Huizi said, 'How can people exist without helping life?'

Zhuangzi said, 'The Way gave them a face, Heaven gave them a form - by not letting likes and dislikes in to do harm, that's how. But you shut out your spirit, and tire your energies, leaning on a podium ranting, slumping at your desk and napping. Heaven chose a form for you, and you use it to sing of "hard and white"!'

In early China, monkeys served as symbols of willful ignorance and cognitive rigidity...

The way to handle monkeys—human or otherwise—is just to let them have their way, if there is no harm in it, rather than insisting on one’s original plan. This is “going along with things.” We see many of these socially adept exemplars in the text, including a skillful tax collector, who is empty of schemes and responsive to the emotions and needs of those he encounters.

For traveling on water there's nothing like a boat. For traveling on land, there's nothing like a cart. But though a boat can go on water, if you try pushing it on land, you can push until you die and not go an inch. Aren't past an present like water and land? Aren't the states of Zhou and Lu like boats and carts?

Sometimes people will (and do) hate us for things we do and say. The goal is not to try to be indifferent to it—that is next to impossible for many people anyway—but rather to appreciate that an enemy’s perspective is valuable because it throws our being into question…

Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds…

One mitigating factor with the Mohists and Confucians is that, despite their ineffectiveness, they at least want to help others and improve the world. The problem is that their "petty understanding" - Zhuangzi's term for any narrow, rigid view of the world…

So good people are teachers

of people who are not good.

People who are not good

are students of people who are good…

Zhuangzi was angling by the Pu River when the king of Chu sent two officers to him, saying, "We would like to trouble you with administering Our kingdom…

One can't help but think of ruthless corporate climbers, sacrificing their youth, their health, their family to make it to the top, only to find once they reach the corner office that they're too exhausted and dispirited to enjoy it…

That means when you are in ascendancy of power

you handle it as you would mourning.

When you have killed many people…

For Zhuangzi, the question is not so much how we ought to characterize the presence of time in relation to human experience, but that we perceive its true nature as an absolute operating within the infinite spatiality of nothingness…

Thirty spokes are joined in the hub of a wheel. But only by relying on what is not there, do we have the use of the carriage.

By adding and removing clay we form a vessel…

Nothing in the world is more flexible

and yielding than water.

Yet when it attacks the firm and strong…

As Zhuangzi shows us, it’s the principle of seeing things differently, or shifting our perspective, that allows us to experience life with newness and intensity.

#DailyDao