https://www.cccbrussels.be/media/jinshan-peasant-paintings
Here we shall live, here rest, here laugh, here talk.
These lines come from the “Book of Songs”, a collection of ancient folk songs, dating back to around 1000 BCE, and compiled during the Warring States period in China (475-221 BC). As the name indicates it was a time characterised by war, corrupt and despotic rulers, neglect of the welfare of people and the land, a time of poverty and famine. Lives during this period, precarious enough in their dependence on capricious nature, were constantly threatened by war, the ravages of marauding armies, despotic rulers, lawlessness and ever-changing political alliances.
Another poem from the Book of Songs starkly illustrates the plight of the common folk:
Oh! our people are exhausted,
Would they have but a little respite!
Treat the middle kingdom with kindness,
Then peace will reign in all the lands…Book of Songs, 253. (Waley 1996)
The ancient poem continues in this vein, entreating the ruler to have care for the people, to ensure that tyrants and thieves are suppressed, to refrain from indulging the ‘wily and the servile’. To ‘treat tenderly the near and the distant’. To ‘not bring our people to grief’.
The beginning of each of the subsequent stanzas repeats the refrain: ‘our people are exhausted’, with the entreaty for them to be granted, successively:
but a little respite …
but a little rest…
but a little leisure…
but a little repose…
but a little quiet
The lines from the ode in the Book of Songs recall chapter 80 of the Dao de Jing, an ode to an imagined small nation, whose ‘few folk’ have everything they need to live a good life, including the tools and capacity to defend themselves, but no need to use them. They take pleasure in their simple food, clothes, customs, and the sound of the dogs barking and cocks crowing in the neighbouring country, but which they have no need or desire to visit.
A good life is a life lived to its allotted time – people die of old age. They have no interest in courting premature death in wars, in violence. There is peace, and peaceableness.
Cao Xiuwen 2011
While not necessarily subscribing to a primitivist idyll that might be conjured up in this chapter, the essence of the chapter’s vision, which is evoked in the few lines of the poem from the Book of Songs cited in the title of this blog, holds its resonance today. The promise of a welcoming, convivial, nurturing, place to dwell, a place of harmony.
The idea of harmony
A good life is a harmonious life; the values associated with a good life are enfolded within a harmonious set of relations. Harmony occupies an important place in the Chinese cultural and philosophical tradition. The contemporary scholar of Daoism Chen Guying (2018) identifies three principal fields of harmony, and correspondingly, potential sources of disharmony/discord.
The three harmonies Chen identifies are:
Natural harmony – living in harmony with nature: this is the first, ‘ur’, harmony and imperative. All other harmonies rest on/within this.
Human harmony (harmony between people).
Harmony of the heart-and-mind (inner harmony).
All these forms of harmony are difficult to imagine in a state of conflict and violence. Indeed, if one is without safe and stable shelter – home, food, personal connections – harmony of the heart-and-mind will be elusive.
Harmony in Chinese thought draws on metaphorical associations from music and culinary arts. The etymology of the word in the culinary arts points to the character of harmony as incorporating individual ingredients expressing their distinct character and taking their place with other ingredients to create a harmonious melding. The idea was extended to the coming together of the myriad (ten thousand) things, including human relations.
As Karyn Lai notes (2008: 9)
‘The Daoist viewed harmony as a lively interchange between different points of view.’
Zhuangzi
‘seems to celebrate the messy cacophony of differences between individuals and views…seeking an eventual coming-together in plurality.’
Confucius also valued a plurality of views and outlook, commenting,
‘Exemplary persons seek harmony, not sameness’ (13.23).
But a little respite…
A harmonious, nurturing place to dwell was as much a mirage for the historical Chinese creators and audience of the Book of Songs poem as it is for many young people today.
The impact on young people of the ravaging consequences of the modern world: of consumer capitalism with its ethos of unbridled growth as unquestioned ‘Good’, with daily evidence of catastrophic human damage to the environment, and of fast paced, surveillance society, has meant that the vision of ‘rest’, ‘home’ and a healthy dwelling place in harmony with nature appears ever more remote and illusionary.
Young people find themselves now corralled into individualised lives, in precarious employment, with mortgaged futures, engendering anxiety, despondency, loss of hope. But at the same time for many the recognition that to engage in this world, and, crucially, in efforts for change, is imperative.
Acknowledging these burdens, and while not retreating from the need to engage with the world and its labours, the question becomes: how to achieve this without a fracturing of the self? How to find peace, rest, authentic connection, spiritual connectedness, and meaning to live authentic lives?
