GLOSSARY OF ESSENTIAL TERMS

BIAN. Debate, Distinguish, Demonstrate, "Back-and-Forth." The term

means "debate" or
literally
"disputation, engaged by logicians the day, including
as in of
Zhuangzi's triend and foil Huizi (Hui Shi), whose presence looms large in the
text. It can mean "demonstration" in the sense of "demonstrating by means ot
debate which of two alternatives is correct." It is sometimes used in the
Zhuangzi
as a cognate tor the homonyms bian P# (meaning "to distinguish, to ditferenti-
ate" and by extension, "to clarify by means of debate") and bian (meaning
"transformation"). Zhuangzi exploits this ambiguity, not least in the crucial line
in Chapter 1, "riding atop the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths"
(p. 6) where "back-and-forth" is meant to capture the sense of "debate" and "trans-
formation," along with the implication of a differentiation between the contend-
ing positions.

CHANG E.Constaney, Stability, Sustainability, Staying Power, Reliability, Regu-

larity, Normal, Common, Ordinary, Everyday. The more common translation-
"constant" or even "eternal"-can be misleading, for the term also means "com-
mon, everyday, ordinary" and at the same time has a distinctive value implication,
that is, "normal" Bringing these senses together, it can be rendered as "sustain-
able" in the sense of what has the value of staying power, of what can be main
tained over a long period of time without exhausting or destroying itself, partic-
ularly what can be maintained without special effort-hence a reliable and
Sustainable course of action. The term (or its cognate, in some versions, heng "E) is
very central in the Daodejing, appearing in the first two lines of the standard post-
Han editions of the text: daokedao feichangdao, mingkeming feichangming D
F E , ]24F#4.These two lines are often translated to mean something
like, "The Way that can be spoken is not the Eternal Way; the name that can be
named is not the Eternal Name." But in context, the meaning is arguably some
thing more like, "Guiding courses can be taken as explicit guides, but then their
guidance ceases to be sustainable. Named values can be explicitly named as
values, but then what they name ceases to be sustainably valuable." Or more
siccinctly, "Specifying a way to do things destabilizes that way of doing things.
Specifying what is valuable about things destabilizes their value."

275
6 Glossary of Essential Terms
to Be, Taking Shape, Accom.
CHENG 5. Completion, Completeness, Coming
Formation, Fully Formed, Perfection
plishment. Fullnes, Maturity, Success, on,

opposed to kui 5, lacking, waning (of

the moon), incomplete, or to hui . to
"to come into evic
The tem means "to form," "to become fully formed,
destrov.
tence" "to succced," "to reach maturity, "to accomplish or be accomplished"
to be perfect" "to be complete," "to take shape. The argument in Chapter ?

heavily tlhe various implications of this term

plavs on

DAI To Depend On, To Wait, To Wait For, To Wait On, To Attend To, To
Treat. The word means both diachronic "waiting tor and synchronic "depen-
dence on," as well as "to attend to" someone, as one does a guest. The theme of
dependence and independence centered on this term has deep resonances
through at least the first few chapters of the text. We are told that the rightness
or wrongness of knowledge "depends" on something "peculiarly unhxed" (Chap-
ter 6. p. 55 ), making it impossible to know whether we are correct when we call
something "Heaven" or "human"-a claim that replicates verbatim claims made
about the instability of the referent of any words, also called "peculiarly unfixed"
(Chapter 2,p. 13), and questions about whether we can know if we are correctly
calling something "knowledge," illustrated by noting that what is named the
knowing of right dwelling, right cuisine, or right sexual allure differs depending
on who is doing the naming (Chapter 2, pp. 18-19). Bringing these together we
have the suggestion that all judgments about what is right and what is so are
"dependent" upon the perspective from which they are spoken. T he value of ones
identity and the function of one's distinctive virtuosity analogously "depend" on
the environments that affirm and enable them, as Liezi "depends on" the wind
(Chapter 1, p. 5)-and the same could be said of the great bird Peng, who depends
on the wind just as Kun qua Kun depends on the water. The unresolvable ques-
tions about the "identity of the rouser" that calls forth all the varied sounds of
the windstorm, or the genuine ruler governing all events, or the true self ruling
one's own body and mind (Chapter 2, pp. 12-13), are similarly understood as
questions about dependence: the rouser or ruler or self is the basis upon which
the varied sounds, the phenomena of nature, or our moods and actions are sup
posed to depend, and yet the identity of this basis can never be specified. But the
me word is used in the crucial line of Chapter 4,
stating that "the vital energy
becomes a vacuity that waits for
the presence of whatever
thing may come
(p. 37). Similarly, the shadow "depends on" the physical form, and the penumbra
on
the shadow, so
thoroughly that they have no way of knowing how or why they
are what they are and do as they do, or what the thing they depend on might itself
depend upon-but not knowing what to nmake of who or what either the depen-
dent or the depended upon are, finding no specific identity anywhere that doesnt
depend on something else, appears to make the initial problen of dependence
evaporate (Chapter 2, p. 21). Similarly, we are told that the sounds of the wind-
storm depending on sonething, or on each other, is no different from their not
depending on anything or each other (Chapter 2, p. 21); the inon-resolution of
the question of what they depend upon, and their inability to ever be freed ot
 Glossary of Essential Terms 277

this thoroughgoing condition of dependence-but dependence on something that

can be neither known to exist nor not to exist, something without any definite
identity at all is presented as resolving their problem of dependence. See
Zhuangzi as Philosopher at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil
a fuller
discussion of this point
for

