Death and transformation: is the singing-on-the-basin response heartlessness, denial, or the philosophical achievement of seeing through to the great transformation?

Zhuangzi, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Death and life are alternations, not opposites. The great Clod (Heaven and Earth, the cosmos itself) gives me the form of a man, gives me labor in life, gives me ease in old age, and gives me rest in death; what makes my life good is what makes my death good (Chapter 6). The butterfly dream presses the question on the side of life: I do not know whether I was Zhuang Zhou dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming it is Zhuang Zhou.

The singing-on-the-basin scene of Chapter 18 — written by the school after my own time — presses it on the side of death: the husband wept first, then thought it through, then sang. The deathbed scene of Chapter 32 (also from after my time) has me say that Heaven and Earth are my coffin, the sun and moon my burial jewels. We do not finally know what death is; the cosmological language of transformation is not metaphysical assertion but the phenomenology of the working-through. The skeptical and the cosmological are held together: we do not know, and we sing.¹²³

Sources

1. "See how he has doubled me up. My back is so hunched that my viscera are at the top of my body. My cheeks are level with my navel. My shoulders are higher than my neck. My hair grows up towards the sky. The whole economy of my organism is deranged.

   Chuang Tzu

2. When Chuang Tzŭ's wife died, Hui Tzŭ went to condole. He found the widower sitting on the ground, singing, with his legs spread out at a right angle, and beating time on a bowl. "To live with your wife," exclaimed Hui Tzŭ, "and see your eldest son grow up to be a man, and then not to shed a tear over her corpse,--this would be bad enough.

   Chuang Tzu

3. And if I employ some one who either differs from, or agrees with, both of us, he will be equally unable to decide between us. Since then you, and I, and man, cannot decide, must we not depend upon Another? Upon God, in whose infinity all contraries blend indistinguishably into ONE. Such dependence is as though it were not dependence. We are embraced in the obliterating unity of God.

   Chuang Tzu

Where the argument is made

• Inner Chapters 2 (the butterfly dream, Penumbra and Shadow), 3 (the death of Lord Wenhui's master), 5 (the no-foot Wang Tai, the leper Ai Tai-tuo), 6 (Master Yu's deformity, Master Lai's dying, the Great Clod that gives me labor in life and rest in death), 7 (Hundun's death from being given senses)
• Outer Chapter 18 (the wife's death and the singing-on-the-basin), Miscellaneous Chapter 32 (the deathbed scene — Heaven and Earth my coffin, the sun and moon my burial jewels)

How the argument was received

The wife's death scene is in the Outer Chapter 18, not the Inner Chapters, and is therefore school material rather than directly Zhuang Zhou's voice; the deathbed scene of Chapter 32 is school as well. The Inner Chapters' own treatments — Chapter 6's sequence of dying friends (Master Yu, Master Sang, Master Lai), the leper Ai Tai-tuo and the no-foot Wang Tai of Chapter 5, the Penumbra and Shadow at the close of Chapter 2 — work at the same theme with more restraint. The proto-Buddhist receptions read the transformation as the unreality of the self; this is a reading that goes further than the texts.