Watching the Tree: A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Spiritual Beliefs and Universal Wisdom. Adeline Mah Yen

Zi was born about 200 years after Lao Zi and died shortly after 300 BC. He was from Mengshien in Henan province (the same province as Lao Zi) and held a minor post as an officer/administrator. In his book he tells us that one day, while he was fishing, two ambassadors from the southern state of Chu came to visit, bringing precious gifts from their ruler. They tried to persuade him to take up the post of prime minister but Zhuang Zi declined without even looking up from his fishing pole.

      He was married but childless. When his wife died, his disciples found him sitting on the ground with an inverted basin on his knee. Instead of mourning her, he was singing a song and beating time on the basin, while her coffin lay in a corner awaiting burial. Shocked at his behaviour, they questioned him. This was Zhuang Zi’s reply:

      ‘When she died, I was in despair. But soon, I told myself that in death, nothing new has happened. In the beginning, we lacked not only life, but form. Not only form, but spirit. We were blended in one great featureless indistinguishable mass. Then the time arrived when the mass evolved spirit, spirit evolved form and form evolved life.

      ‘Now life in turn has evolved death. Besides nature, man’s being also has its seasons; his own sequence of spring and autumn, summer and winter. If someone is tired and lies down to rest, we should not pursue him with cries and laments. I have lost my wife and she has laid down to sleep in the Great Inner Room. To disturb her with my tears would only demonstrate that I am ignorant of the Laws of Nature. That is why I am no longer mourning.’

      In another passage Zhuang Zi mused further about death:

      How do I know that wanting to be alive is not a great mistake? How do I know that hating to die is not like thinking one has lost one’s way, when all the time one is on the path that leads to home? …

      While a man is dreaming, he does not know that he dreams; nor can he interpret a dream till the dream is done. It is only when he wakes, that he knows it was a dream. Not till the Great Wakening can he know that all this was One Great Dream …

      He once had a vivid dream in which he was a butterfly fluttering from flower to flower. During the dream he was utterly convinced he was a butterfly. When he woke, he said to himself, ‘Am I Zhuang Zi dreaming I was a butterfly or am I a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi?’

      Zhuang Zi developed and refined the basic concepts of the Tao Te Ching and taught that the tao way is the way of Nature. It includes the substance as well as the manner in which the cosmos exists and acts. Over 2000 years before the birth of Einstein, who propounded that matter and energy are interchangeable, this ancient Chinese sage and his disciples had already suggested that the balance in the universe remains for ever the same. Zhuang Zi conceived of the cosmos as a stream in which one state succeeds another endlessly. Change is the only constant. Time never stops and no state can be retained. There is incessant transformation. However, while everything is changing, for each action there is a reaction so that the cosmic balance remains the same.

      When I first started to learn English in earnest, one of the English words that used to puzzle me was ‘universe’. The English-Chinese dictionary translated ‘universe’ into yu zhou. The Chinese word yu

means ‘space’; but zhou

means ‘infinite time’, or ‘time without beginning or end’. As teenagers, my third older brother James and I puzzled over the inclusion of ‘time’ into the concept of ‘space’ in translating ‘universe’ into yu zhou. A few years later, after James was admitted to Cambridge University in England, he sent me a note. ‘According to Einstein’s theory of relativity,’ he wrote, ‘our ancestors were correct all along. Our universe does consist of “space/time” and not space alone. Yu zhou is right on the money, after all.’

      While doing research for this book, I actually came across the words yu zhou in ancient Chinese books. It gave me a thrill to note the similarity between my ancestors’ conception of the universe and that of our greatest contemporary physicists.

      Zhuang Zi says, ‘Tao is real, is faithful, yet does nothing and has no form. Can be handed down, yet cannot be passed from hand to hand. Can be acquired but cannot be seen. Is its own trunk, its own root. Before heaven and earth existed, from the beginning, Tao was there.’

      In Taoism, the goal is spiritual freedom, to be achieved in the realm of Nature. Following Nature means wu wei (taking no action), through which one will gain contentment, enlightenment and peace. Man should see his lifecycle of birth, growth, decay and death as part of Nature and accept change to be the tao of everything in the universe.

      During the Middle Period (221 BC–AD 906) Taoism developed more as a religion than a philosophy. The writings of Taoist philosophers such as Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi were carefully culled by priest-magicians to cultivate and reinforce superstitious practices such as the search for immortality and alchemy. Huai Nan Tzu

(178–122 BC) first started mixing philosophy with mystical concepts such as spirits and distant fairylands. Certain elements were synthesised by religious leaders and interpreted according to their beliefs. Borrowing from the I Ching, they taught that all things were products of cosmic negative and positive forces (yin and yang), which could be harmonised with the vital force (

qi) of the universe and concentrated in the human body to promote health and prolong life. They developed breathing techniques (

qi gong) in an attempt to control the flow of qi, along with special sexual practices which allowed men to regulate and preserve the flow of their semen, thought to be linked to male (yang) qi. Various ‘scriptures’ were written which aimed to provide Taoism with a theory as well as an elaborate system of practice. Ceremonies were formulated and names given to a great number of gods: kitchen; stars; ancestors; famous historical personages; literature; medicine; wealth; immortals; ideals, and countless others. Taoists had their own clergy, temples and images. The head of the clergy was called the Heavenly Father, a title retained by his direct descendants. Taoism became an organised religion as well as a state cult, reaching the zenith of its power and influence during the Tang dynasty (AD 618–960), partly because the Tang emperor had the same surname as Lao Zi (Li).

      Over the years Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism imitated, influenced and intermingled with each other extensively. One of the most popular Taoist gods, Guan Yin

(Goddess of Mercy), was borrowed wholesale from Buddhism. Another was a courageous and red-faced military hero named Guan Yu

, who fought and died during the Three Kingdoms War (AD 220–264). However, Taoism was less organised than Buddhism and lacked an intellectually enlightened leadership; it gradually widened its sphere and lost its focus. Primary objectives became earthly blessings such as wealth, happiness, health, children, longevity and the fulfilment of personal desires. These were to be obtained through witchcraft, magic, aphrodisiacs and incantations. Instead of developing a comprehensive philosophy based on the Tao Te Ching, Taoists concentrated on cultivating practices such as breath control (qi gong), periodic vegetarianism, meditation, shadow-boxing (

tai chi – modelled on the movements of animals such as birds and panthers), and attempts to transform mercury into gold. Geomancy (Jeng shui

), fortune-telling, divination and the use of charms were some of the offshoots of religious Taoism. Ritual observances became increasingly ‘practical’. Food was offered to departed ancestors but eaten after the ceremony by living relatives. A westerner summed it all up by saying that in China the intellectuals questioned everything and believed in nothing whereas the uneducated questioned nothing and believed in everything.

      With