DAO E. Course, Coursing. Courses, A Course, Some Course, Some Courses

The Course. To Guide, Guidance. Often translated as "Way." the term originally
designates aroadway From this literal meaning it takes on the early ethical mean-
ing of a course of study or activities that lead to some desired result. that is, a
set of skills
program ot emulation and practice by neans of which a particular
could be cultivated ("the course ofthe sage kings, the course of humankindness,
the course of archery), or a process by which a particular type of valued result
was produced ("the course of Heaven/Sky," which produces the seasons and thus
the growth of all things). Used as a verb, it means " to put someone on or to lead
someone along such a course of study and practice," that is, "to guide." In this
sense of spoken indication as di-
usage it is cognate with the character . This
rective is implicit also in the word's extended meaning of "to speak." In pre-Daoist
deliberate activity di-
thought it thus has a highly normative and ethical flavor:
it can be
rected toward a preconceived goal. Putting these implications together,
use of the
translated, following Chad Hansen, as "Guiding Dis/course." Daoist
term, beginning with the Daodejing, ironically plays on this original meaning.
a normative course, but one that
reversing it to signity precisely the opposite of
has the expected effect of a normative course (that is, to produce something
of a
deemed valuable). In this ironic sense, Dao means not the deliberate pursuit
and indiscernible process, a non-
consciously valued goal but the non-deliberate that is claimed
doing both unvaluing and unavailable as object on a valued, naturalization
an to be

to be the real source of value and being. Expanding growing

consciousness intention
of Heaven's Course, pushed to the total denial of any
or

comes to mean the nameless unhewn raw

in the formerly deified Heaven, Dao
material from which are carved out all particular named and
culturally valued
and return in the manner of a
objects, conceived as entailing their emergence
in its ripples and
shapeless fluid whose very instability produces specific shapes
In this translation, the term
waves, and into which these shapes again submerge.
"course" is used inpreference to the more prevalent English translation for this
word, "way." There are two main reasons tor this: (1) to highlight the originally
highly normative sense of the term and its reversal into a critique of normativity:
"course" in English can be used in both an explicitly and emphatically normative
sense ("course" as in syllabus or prescribed program) and also in a neutral sense,
for example, in "a course of events," or "the course of time"; and (2) to emphasize
the new meaning of not only "road" but "the process of traveling a road," and even
"that which travels," in keeping with the dimension of radical immanence and
the watery magery associated with the term in Daoist texts. In English "the course
of the water" means not just the channel through which the water Hows but also
the traveling of the water, and thus this word, unlike "way," can function also as
278 Glossary of Essential Terms

a verb, as in "the blood of kings courses through my veins." We can say "when in
the course of human events," referring to the actual events, as opposed to "the
way of human events" which is only the manner or style of their going, not their
going itself. "Course" seems to be broad cnough to imply dao all at once as nor-
mative, anti-normative, roadway, or empty channel through which something
gocs, what goes through that channel, process of going through, immanence of
channel and process and wlhat undergoes process to each other, and manner or
style of doing all at once, and for this reason is to be preferred to "way" "This dy-
namic implication seems to be forefronted in the locus classicus of the
explicit
repurposing of the word dao for its new "metaphysical" meaning, that is, Daode
25: "There is something undifferentiated and complete, prior to the genera-
tion of heaven and earth, standing alone but unchanged, circulating everywhere
but unendangered., which can be considered the mother of the world. I don't know
what its name is; I nickname it Dao." That it itself circulates everywhere, going
all around (zhouxing T ) , seems to be a key consideration in choosing the
strange name "Dao" for this vague something. for although this line is not found
in Guodian or Mawangdui versions of this chapter, the rest of the chapter
the
singles out precisely this dynamic dimension as what is most notable about Dao:
not its priority to heaven and earth, not its
standing alone, not its changelessness,
not its motherhood of the world, but its motion: its "vastness, which means
going
away,which means distancing, which means returming" (da , shi , yuan .
fan ) . Dao is something that goes and returns, like a course, not merely the
channel upon which or through which something else goes and returns, like a
road (though "course" is able to cover that meaning as well: the peculiarity of Dao
s that it is both theformless openness through which all goings pass and also the
definite goings themselves, both the named and the unnamed, both immanent
and transcendent). This persistent semantic nuance informs the much later adop-
tion of this character as a measure-word when reterring to rays ot light or jets of
water through empty space, to "courses" of food at a restaurant, or even t
stances of going through processes and procedures like washing or applying paint:
one "dao" can mean one ray of light, one bolt of lightning, one jet of water, one
course of food in a meal, one time
through a process ot washing or painting
something-and even one of the resulting coats of paint itself. In all cases, these
refer not merely to the paths traversed by certain items but also to the very pro-
cesses of traversing and the items that traverse: one can be struck and killed by
a "dao" of lightning, one can be swept away by a "dao" of water. "Way" comes a
little closer to including this dynamic implication than "road," but still falls short
of fully marking it. Unlike "way," "course" can be used as synonymous with words
like "process," evoking richer
implications of motion than "way" does-something
that moves or even is itself the process of moving. Hence "course" is used as the
translation for Dao. In the Inner Chapters dao is used both in its older normative
sense (as an object of critique) as well as in its new ironic sense, and it is here that
we see the intricate dialectic of these two senses of the term played out most
forcefully. What is really distinctive to the Zhuangzi, especially the Inner Chap-
ters, is the further elaboration of the ironic sense of Dao to mean the process of
 Glossary of Essential Terms
279
oducing not only valued
things but also value
diverse valuations themselves. See the Pretace andperspectives, and hence all the
L "Zhuangzi as Philosopher" at
/www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil
Oter and Miscellaneous Chapters present a wide for a fuller discussion. The
variety of new and innovative
enttrDOsing and syntheses of the various senses found in the Inner
in the Daodejing. Chapters and

