Zhuangzi, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Cook Ding has been cutting up oxen for Lord Wenhui for nineteen years and his blade is still as if newly sharpened from the whetstone, because he does not hack through bones but slips through the joints — when he encounters a place where the blade and the joints are perfectly fitted, his mind comes to a halt and his hand slows down, the blade whispers, the ox falls apart like clods of earth.
The Wheelwright Pian (Chapter 13) tells Duke Huan that the right way of chipping cannot be put into words, that he has not been able to teach it even to his own son, that what the duke is reading is the chaff of dead men's utterances. The swimmer of Lüliang (Chapter 19) emerges from the rapids singing and tells Confucius he was born to it, became habituated to it, accomplished it by destiny — there is no method.
These are the parables of skill as embodiment of the Course. The cook does not theorize; the wheelwright cannot teach; the swimmer was born to it. The skill is not a kind of knowledge.1234
Those who see this bogy are like to be chieftains among men." The Duke laughed exultingly and said, "The very one I saw!" Thereupon he dressed himself and sat up; and ere the day had closed, without knowing it, his sickness had left him. The above episode teaches that the evils which appear to come upon us from without, in reality have their origin within.Chuang Tzu
But alas! the people of this generation think that form, and colour, and sound, and noise, are means by which they can come to understand the essence of TAO. This is not so. And as those who know, do not speak, while those who speak do not know, whence should the world derive its knowledge?" The first half of this last sentence has been pitchforked à propos de bottes into ch. lvi of the Tao-Tê-Ching.Chuang Tzu
For at the joints there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such an interstice. These words help to elucidate a much-vexed passage in ch. xliii of the Tao-Tê-Ching. See The Remains of Lao Tzŭ, p. 30. By these means the interstice will be enlarged, and the blade will find plenty of room.Chuang Tzu
That was my original condition. Growing up on the water, I accommodated myself to the water. That was what I meant by nature. Habit is second nature. And doing as I did without being conscious of any effort so to do, that was what I meant by destiny." Objective existences cannot injure him who puts his trust in God. [This episode occurs twice, with textual differences, in the works of Lieh Tzŭ, chs. ii.Chuang Tzu
Cook Ding is in Inner Chapter 3 and is therefore Zhuang Zhou's own image. Wheelwright Pian (Chapter 13) and the Lüliang swimmer (Chapter 19) are in Outer Chapters and represent a distinguishable skill-mystic strand within the school (Liu Xiaogan, Graham). The contemporary Western reception — Csíkszentmihályi's 'flow,' the expertise literature, Heideggerian skill as Being-in-the-world, Zen-Buddhist appropriations — has tended to translate the no-method skill into a method, which is precisely what the texts refuse.