Zhuangtsu's Insight on Death: Some more Translations

D2OTSSUMMERBUG

Zhuangtsu’s wife died. His friend Huishi came to mourn but found out Zhuangtsu was singing while playing beats on a tub.
Huishi was confused and asked, “the person with whom you lived for your whole life, raised your children, and grew old together just died. Not to mention that you are not crying, you are even singing and beating on a basin. Haven’t you gone too far?
Zhuang replied, “That’s not so. Soon after her death, how would I not wail! I observed her, that at the beginning there was not her birth, nor her form, nor even her spirit. It was in the midst of the jumble, the subtle motion of the world, that came changes: a change and emerged her spirit, another her form, and then her birth. Now that yet another change brings her back to death – it’s just like the cycle of the four seasons. Placidly the lies dead in the huge hall silently, and if I howl and sob, I don’t think I understand destiny as it is, so I stopped crying.”
-Zhuangtsu: The Ultimate Pleasure

莊子妻死，惠子吊之，莊子則方箕踞鼓盆而歌。

惠子曰：「與人居，長子老身，死不哭亦足矣，又鼓盆而歌，不亦甚乎！」

莊子曰：「不然。是其始死也，我獨何能無概然！察其始而本無生；非徒無生也，而本無形；非徙無形也，而本無氣。雜乎芒芴之間，變而有氣，氣變而有形，形變而有生。今又變而之死。是相與為春秋冬夏四時行也。人且偃然寢於巨室，而我噭噭然隨而哭之，自以為不通乎命，故止也。」

Zhuang had become old and ill. His apprentices prepared for him a luxurious funeral. Zhuang was not satisfied: “Isn’t it sufficient: that the sky and the earth enclose as my coffin; buried along me are the sun and the moon I see as jade, the stars I see as pearls, and literally everything on this world (it’s a tradition that people bury something precious along with the dead)? What’s for to add on this?”
“We are afraid that the crows and the hawks nibble away your corpse, sir.”
“Leave me on the ground, that I be eaten by the birds; bury me to the ground, that I be eaten by the ants. Now, you take away the food from the birds and give it to the ants, how prejudiced and partial this is!”
-Lie, Yukou

莊子將死，弟子欲厚葬之。莊子曰：「吾以天地為棺槨，以日月為連璧，星辰為珠璣，萬物為齎送。吾葬具豈不備邪？何以加此！」
弟子曰：「吾恐烏鳶之食夫子也。」
莊子曰：「在上為烏鳶食，在下為螻蟻食，奪彼與此，何其偏也！」

TheMadFool

In my humble opinion, we should frame death and most other things I suppose within the context of necessity (inevitable) and contingency (not inevitable).

Back then, Zhuangtsu's time, death was unavoidable - it was an absolute, inviolable law of nature, set in stone as it were like gravity itself. Zhunagtsu's views, in your beautiful translation, reflects this understanding of the world, life, death as part of nature's order.

It bears mentioning here that people, even a thousand years before Zhungtsu, were already ideating about immortality - the epic of Gilgamesh is, I'm told, a story of a man seeking eternal life. Gilgamesh fails of course and that was the core message of this work, congruent with Zhunagtsu's own take on death.

However, Gilgamesh (the hero) epitomizes the growing doubt in people's minds - is death necessary or is it...contingent?

Fast forward to the 21st century and we've learned a great deal about how our body works, knowledge that could be/is being used in all and sundry ways to...cheat death in all its terrifying manifestations. Doubt is being slowly but steadily being replaced with certainty that morte isn't some hard and fast rule that people have to obey willingly/unwillingly.

This is nothing less than what people might refer to as a paradigm shift - aging and mortality are both diseases in transhumanism I believe. This rather simple recategorization radically transforms our attitude towards quietus, crossing the river Styx. At the very least, it provides a strong impetus to look for a cure and that, in my humble opinion, is a move in the right direction.

Zhuangtsu, nonetheless, is still relevant; after all, no major breakthroughs have been reported by the scientific community. For how long?, is the million dollar question.