DE"Virtuosity/Virtuosities,
heings), "Intrinsic Powers"
"Intrinsic Virtuosities" (when speaking of human
(when speaking of nonhuman entities), modified ac-
cording to context. Virtue, Kindness, Moral Force. Often translated as
"Dower," "potency," or the like, the "virtue"
original sense of this term is an eficacious
power, "virtue in the nonmoral sense
("by virtue
of .."), which is closely linked with the idea of daoof.. ."meaning "by the power
in the generic sense. If a dao
is a course of study, de is what is attained by
successfully completing that course:
the perfected skill thereby acquired, the value gained by
doing things that way.
The term is thus often glossed in early texts with the
homophone de , meaning
"to attain," or "to succeed." Virtuosity is what one gets from following a course.
Virtuosity in archery is what one gets from practicing a course in archery. Virtu-
osity in general living, in interacting with the world with maximum effect and
minimum harm, is what one gets from the Course in general. This is the primary
sense in the Inner Chapters, but a shitt is already beginning to occur there, con-
comitant to the new Daoist ironic sense of "Dao." It is the virtuosity of the non-
deliberate Course of the world, and thus something like the innate skil, inborn
virtuosity, which we might call one's ownmost powers, what one can do without
deliberate effort, just as a virtuoso can perform his art effortlessly (after finishing
the efforts of learning and training). In the Daoist sense, it is the intrinsic powers
constituting a thing's distinctive being, where a characteristic is regarded not
as

a property inhering in a substance but as a virtuosity, an effortless skill in a par-

ticular kind of efficacious nondoing, the style of activity that any being con-
identifies it as that being and no other.
sistently engages in without effort, which "moral charisma" or "non-
From an early period the term is also used to mean
and kindness on the part of
coercive persuasiveness," and by extension leniency
entorcement ot penal law; here again this is
looked at
a ruler, as opposed to strict

as a manifestation of the ruler's mastery

and virtuosity in his practice of the
imoral intluence, the course of
"Course" of true noncoercive rulership through
he personally trains himselt in.
humankindness and responsible conduct that
When the Inner Chapters' usage of Dao comes together
with the more explicitly
the Outer and Miscella-
Dao of Daodejing and related texts, in
metaphysical of broader
neous Chapters, the term takes on
a key role in an emerging family
Here the term comes to imply the indi-
ontological and cosmological accounts. the individuated
vidual endowment or attainment of Dao in a particular being.
and that allows one to live, the
form of Dao that constitutes one's own nature
of Dao in and as one's specific ownmost character.
This own-
effortless operation
character is still a kind of virtuosity, denoting the most
most inborn individual
and ettectiveness in the world. what
distinctive powers of nondeliberate activity
280 Glossary of Essential Terms

one can do without having to try: beat one's heart, pump one's blood, see and hear,
but also exactly be who one is and none other, and have whatever mysterious
unintended effects on others that one does. As before, this is thought to have power
not only in the sense of ability to act but also to influence other beings non-
coercivelv, through its fascinating clharisma-much as virtuosity in the narrower
artistic scnse does.

JING E. Purest Kemel, Purest Kenel of Vitality. Quintessential Energy, Seminal

Energy. Semen. Pure kernel of energy within things, especially living beings. The
word initially denotes rcfined or purifhed rice, that is, the innermost kernel of a
grain of ice after the inert outer husk has been removed, the kernel being where
the life-sustaining nutrition and also the germ of growth are located.

JINGSHEN E Purest Kemel oflmponderable Spirit. Quintessence ofthe Impon-

derable Spiritlike Within Us. See jing and shen.