Chinese, particularly Daoist, philosophy allows for people to be at once in the world, to treasure its abundance and complexity, and to be at the same time unentangled, untroubled by the ‘dust’ – the noise and fuss (Minford 2019) – of the world.
Laozi and Zhuangzi, with humour and earthiness, draw us into contemplation and appreciation of the vastness of life containing the ‘myriad things’, while eschewing greed, excess, and remaining unimpressed by the ephemera and glitter. Maintaining perspective and accepting the relativity of viewpoints and equal claims of our Earth Others on the goods of life.
Ingredients
If we take the lines from the poem as a guide, what are the ‘ingredients’ – the conditions and values – for a restful dwelling in this life? To live a ‘good life’?
Embedded within a predominantly agrarian economy and society, the Book of Songs reflects a culture immersed in the seasons and rhythms of nature. The theme of rest, grounded in the idea of a satisfying life, connectedness, simplicity, is recurrent throughout the poetry – a desire for enough, for all. Simple, touching poems reveal the emotions and rituals of love and attraction in ordinary village lives.
The poems are overflowing with the imagery of the natural world, of growth and of harvests; the spawning of the fish, pleasure in the abundance of the thyme on the hillsides, the lush growth of the mulberry, the willow; the aspen and the plum. The idyll is represented by horses peaceful in the fields, producing manure, rather than being prepared for war.
A chapter in the Dao De Jing reflects this same satisfaction in the proof that all is well with the world:
‘When the Tao rules All-under-Heaven swift horses are put out to pasture’ (chap. 46, translated Minford 2019).
Whereas when the dao is absent from the world
‘war horses are bred just outside the city walls.’
There is abundance, without greed or excess.
There is no crime more onerous than greed,
No misfortune more devastating than avarice.
And no calamity that brings with it more grief than insatiability.
Thus knowing when enough is enough
Is really satisfying.
(Dao De Jing chapter 46, translated Ames and Hall 2003)
The ideal of taking only what is needed, without greed or individual excess, is represented in the Zhuangzi by the example of the Taylor bird, who ‘makes its nest deep in the forest, but only uses one branch’. Or the tapir, who ‘drinks from the river Ho, but only takes what it needs.’
Zhuangzi gives us a nudge to cultivate some humility and broaden our understanding by depicting contrasting perspectives and life conditions – often taken from the natural world – which reveal the diversity and relativity of viewpoints, capacities and limitations. For Zhuangzi paying attention to what is customarily overlooked or dismissed in the natural or human (social) world provides a broader perspective, a deeper insight, an appreciation of the humble, and the usefulness of the apparently ‘useless’.
Zhuangzi’s friend Huizi complained about his tree, the Stinktree, which had a trunk too swollen and gnarled, and branches too twisted and bent to be any use to the carpenter. However, this apparently ‘useless’ tree, Zhuangzi points out, is useful for shade and a pleasurable repose – perfect for loafing and wandering in one’s thoughts. Moreover, as “something that is ‘useless’” it “will never be disturbed.”
Similarly, Huizi grows a giant gourd that he rejects as too big to use as a scoop, and too heavy to use as a water vessel. But, asks Zhuangzi, has its usefulness not been discovered? Have we not looked closely enough? And he proceeds to suggest new perspectives on its uses.
But a little leisure …
In the Book of Songs poem introducing this blog the poet appeals for a little repose, a little respite. For Daoists, periods of respite provide essential space for the contemplation of the ‘mysteries of all things’, the ‘inner marvel’ and pleasure in the Outer Radiance.
Free from desire
Contemplate the Inner Marvel
With Desire,
Observe the Outer Radiance. (Minford 2019)
Observing the outer radiance of the myriad things, one may glimpse and connect with the primordial mysteries. Periods of respite and leisure also allow for renewal of the imagination, the nurturing of aesthetic sensibility and union with the dao through creativity.
‘The creative process of the universe is also the creative process of the poet.’ (Chung Yuan-chang 2011).
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/art/2016-02/22/content_23576856_6.htm#Content
But a little quiet….
And finally, it is well to recall once more that, amid the ‘noise and the fuss’ of our world, and the constant assault on our senses, Daoism reminds us of the significance of silence, and stillness. The writer of the ode in the Book of Songs was conscious that quiet and quietude is an essential condition for nurturing and replenishing the spirit and connecting with the dao. In Daoist philosophy, described as ‘the philosophy of silence and of nothingness’ (Fung Yulan, cited in Moeller 2011), silence is of cosmological significance. Dao itself is silence. Silence is an expression of the primordial dao, and found in its most pure form in nature.
“Mountains and forests, marshes and lowlands! They make me happy and bring me joy!” (Zhuangzi Chapter 22).