Pantagruel

Gilgamesh fails of course and that was the core message of this work — TheMadFool

Gilgamesh joins the immortal pantheon after he dies....kind of fits with something I've recently been toying with, are we spiritual beings "in-training"? Perhaps what is traditionally called the soul has its material birth....

TheMadFool

Gilgamesh joins the immortal pantheon after he dies....kind of fits with something I've recently been toying with, are we spiritual beings "in-training"? Perhaps what is traditionally called the soul has its material birth.... — Pantagruel

Leave me guessing, huh?

Your words has all the hallmarks of an artist, in the making or already in full bloom, which?, however, I can't tell.

He was a trainwreck, this guy - his family had abandoned him, his friends deserted him, a mountain of debt to pay off, unrequited love, and now the proverbial cherry on top, the icing on the cake, was a diagnosis of terminal cancer. I went to see him, he wasn't sad and that made me ask myself, "did I go to see him or did he come to see me?" — Some Guy

Pantagruel

Leave me guessing, huh? — TheMadFool

I can only surmise that, qua conscious beings, we are composed of experiences and beliefs. So perhaps experiencing the magnificent uncertainty of death is the key to spiritual evolution. Much of my own personal growth has been linked in one way or another to an immersive awareness of the profound finality of death. To quote one of my favourite movies (that I just watched again on the weekend as it happens): Death is the road to awe.

TheMadFool

I can only surmise that, qua conscious beings, we are composed of experiences and beliefs. So perhaps experiencing the magnificent uncertainty of death is the key to spiritual evolution. Much of my own personal growth has been linked in one way or another to an immersive awareness of the profound finality of death. To quote one of my favourite movies (that I just watched again on the weekend as it happens): Death is the road to awe. — Pantagruel

Torture is the way to awesome — Some guy

:rofl:

Pantagruel

Torture is the way to awesome
— Some guy — TheMadFool

For the guy doing the torturing?

TheMadFool

For the guy doing the torturing? — Pantagruel

I didn't ask you a question.

T Clark

↪D2OTSSUMMERBUG

Again - gracefully and artfully translated. Many translations feel forced and clunky. Yours are poetic.

Some questions:

Do you work only from the text or also from other translations?
Did you find those other translations unsatisfactory? Why have you chosen to translate these verses again?
Have you done any translations of verses of the Tao Te Ching?

Thank you for this.

D2OTSSUMMERBUG

↪TheMadFool

This is a tricky paradox - why do all living minds tend to fear death while empirically it's a necessity? So far we've been extending the limits of life - mainly through means of biotechnology. Yet are our biological features the only decisive factors on how long we can live (by that I have included accidents and other "non-natural deaths" because, at the end of the day, it is the biologically fatal damage that results directly in death)? Before answering that question, we even have to achieve breaking through biological limitations, and when that will happen, as you said, remains a million-dollar question.

TheMadFool

↪D2OTSSUMMERBUG

I don't want to live on in my work. I want to live on in my apartment. — Woody Allen

D2OTSSUMMERBUG

↪T Clark

I humbly accept your compliment.

For these pieces, I've worked from the text and Chinese annotations. To be honest I wasn't all that into philosophy until recently so I didn't know these translations have existed. Long story short, I was prepping a presentation assignment for our English class at school on the poem Thanatopsis by William Bryant. Then I found connections of the poem with Zhuangtsu's work I encountered earlier, and I came across the idea: why not bring some of these pieces together to the class (I go to school in Virginia but I'm Chinese)? I didn't want to bother going through Google to find the translations so I did the work myself.

I'm glad that I translated these several verses and shared them. But realizing that other people have done the work, I feel like pausing for a while. I regard myself right now as "the hollowest nut" as Nietzsche put it so I'm trying to get more solid for the time being.

No, I haven't translated Tao Te Ching. But if I feel couraged again to share some of the related works I tend to find more interest in starting with I Ching. I'm envisioning the project as pulling threads all over the history of philosophy though more than the translation - that being I found out the translation has already been done as well.