LI Structural Coherence, Coherent Structure, Guideline, Coherence, Struc-

tural Configuration, Pattern, Perforations, the Way Things Fit Together, the Sense
Made by Things, the How and Why of Things. "Principle" is the mnost common
translation of this tern, but that word has misleading metaphysical connotations
in English that are best avoided. "Pattern" comes closer to the sense ot the term.
but this word in English usually implies a strictly and exactly repeating motif, and
this sense of exact replication of some form or shape that is literally the same in
each instance, however abstract, is lacking in this Chinese word, which is better
understood as a not necessarily repeating way in which things fit together and
together with which further things can then be ht. In its earliest usages,the term
functioned as a verb meaning to divide something up in a way that made it valu-
able or useful, such as carving a raw piece of jade into a ritual pendant or dividing
field for agricultural purposes. (The word still tunctions as a verb in this sense
in modern Chinese, for example wBhen a haircut is called a "iing ot the hair:
cutting and dividing and recombining it to make it all cohere in such a way that
it will further cohere with social expectations and fashions.) By extension, it came
to mean the inherent lines or patterns in the raw material that might guide such
cutting most casily and effectively, the places it was easiest to cut and that would
also give it the greatest value by allowing its parts to fit together in such a way
as to allow it to meet the needs of (that is, fit together with) the various domains ot
the wider world where it was expected to be put to use. The single occurrence ot
the term in the Inner Chapters, in Chapter 3, p. 30, where it is translated "un-

wrought perforations," marks the irst appearance anywhere in the tradition of the
binome "Heavenly Li" (tianli), which would later name a central metaphysical
category in Neo-Confucianisin. But in Chapter 3 its meaning is more concretely
related to the actual lines and contigurations runningthroughthe lesh of the ox,
the channels and gaps that serve as guides for the knife to effectively and easily
cut through it. In later parts of the Zhuangzi, the word becomes a more general
philosophical term, reterring to the underlying structure of a thing conceived as
 Glossary of Essential Terms 281

d Way its parts cohere with cach other and with the wider world, discernibleas
he natural guidelines that allow one to take worthwhile action with
respect to it,
ch that acting in accorcdance with them (or dividing along those particular lines)
uill lead to a valued arrangement of things. Li is a "coherence" in the sense of
something valued, somethimg readable, or the lines according to which one may
divide things up so as to make them colhere into a desired structure. As coherence,
it can thus be cquivalent to the sense made by things, the how and why of them,
their structure, the conditions of their possibility inasnuch as they must coexist
with other things, the way they ht together, what allows them to be discerned and
identified. and a tracing of what conhgurations of action are workable with respect
to them. It is translated ditferently in caclh case according to context.

MING B. 1lumination (of the Obvious). Clarity. Light. Understanding. The char-
acter is composed of a graph juxtaposing the sun and the moon; its most basic
meaning is simply "light, brightness." It also means to make manifest, or to un-
derstand, or what is manifest, the obvious. The distinctive phrase yiming AB
"using ming, because of ming," is repeated several times in Chapter 2 and is a
crucial point of controversy for interpreters. The same term is contrasted to zhi
(see entry below) several times in the Daodejing (Chapters 10, 33; see also Chap-
ters 16, 24, 27, 36, 47, 52, 55), and there, too, ming is some form of cognition ap-
proved of by the text while zhi is disparaged. In the Daodejing, it seems to refer to
the type of awareness that does not cut names and identities entirely out of their
unnamed contexts, thereby retaining a sense of their connection to the processes
of the whole and their rootedness in the nameless. This is a type of non-knowing
that is identified with the knowing of the sustainable (chang; see above). Chapter
2 does seem to share something of this contrast with zhi in its use of the term, but
gives it a twist more in keeping with its own way ot thinki Some take the term,
as used at crucial junctures in that chapter, to indicate a higher type of under-
standing, which transcends the relativism of perspectival rights and wrongs, a
"Creat Knowledge" that is intuitive rather than cognitive or logical. But this
seems to be inconsistent with the relativist critiques that dominate the local con-
text of this usage, a tension that some interpreters try to resolve by regarding the
critiques as merely therapeutic and provisional, critiques of rational knowledge to
make room for another, intuitive kind of knowledge. Understanding this term in
its more basic sense of "obvious" provides an alternate way to resolve this tension,
one that is in my view more satisfying on several levels-a usage closer to the so-
called "Cenuine Understanding" of Chapter 6, p. 53, which is clearly presented
as no understanding at all, intuitive or otherwise. It then refers not to a deeper
apprehension of the real transcendental truth lying beneath the surface of appear
ances but rather to attentiveness to the surface itself, the most obvious and unde-
niable feature of which is the disagreement between varying perspectives, but also
their intrinsic inseparability and unavoidable mutual transformations, inhabiting
and then forgetting the intrinsic rightness/thisness of each as it passes. As such it
is related to other distinctive and seemingly paradoxical phrases in Chapter 2,
notably "The Shadowy Splendor" (p. 18) and "The Radiance of Drift and
282 Glossary of Essential Terms
Doubt" (p. 16). Drift and Doubt are precisely what is obvious, and the radiance
and illumination provided by this resolves the problenms they seem to present, the
uncertainty of multi-perspectivism. This is still positively contrasted to ordinar
zhi and does all the work attributed to ming in the carlier Daoist sense of the
Daodejing. (Sce "Zhuangi as Philosoplher" athtps://www.hacketpublishing
com/zhuangziphil.)
MING a. ate. Destiny. Literally "a command," originally linked to Heaven in
the term tianming An, the "mandate of Heaven," which was used as a moral
justification for the Zhou overthrow of the Shang dynasty in the eleventh century
BCE. This term undergoes many of the same modifications that affect the term
Heaven" in subsequent Chinese thought. In the nner Chapters it is not apreex
isting plan inseribed in advance in some other, transcendental site, determining
what will happen. but rather a word for the unknowability of the agent who makes
things happen. That fate is not to be thought of as an agent that does something
or a positive law with determinate contents somewhere, an actual grounding
principle that accounts for anything, is already implied in the much more conser-
vative usage of the term by Zhuangzi's contemporary Mencius, whose conception
of Heaven retained a much more normative tinge than Zhuangzi's, but who none-
theless states, "What comes upon us although no particular agent brings it about
is what
we call ming, Fate" (Mencius, 5A7). Mencius perhaps meant only to dis
avow a human agent here, not literally to disavow all agents and identifiable de-
terminants, human or divine, seen or unseen; but the Zhuangzi of the Inner
Chapters can be understood to be literally dismissing all of the above. In the
Zhuangzi, the term is sometimes explicitly disassociated even from "Heaven" (see
the final story in Chapter 6, p. 63), underscoring the sense of "what happens al-
though I can find no one who makes it so," or more simply, a synonym tor "what
cannot be stopped," that is, what no conscious purpose or activity, of any one
particular agent divine or human, can change.

