What will you be made into next?

The insecurity of Taoism

There’s a story from the Lieh Tzu (a Taoist text from around the 4th century) about a twelve-year-old at a dinner party. The host, gazing at the feast before them, announces, “How kind Heaven is to humanity. It provides the five grains and nourishes the fish and birds for us to enjoy and use.”

As the crowd agrees, a twelve-year-old boy, the son of a guest, breaks the silence (translated by Martin Palmer, from his introduction to The Book of Chuang Tzu):

“My Lord is wrong! All life is born in the same way that we are and we are all of the same kind. One species is not nobler than another; it is simply the strongest and cleverest rule over the weaker and more stupid. Things eat each other and are eaten, but they were not bred for this. To be sure, we take the things which we can eat and consume them, but you cannot claim that Heaven made them in the first place for us to eat. After all, mosquitoes and gnats bite our skin, tigers and wolves eat our flesh. Does this mean Heaven originally created us for the sake of the mosquitoes, gnats, tigers and wolves?”

What a clever twelve-year-old. Through the voice of a child, Lieh Tzu asks if God is on our side. Is someone up there looking out for us? Or are we, like other animals, left to fend for ourselves?

This passage is troubling. It contradicts a longing for security.

When I was a kid, I remember when it hit me that we won’t be around forever. I’d heard about death before, but one lonely night it finally sunk in. I started crying and my parents came in to comfort me. I explained my predicament and they sweetly replied that nothing would happen for a very long time. “It will be alright.”

I love my parents for that. I think they meant it.

As we get older, worry starts to creep in. Lieh Tzu’s twelve-year-old sounds more reasonable. We start to wonder who’s watching our back. What can we have faith in? Do we even know what we want?

Here is a passage from The Book of Chuang Tzu:

How great is the Maker of All! What will you be made into next? Where will you be sent? Will you come back as a rat’s liver? Or will it be as a pest’s arm?

The eccentric Chuang Tzu says that we don’t know what will happen to us. His view of the world is scarier and more exciting. There’s no security in Taoism. But it was never there in the first place.