All that being said, I'm a rising senior so I both actively and passively place college application and GPA as my primary focus. :lol:

D2OTSSUMMERBUG

↪TheMadFool

There's a documentary regarding transhumanism called the Transcendent Man. Ray Kurzweil was the protagonist and he spent some significant part of the documentary explaining that our fear for death is inevitable and acceptance is lying to ourselves. I hold the same personal perspective but I wouldn't take that as ubiquitous to everyone since I don't have telepathy. :lol:

TheMadFool

This is a tricky paradox - why do all living minds tend to fear death while empirically it's a necessity? — D2OTSSUMMERBUG

If X's essence is Y, it must resist not-Y. Life's essence is living, it must, therefore, resist (fear) not-living (thanatos/death). A lot's going on between, for X, Y and not-Y e.g. X's losing what it is to be X viz. Y. There maybe many examples that illustrate this point but I remember a movie, sorry I can't recall its name, in which a top athlete becomes paralyzed - an athlete resists (fears) losing faer essence (running).

T Clark

↪D2OTSSUMMERBUG

Whatever you do, I hope you'll share some of your translations here.

No, I haven't translated Tao Te Ching. But if I feel couraged again to share some of the related works I tend to find more interest in starting with I Ching. — D2OTSSUMMERBUG

In case you haven't found it, here's a website with many translations of the Tao Te Ching along with some other documents:

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/_index.html

I've gotten started on the I Ching a couple of times, but never got very far. The Tao Te Ching, on the other hand, grabbed me and shook me when I first read it. I find the poetic format much more compelling than the stories in the Zhuangzi. I think that's because I tend to be very intellectual, verbal. I'm an engineer and the Tao has always felt like engineering mysticism to me.

Ray Kurzweil was the protagonist — D2OTSSUMMERBUG

Kurzweil predicts that the "technological singularity" will arrive in 2045 and we will grovel on our knees before our machine overlords.

our fear for death is inevitable and acceptance is lying to ourselves. — D2OTSSUMMERBUG

Yes, well. I think this says a lot more about Kurzweil than it does about me or you or anyone else. Last time I looked, he was trying to keep himself alive until he can upload his mind into a computer and live forever.

TheMadFool

In case you haven't found it, here's a website with many translations of the Tao Te Ching along with some other documents:

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/_index.html — T Clark

Many thanks!

D2OTSSUMMERBUG

I've gotten started on the I Ching a couple of times, but never got very far. The Tao Te Ching, on the other hand, grabbed me and shook me when I first read it. I find the poetic format much more compelling than the stories in the Zhuangzi. I think that's because I tend to be very intellectual, verbal. I'm an engineer and the Tao has always felt like engineering mysticism to me. — T Clark

Thanks for the archive. The thing about the ancient Chinese text is that each character is so compact in both syntactic and semantic sense. So not to mention translating into other languages, it cannot be ensured that all the nuances are kept when explaining it in modern Chinese. I take that it is easier to keep the poetical sense when converting Tao Te Ching into English than when doing so with Zhuangzi.

In terms of I Ching, the interesting thing about it is that it is highly structured into 64 chapters, each with 6 verses. The gimmick here is that each verse is coordinated with either the Yang or Yin element of the divination. Six of the Yin or Yang elements combine in sequences to form one diagram of the divination so there are a total of 2^6 = 64 forms of the diagram, each of whose attributes explained in the correspondent chapter. Many have tried to use this well-organized structure for fortune-telling, but some philosophical elements are highly valued among Chinese-language scholastic communities.

Yes, well. I think this says a lot more about Kurzweil than it does about me or you or anyone else. Last time I looked, he was trying to keep himself alive until he can upload his mind into a computer and live forever. — T Clark

I can definitely sympathize with his own eagerness to survive but I felt kind of cringed in the documentary that he seemed to be intended to revive his father who had passed away for quite some time.

Pantagruel

"A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave....I am now ready to leave, regretting nothing except life itself....Death is the origin of another life....is it reasonable to fear for so long something which lasts for so short a time?"
~Montaigne, "To Philosophize is to Learn how to Die"

Zhuangtsu's Insight on Death: Some more Translations

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