QI Ri. Vital Energy, Atmospheric Conditions, Breath, Air, Energy, Life Force. A
keyterm in Chinese cosmology, sometimes speculatively traced to a root meaning
of mist basis of the rice radical in
the that forms into clouds, (on the
or the char-
acter) even the steam rising from rice, in either case suggesting a vapor that takes
various shapes and provides life (as rain or as food). It refers to air in general, but
more specifically to the breath, and by extension the life force, the absence of
which constitutes a living creature's death (referred to as "cutting off the qi"). It
has no one fixed form and is composed of no fundamental building blocks such
as
atoms or particles, rather, it is constantly in a process of transformation, con
gealing and dispersing It also refers to weather conditions and to the general
feeling of a particular atmosphere either physically or stylistically. These implica-
tions are to be kept in mind when considering the various uses of wind imagery
in
Chaptersl and In2. Chapter 4 it is presented in an "empty" condition, con
trasted tothe ear and themind, with whieh one hears when practicing the "fasting
of the mind," and that is "a waiting for the presence of whatever thing may
come
 Glossary of Essential Terms
283

Having no hxed form or

identity of its
("empty"), it is able to adapt itself to
own
anycondition. Cosmologically it eventually comes to be
ofwhich all things are composed, which is by nature
the regarded as substance
intoimpalpable vapor and condense into palpable objects, biphasic, tending to expand
material and the spiitual, which is one moment undetectable spanning both the
and the next felt
the hand or face as wind,
by the ungs as
or
by
breath, nourishing seemingly produc-
ing something
trom nothmg, lite from empty space. This
ing is often encountered in the Outer and Miscellaneous expanded cosmic mean-
Zhuangzi. In slighthv later Chinese texts, Chapters of the
particularly those concerned with
med-
itation and religious practices, or with constructing a
universal theory of the origin
and constitution of the world, its relation to Dao becomes so close that the
two
terms often verge on svnonymity.

REN .
Humankindness; Kindness; Humaneness; Kind; Humane, Being Good.
See Reny.

RENYI 1 . Humankindness and

Responsible Conduct. Being Good and Doing
Right. Kindness, Responsibility. Kind and Responsible. Humane and Dutiful.
Goodness and Rightness. The cardinal virtues of Confucianism, sometimes trans-
lated as "Benevolence and Righteousness" (Waley, Watson) or "Goodwill and
Duty" (Graham). Functionally often a synecdoche for "morality" or "ethics in
general. Ren is originally the adjectival form of "human" (A), initially used espe-
cially of the noble class as opposed to the common masses (referred to as min EE).
Hence the term means the demeanor of a true member of the nobility, someone
who displays the character proper to a noble, or adjectivally, "to be noble." Con-
ucius
expands this implication, using the
on term
to mean something like "truly
human" (note that David Hall and Roger Ames translate the term as "authoritative
humanity"), applicable to a virtuous member of any social class. The term comes
to have the implication especially of kindness and humanitarian love, and the
sense of "kindness" in our translation "humankindness" should be taken here in
its original English etymological sense (encoded also in the "two" component of
the character 1), as a feeling of "kindredness" or "kinship"-either the feeling of
kindness as kinship among humans (or as in Chapter 14, the kindredness between
tigers and their young,p. 119) or in some later Confucian thought even the (hu-
man) feeling of kindredness with all things in the universe. Yi has a range of
meanings that no single English word exactly covers: "responsible conduct" is
deployed here as a blanket term meant to cover on one side "Justice" and on the
other "Duty," and in the middle a sense of Decency or a particular sense of what
is right and wrong in general, and what is right and thtting in any situation. It is
focused more on conduct than on feeling, without excluding the latter-which is
why a Confucian thinker like Mencius felt the necessity to retute the seemingly
commonsensical idea that it was "external" as opposed to the innerness of human-
kindness, allowing its ordinarily deemphasized dimension of a felt sense of respon-
sibility to be brought into focus. "Appropriateness E [to one's official position or
temporary situation, is its standard gloss in early texts, which gives us perhaps
284 GIOSS

