Zhuangzi’s Story and My Ink Paintings
Zhuangzi is one of my favourite thinkers. [1] I have introduced some of the stories associated with him alongside my own visual responses. [2] Today I return to his encounter with a skull, a brief and unsettling reversal of the living person’s point of view.
I am including a few older works alongside the story. They did not grow out of a morbid fascination, but from questions many of us return to: death, change and what lies beyond our experience. I find the perspective in the Zhuangzi congenial, though I would rather let the story pose its question than turn it into a doctrine.
The following is a free retelling of the skull episode in chapter 18, Perfect Enjoyment (至樂), of the Zhuangzi. [3]
The Death’s-Head
On his way to Chu, Zhuangzi found a bleached skull beside the road. He tapped it with his riding crop and wondered aloud how its owner had died: through reckless choices, execution in the service of a ruined state, disgrace, hunger and cold—or simply old age.
Receiving no answer, Zhuangzi used the skull as a pillow and went to sleep.
That night the skull came to him in a dream. It told him that all his questions concerned the entanglements of the living. Death, it said, had none of their hierarchies or seasonal obligations. Its ease extended as far as heaven and earth; even a king could not surpass it.
Zhuangzi remained doubtful. Supposing the power that governed destiny could restore the skull’s body and return it to family, friends and home, would it welcome the offer?
The skull drew its brows together. Why exchange such freedom, it asked, for the toil of human life again?
Footnotes
[1] The thinker and the text. Zhuang Zhou, conventionally dated to the fourth century BCE, is associated with the Zhuangzi. The surviving book contains writings from different hands and periods. Chapter 18 belongs to the Outer Chapters; it should not automatically be treated as the historical philosopher’s own composition. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[2] Earlier discussions: Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream in Ink Painting and Wu Wei: Effortless Action in Daoism and Chinese Painting.
[3] Source of the retelling. Zhuangzi, chapter 18, Perfect Enjoyment, Chinese text with James Legge’s English translation, Chinese Text Project. The dialogue above is a paraphrase, not a quotation from that translation.
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