Dragging Its Tail in the Mud
The Teaching
Kwang-dze was (once) fishing in the river Phû, when the king of Khû sent two great officers to him, with the message, ‘I wish to trouble you with the charge of all within my territories.’ Kwang-dze kept on holding his rod without looking round, and said, ‘I have heard that in Khû there is a spirit-like tortoise-shell, the wearer of which died 3000 years ago, and which the king keeps, in his ancestral temple, in a hamper covered with a cloth. Was it better for the tortoise to die, and leave its shell to be thus honoured? Or would it have been better for it to live, and keep on dragging its tail through the mud?’ The two officers said, ‘It would have been better for it to live, and draw its tail after it over the mud.’ ‘Go your ways. I will keep on drawing my tail after me through the mud.’
— Zhuangzi 17
Commentary
A king offers Zhuangzi the government of his whole kingdom, and Zhuangzi doesn’t look up from his fishing. He asks the messengers a question about a tortoise. There is a sacred shell in the king’s temple, wrapped in cloth and honoured for three thousand years. Would the tortoise rather be that? Or alive, dragging its tail through the mud? The messengers answer correctly, and Zhuangzi sends them home.
The martyr queue is a line for the shrine: the honoured shell, the place in the temple, a self displayed after it has stopped living. Zhuangzi is the counter-image. He turns the post down and keeps the life. And he does it laughing, without a speech, without making a cause of the refusal, which is the only way to refuse the post without turning the refusal into another one.
The mud is the point. A life that doesn’t need to be seen, honoured or wrapped in cloth is free in a way no position can be.
Themes
Connections 6
Unsure
No documented reading of Taoism by Tool.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Christianity and Taoism while these teachings took shape. The Church of the East reached Chang’an in 635 and described itself in Taoist and Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781), long after both took shape.
Unsure
No documented reading of Taoism by Ram Dass.