carries a bit more normative gravitas than "aDn

its central connotation, but it
the scolding use of "not appropriate" is
priateness" bears in English (though
The term can mean justice both in its sense ofa
gaining ground in English).
situation to make it ht together in a way that is fair
readjustment of an existing
to all its participants, and in its severe sense of meting out deserved punishment
or imposing a restriction, saying no to something, retusing to do something be.
cause it is just not done (Mencns sees its source in the teeling of "shame and
dislike" of cettain states or acts, the need to negate or eliminate them): it can
mean "dut in the sense of fulhlhng the obligations that come with being ina
certain role or situation. It can thus mean doing right, rightness, justice. ordut
the doing of what onc's particular role or rank requires. Mencius says he likes
both life and vi. but likes vi more than Iite, and thus it is sonething he might he
willing to die for. The Shuowen defines it in terms of "one's personal dignified
demeano." ji zhi weivi , relating it to honor and selt-respect, which also
connects to the meaning of "decency." "Appropriate" is also the root meaning of
the English word "decent," rendering a coremeaning of "doing the decent thing,
acting appropriately in each context," but in English this perhaps does not convey
the life-or-death dignity of the term. The extended meaning of "meaning itself
is also not irrelevant here, denoting also the role a word properly plays in its
context, like the conduct that duty requires of a person in his social position and
temporary situation. The "meaning" of a word is also an instance of the word
doing its duty by appropriately playing its semantic role, and understanding a
meaning is "doing what one should in response" to the word, the "appropriate
response" to the use of that word, or perhaps the proper function of a word in
response to its context, the role to be played bya word in a sentence. The word
basically means "responding appropriately," whether to one's position and role
(duty), to the needs of the moment (appropriateness), or to the need for the
tempering or elimination of some unfitting factor in the adjudication of alterna-
tives (justice). Here it is translated "responsible conduct" (with the full sense of
"responding" in the forefront) when part of the set pair "humankindness and
responsible conduct, taken as a binome indicating the whole of moral virtue in
general. But when used alone it is translated variously according to context,
covering the range from Justice to Duty.

SHEN 4. Spirit, the Spiritlike, Spiritlike, the lmponderable, Imponderable Spirit.

The word originally means the spirit of a deceased person, an ancestor, or the in-
visible entity presiding over some part or process of nature like a river, a mountain,
or the growth of crops. In the period during which much of the Zhuangzi text
was probably written, the term was undergoing a partial expansion and demy-
thologization, without losing its original animistic application. It comes to be
used as an adjective describing anything mysterious, incomprehensible, incal-
culable, niraculous, as well as sometimes indicating a faculty within the living
human bcing, associated with the higher aspects of conscious life, including
but not limited to thought and innagination. But the implication of full transpar
ency and lucidity, of maximal intelligibility, which might be associated with
 Glossary of Essential Terms 285
eonsciousness" or "spirit" in English, should be avoided, since the term connotes
inust the opposite: the mysterious, the incomprehensible. Moreover, as the univer-
sal application of cosinological theories of Qi (vital energy; see above) begin to
ake more definite slhape during this sanme period, shen comes to be understood
as a highly retned torm of Qi, 1made of the same stuff as, and functioning on a
continuum with, all other phenomena, inchuding physical objects. Prior to this
time, while no theory is explicitly put forth, shen nay well have been assumed to
be an ontologically distinct category of existence, surviving the death of the phys-
ical body because it was of an entirely ditferent nature, as is commonly believed
in many pre- and even postliterate societies. This situation sometimes makes it
difficult to pinpoint which of these senses is intended in some of the usages in this
text; the judgment calls in the translation are determined by local context, but
whenever the term is used, all the possible meanings should be kept in mind.

SHENC Becoming, Birth, Life, the Life Proces, the Process of Life, the Flow
of Life, the Life in Us. The term means both "birth, becoming, coming into ex-
istence, whether of a state or condition or of a living entity, and "life" in the sense
of being alive. Hence "life process" is sometimes used as a translation, sometimes
generation, "production," and the like. In the opening lines of Chapter 3, in
accordance with the "shoreline" imagery used, it is translated as "flow of life." In
most places when it is something to be preserved or nourished, the vitality that
animates a living body, it is rendered "the life in us." "Nourishing life" should not
be understood as, say, feeding living creatures but as supplying the life in us with
what it needs for optimal fourishing and sustainability.

