A Story from Chuang Tzu

A Story from Chuang Tzu

From an article by David Tuttle

Tzukung wandered south to Ch’u and was returning through Chin. As he was passing along the south bank of the Han River, he saw an elderly man who was working in his vegetable garden. He had dug a channel to bring water from the well and was carrying jars to pour on the garden. He exerted a tremendous amount of energy, but with little result.

Tzukung said to him, “There are machines for this purpose that can irrigate a hundred plots in one day. They use very little energy, but their results are great. Don’t you want one, sir?”

The gardener looked up at him and asked, “How does it work?”

“It is a device fashioned from wood that is heavy in back and light in front. It picks up the water like a ladle, as fast as though it were boiling over. It’s called a wellsweep.”

“The gardener made an angry grimace and said with a laugh, ” I have heard from my teacher that where there are ingenious contraptions, there are sure to be ingenious affairs, and where there are ingenious affairs, there are sure to be ingenious minds. When one harbors an ingenious mind in one’s breast, its pure simplicity will be impaired. When pure simplicity is impaired, the spiritual nature will be unstable. He whose spiritual nature is unsettled will not be supported by the Way. It’s not that I am unaware of such things, rather that I would be ashamed to do them.”

Here we can see the lesson. If there is no simplicity, our spiritual nature will be hindered, and we cannot be ‘supported by the Way,’ that is, we cannot be present to the moment.

But what is this simplicity?

Perhaps the term “simplicity” means a state of essence, specifically the essence of an infant, totally receptive and absorptive.

I’d give all the wealth that years have piled,

the slow result of life’s decay,

To be once more a little child for one bright summer day.

– Lewis Carroll

Simplicity must be an intentional and conscious unwinding of the layers of essence, a going back to infancy, when we were a pure, open-eyed piece of a higher world, finding ourselves suddenly in a lower world. Perhaps it is whatever essence was before conforming to the mold of our body type, center of gravity and alchemy, before merging with the world of the body, before we were stamped by the impress of our culture.

When simplicity arises in your mind,

Do not follow cleverness.

Rest in the state of simplicity.

– Milarepa

We become simple through self-remembering, for moments at a time. In these moments, our complex personality temporarily drops away. Then we must defend it, by deflecting cleverness and avoiding complex thinking.

The greatest carver does the least cutting.

– Lao Tzu

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