻死), or “Drumming a Tub and Singing” (鼓盆而歌), perhaps best illustrates this point. In this “playful” story, Zhuangzi after a relatively brief period of mourning (“是其始死也，我獨何能無概然！”) returns to his particular style of “playing.” But for Huizi, the “journey” still involves a certain amount of confusion and “added” pain and suffering.
By way of further example, in the Chapter 11 dialogue in which a sagacious 鸿蒙 advises a seeking 雲將 on “journeying” (遊) and the latter twice “journeys east” (东遊), even in the end 雲將 still has much to learn. At the same time, doesn’t the Chapter 14 dialogue in which a sagely 黄帝 is “張咸池之樂於洞庭之野” indicate even for one who is like 北門成 and well along the path to self-realization, the journey, or there as it were “playing” (張…樂), still can be “frightening” (懼).
In sum, while in the Zhuangzi the best of “journeying” (遊) is akin to “play,” “journeying” even for a sage is not necessarily “play.” If we want to refer to the “play” of sages in general, we instead could invoke the character 樂, which means “joy” as well as perhaps “ease.” If we want to highlight Zhuangzi’s unique “playfulness,” which he most certainly exhibited including in comparison to other Daoists like Laozi and Guan Yin, we then can point to the Zhuangzi’s tales themselves as well as the text’s Chapter 33 biography of him.
Thank you again for this stimulating episode.
J.Pratt. See chapter 6 of D. Chai’s ‘Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness’
@medjed: nice. I do think that some parts of the Zhuangzi – including this one – lend themselves to that sort of economic analysis…the story about repurposing the salve in particular.
@J. Pratt: yes, those are good and fair points about you 遊 in the Zhuangzi. I don’t want to speak for Lee, but for what it’s worth, here’s my (very off-the-cuff) sense of the issues: first, her claims about the Zhuangzi‘s playfulness don’t depend on taking you 遊 to mean play. It would be enough that you strongly implies play or playfulness in certain contexts. And regardless of how we should read you, it’s certainly arguable that there is a sense of playfulness in the passages of the Zhuangzi. It’s also quite arguable that it recommends adopting a kind of playful attitude, as David Chai proposes in the book mentioned above by Guest.
As for the meaning of you – it’s tricky! Off the top of my head, I’d say that in some discursive contexts it strongly implies play, perhaps in roughly the same way that describing someone as “adventurous” strongly implies that they have an inclination to take risks. Describing someone as adventurous doesn’t always imply that they are inclined to take risks (sometimes, it just implies that they like to travel or have new experiences, risky or not). But in some contexts, the implication is unmistakable, so much so that it is often useful to list “inclined to take risks” among the possible definitions in a dictionary. Also, even when “being adventurous” implies “being inclined to take risks,” it also implies much more than that (being fond of new experiences, encountering unfamiliar things, etc.). Similarly, even when you is clearly implying play or playfulness, it also implies much more than that. All of this is just my longwinded way of saying that “means play” is too strong, but also that it’s fine to use some instances of you to track the Zhuangzi‘s understanding of play and playfulness.
I’m sure that there are people here in this forum that could offer a more precise and subtler take on the senses/significances/implicatures of you, and I’m happy to defer to them.
Oh, and I wouldn’t read much into the prevalence of 遊 by comparison with 游. I’m pretty sure that they were the same character in the various iterations of seal script. Sometimes, we might be able to use the later phonetic or semantic elements as a bit of evidence for how Han and post-Han editors and readers understood the original character, which could be evidence of how the character was traditionally read or which sense it was assumed to have. But I doubt that we could do that here. On this issue, too, there are more knowledgeable people than me who might chime in.