SHI/FEI E Right/Wrong. Literally "that's it/that's not" (A. C. Graham), im-

plying, "right/wrong." Shi by itself, or coupled with bi ("that, other") can mean
simply "this." The double meaning of "this'" and "right" are key to Zhuangzi's
argument in Chapter 2. For a full discussion, see "Zhuangzi as Philosopher" at
https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangziphil.
TIAN . Heaven, Heavenly, the Heavens, Sky, Skylike, Celestial. The first thing
any non-Chinese reader should understand about tian is that no one in the his-
yof Chinese thought ever doubts its existence. Eventhe most skeptical thinker
would not deny the existence of tian; rather, he would say that tian exists and
that it is simply that blue sky above us. This makes the term very unlike "Cod" and
its equivalents in Western traditions, and perhaps closer to "Nature," which sim-
ilarly is something the existence of which is never contested. In both cases the
only issue is not whether it exists but what its character is: personal, impersonal,
deliberate, nondeliberate, spiritual, material, moral, amoral, conscious, uncon-
scious. This primary meaning of "sky" is never absent in the word, in its most
rudimentary and undeniable sense: what is up there above the reach of human
beings, where weather comes from, which changes through the seasons and thus
sets the conditions for all human activity but is beyond human manipulation.
That contrast to purposive human activity remains the core element in thhe idea
286 Glossary of Essential Terms
of tian no matter what further content is added: tian is what is not accomplished
by any deliberate human actions, but which conditions human actions. But "sky"
also functioncd as a metonym for whatever deity or deities may be living in the
skv, much as the "White House" is sometimes usecd to refer to the president of
the United States, or "Hollywood" is used to designate a complex collective
conglomerate entity like "the movie industry." It was so used to designate the
ancestral deity or deities of the Zhou imperial house, whose moral "mandate"
underwrote the Zhou overthrow of the Shang dynasty in the eleventh centurv
BCE. Tian in this usage tended to function as a patriarchal sky-god of the kind
tvpical of many ancient cultures. With the rational1zing tendencies of the Spring
and Autumn Period (770-475 BCE), however, including the early Confucian
movement, the naturalistic association with "sky began to grow more pro-
nounced as the anthropomorphic and morally retributive aspects of the term
were dampened. In the Analects, Confucius sometimes uses the term with clear
but possibly rhetorical anthropomorphic implications, but elsewhere in the same
work he states that Heaven "does not speak [that is, issues no explicit commands],
and yet the tour seasons proceed through it, the hundred creatures are born
through it" (Analects 17:19). The naturalistic sense of Heaven as the plain process
of the sky seems to be present in this pronouncement. Interpretive hedgings
continued in the work of Zhuangzi's contemporary Mencius, representing what
would later be deemed the mainstream Contucian tradition. Mencius sometimes
reduced the meaning of Heaven explicitly to simply "what happens although
nothing makes it happen" (Mencius, 5A6). This is the sense of the term that
emerges front and center in Zhuangzi's usage: the spontaneous and agentless
process that brings forth all beings, or a collective name for whatever happens
without a specific identifiable agent that makes it happen and without a preex
isting purpose or will or observable procedure. This is "skylike" in the sense that
the sky is conceived as the ever-present but unspecifiable open space that "rotates"
tirelessly and spontaneously, bringing the changes of the seasons and the bounty
of the earth forth without having to issue explicit orders, make or enforce "laws"
or directly interfere: the turning of the sky makes the harvest without coming
down
and planning and planting, its action is ettortless and purposeless. The
Heavenly in all things is this "skylike" aspect of all things. The term "Nature
has been used by some early translators, but the implication of Nature as an
ordered and knowable system, running according to "Natural Laws," which are
rooted in the wisdom ofa divine lawgiver, is profoundly alien to the early Chinese
conception of spontaneity, which excludes the notion of positive law as an exter
nally constraining force. Since the term no longer refers to a particular agent but
to a quality or aspect of purposeless and agentless process present in all existents,
it is here often translated as "the Heavenly" rather than the substantive "Heaven.
But
the English "Heavenly" should not be taken in its loose colloquial sense as
an exclamnation ofpraise meaning something like "simply marvelous!" Similarly,
the English term "Heaven" should be stripped of any implications of a pearly-
gated place of reward to which people go when they die.
 Glossary of Essential Terms 287

WuWEI. Non-doing. Often translated into English as "nonaction," "effortless

action," "non-striving, non-cOntending, "non-purposive action," and the like.
The term first appears in Analects 15:5, where Confucius uses it to describe the
ffortless ritual ethcacy of the sage-ruler Shun; the Daoist use can be seen as
exDanding upon that sense of ettortless1ness to the point of stripping it of its ritual
substratum, taking the literal implication of the term nore seriously. Wei, which
is what wuwei negates, can mean "to do, "to be," "to become," "to make" "to
endeavor. "to deem oT regard |something) as [having some particular identity"
and "for [the purpose ot |, and all these senses should be kept in mind when
considering this ternm. What is denied here is not motion or action per se, but the
doing of deeds in the sense of consciously taking action "or" (wei)some specific
purpose, deliberate and intentional teleological action, such that one would deem
oneself and other things as having, or make oneself and others have, specific
definite identities relative to that purpose.

XIN . Heart, Mind, Heart-mind, Heartmind, Heart and Mind. The term is fa-
mously inclusive of both cognitive and affective aspects of human experience, as
well as the physical organ of the heart. Thus the connotations ot the English
"heart" are sometimes too gung-ho and sentimental, and the connotations of
"mind" are sometimes too cerebral and abstract. Instead of the neologism "heart-
mind" to address this problem, I prefer to use "heart," "mind" or "heart and mind,"
depending on the relevant aspect stressed in each context.
XING E. Inborn Nature, Inborn Propensity, Human Nature, Innate Nature of a
Thing. This term does not appear anywhere in the Inner Chapters (1-7) or in the
Daodejing. It is very common in the rest of the Zhuangzi (Chapters 8-33) and in
the vast majority of other Warring States texts dating from the time of Mencius
(who made it central to his presentation ot Contucianism) and thereater, and
indeed remains a topic of intense speculation and controversy in most Chinese

philosophical speculation up to and including modern times.

