Taoism strikes me as similar to quantum mechanics in at least one respect: if you claim to grasp it, then you don’t. Nevertheless, that doesn’t preclude approaching an understanding of either. In his What is Taoism? H.G. Creel has an excellent chapter entitled, “The Great Clod”—a chapter that is quite helpful in regard to one aspect of Taoism.

In explaining the meaning and role of “the Great Clod” in Taoism, Creel quotes, in order to set up a contrast, a part of William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”:

Earth that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, thou shalt go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce they mould. (31-32)

Creel reads this and the rest of “Thanatopsis” as conveying a regrettable feeling about our destination: “To the author of ‘Thanatopsis’ it is clearly a melancholy fate that, after having attained to humanity, one must become ‘a brother to the insensible rock, and to the sluggish clod’” (32). As Creel so nicely emphasizes, we find a rather different attitude in the Taoist Chuang Tzu. Therein we also find mention of a clod, namely the Great Clod. Again, Creel:

If an early Taoist could have read “Thanatopsis,” one can well imagine that he would have demurred at the reference to the “sluggish clod.” Is not the earth composed of clods, and are they not the ultimate source from which comes life, both vegetable and animal? Sluggish, indeed! It is the very quicksilver stuff of which all things are made. What is the Tao itself but a clod of unimaginable proportions? (34)

Here, then, is the entire central passage from the Chuang Tzu that Creel refers to in this chapter on the Great Clod (this is the Burton Watson translation, not the one Creel uses):

            The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death.

You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe. But in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you. But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.

You have had the audacity to take on human form and you are delighted. But the human form has ten thousand changes that never come to an end. Your joys, then, must be uncountable. Therefore, the sage wanders in the realm where things cannot get away from him, and all are preserved. He delights in early death; he delights in old age; he delights in the beginning; he delights in the end. If he can serve as a model for men, how much more so that which the ten thousand things are tied to and all changes alike wait upon! (76-77)

Having read this passage a great number of times now, it occurs to me that one possible reading of it is this: If you try to hide your life in your bodily form, you will lose it and may be even be stupidly surprised when it slips away. But if you hide your life in the world, the Great Clod, then there is no place for it to go. I think this is further supported by another passage that comes shortly after the last from above:

           [Master Yü said] “I received life because the time had come; I will lose it because the order of things passes on. Be content with this time and dwell in this order and then neither sorrow nor joy can touch you. In ancient times this was called the ‘freeing of the bound.’ ….”

Suddenly Master Lai grew ill. Gasping and wheezing, he lay at the point of death. His wife and children gathered round in a circle and began to cry. Master Li, who had come to ask how he was, said, “Shoo! Get back! Don’t disturb the process of change!”

Then he leaned against the doorway and talked to Master Lai. “How marvelous the Creator is! What is he going to make out of you next? Where is he going to send you? Will he make you into a rat’s liver? Will he make you into a bug’s arm?”

Master Lai said, “A child, obeying his father and mother, goes wherever he is told, east or west, south or north. And the yin and yang—how much more are they to a man than father or mother! Now that they have brought me to the verge of death, if I should refuse to obey them, how perverse I would be! What fault is it of theirs? The Great Clod burdens me with form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. So if I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death. When a skilled smith is casting metal, if the metal should leap up and say, ‘I insist upon being made into a Mo-yeh!’ he would surely regard it as very inauspicious metal indeed. Now, having had the audacity to take on human form once, if I should say, ‘I don’t want to be anything but a man! Nothing but a man!’, the Creator would surely regard me as a most inauspicious sort of person. So now I think of heaven and earth as a great furnace, and the Creator as a skilled smith. Where could he send me that would not be all right? (81-82)

There is obviously much that one might question here regarding personal identity. For one thing, it might seem that Master Yü and Master Lai are making inconsistent claims, the former seeming to admit that there’s a time when he won’t be around but he should be content with the time he has, while Master Lai seems to say that the human form is but one of many forms he’ll take on. And there are still other objections one might make, in particular from an Anglo-American philosophical perspective. I won’t address those issues now; but I will say that we ought to be cautious when formulating such objections, for we are liable to beg various questions, in large part due to our failure to understand fully what the Chuang Tzu is trying to tell us.

 

Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. Trans. Watson, Burton. Columbia University Press, 1964.

Creel, H.G. What is Taoism? And Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History. University of Chicago Press, 1970