THE INNER CHAPTERS - CHUANG TZU (trans. David Hinton)

I’m not quite sure really how to begin a “review” (as i EVERY BOOK REVIEWED) to religious text like this. I’ve just finished it, so it’s ostensible goal, to clarify spiritual matters for me, can’t really be evaluated quite yet. I suppose I do feel slightly more enlightened and spiritually at ease. I can’t believe I didn’t even know about this book until very recently. I read and really enjoyed the Tao Te Ching in high school. I’ll dip into it when I see it laying around. There’s a stillness and detachment in what I gather from Taoism that I find really appealing on some level. This book, which most people apparently render as ZHUANGZI these days, at least on first read, is better. The Tao Te Ching is elliptical and strange and beautiful, but, tone-wise, it sticks to a really limited register. Now this might totally be a translation issue, I speak not even a little Chinese and have no idea how the authors of these texts intended them to be heard, but the Inner Chapters weaves together silly stories and fables and anecdote and humor in this pastiche manner that I found really appealing. It’s always great to be reminded that people have always strove to put their actions and lives into perspective. These categories you make in your mind and in your life are fundamentally ridiculous and counter to reality, which itself is best experienced as a void or profound emptiness. Beyond the personal spiritual lesson that the book may or may not have for a given reader, I was able to read some historical context into the book. I don’t know a lot about Chinese history but I do know that this was written during the Warring-States period (which is what it sounds like) so the idea of a philosophical tradition that encourages kings and rulers to do nothing seems like an easy sell. The book again and again features dialogues where a sage or wiseman is encouraging a tyrant or ruler to consider the Tao and make no actions. Certainly a lesson that contemporary rulers could stand to internalize. All that aside, I did find the book actually moving at several points. It is comforting to feel the exact same groping around for answers and confusion and awe in people over 2000 years dead as one feel today when one considers life and purpose and right action and all of that. I’m not sure that these are the answers, I’m not even sure the book is positing that it has answers, but it provided an exciting and momentarily comforting way to think about it. Zero Taos that can be known.