Y.For usage in the stock pair renyi, see supra. When used alone, Right Con-
duct, Righteousness, Rightness, Doing Right, Justice, Duty, Decency, Responsi-
bility, Role-appropriate Response, Appropriate Conduct, Conscientiousness,
as

required by conduct. See detailed explanation in the entry on renyi.

YINSHI E . Going by the Rightness of the Present "IThis." A special term found

repeated several times in Chapter 2 (pp. 14, 15, 16, 17) but rarely anywhere else,
it sums up the "Wild Card" way of handling the perspectival nature of value
judgments (see "Zhuangzi as Philosopher" at https://www.hackettpub
lishing.com/zhuangziphil for a full account). Yin normally means simply "to
follow," or "to go along with," but, as A. C. Graham has shown, it was also part of
the technical vocabulary of the logicians of Zhuangzi's day, used to mean "to take
as a criterion for a judgment, to go by" (See Shi / fei.)
288 Glossary of Essential Terms

ZHENG E. True, Right, Real, Correct, Straight, Aligned, Untilting, Unskewed.

Normally translated simply as "true" or "correct," sometimes as "real" in the sense
of "a true specimen of a
given type," the term has special importance in Chap-
ters 1 and 2 of
Zhuangzi, where it is sometimes the object of interrogation but
sometimes used in a positive sense. In the latter case,
given the critique of norma
tivity there, the term is translated in accord with its more basic etymological
meaning of "straight, aligned." Hence "true to" in the key line in Chapter 1, "to
chariotupon what is true
both to Heaven and to earth," the term is translated
as
"true" but this is to be understood in the sense of
aim may be said to be "true") rather than in the
"aligned with" (as rifleman's
a

This means fitting in, well-aligned, not

epistemological moral sense.
or

only with Heaven but also with earth,

sky-fitting in the sky as well as soil-fitting in the soil, right for the depths of the sea
as Kun and then
right for the heights of the heavens as Peng.
ZHI AO. The
Understanding, Conscious Knowing, Conscious Understanding, the
Understarnding Consciousness, the Mind Bent on Knowledge, Consciousness,
Intelligence, the Intellect, Wisdom, Cleverness, Discernment, Knowledge, Know-
how, Understanding, Comprehension. This is a crucial term in the
The character be
Zhuangzi.
can
pronounced in two ways, one being cognate with , usually
translated as "wisdom." Itdenotes not a store of information but rather a skill in
making "correct" distinctions concerning the character, behavior, and value of
things encountered and the successful know-how issuing from this recognition.
Mencius, Zhuang Zhou's contemporary, defines it as the fullest development of
the innate capacity to distinguish shi from fei,
the key terms in the Zhuangzi's
second chapter, meaning both the ability to approve and disapprove (and thereby
to distinguish "right" from
"wrong") and also the faculty of judgment that iden-
tifies what is or is not a certain thing or a member of a certain class. Sometimes
the Zhuangzi uses this positively charged term ironically, critiquing wisdom or
"cleverness" in this sense. In its other pronunciation, the word means the
of cognition in general: what recognizes and understands on the basis of its
faculty
knowl-
edge, regards things as one way or another, and has opinions, views, and plans
about things-the thinking mind. But the term also means consciousness in the
sense of sentience or awareness as such. A few decades after Zhuang Zhou's death,
the Confucian philosopher Xunzi will
say, for example: "Fire and water have vital
energy but not life; plants have lite but no consciousness (zhi); animals
consciousness but no sense of responsibility related to division into roles have and
duties (yi). Human beings have vital energy, life, consciousness, and also a sense
of responsibility and
duty to specific roles." The same word was used in this pe-
riod in posing the question about whether the
ness or not. So the term should in all cases denote
ghosts of the dead had conscious-
consciousness and its thinking.
conceived as intrinsically a skill in making judgments and discerning objects by
dividing down from a larger whole, and the capacity for successful action derived
therefrom. The whole, undivided, would be impossible to discern; one could not
be conscious of it. Zhi is the capacity to make "correct" divisions and select
particular parts from a larger whole. "The understanding" or "the intellect
 Glossary of Essential Terms 289

eonsidered as afaculty of judgment, the capacity of the mind to identify and

categorize things, 1s useful as a blanket translation for many of these senses. "Dis-
ent " "wisdom," or "intelligence is used as a translation when the sense of
askill in making correct distinctions is stressed. "Cleverness" is used wlhen the
nse of practical skill, or even cunning, is at the forefront. "Understanding."
"conscious knowing. orsimply "knowing" are used when the contextimplies a
etress on the explicit holding of views about what is so and what is right. "The
dlerstanding consciousness or
simply "consciousness" is used when this process
of knowing is viewed more substantively as the awareness that apprehends objects
of experience about which judgments might be made.