Zhuang Zhou (Zhuang Zi 庄子)

 

“When you know that living is hard, and you don’t know what to do to improve but you are happy with the current situation, and was able to find a way to follow the rule of nature, this is the highest state of moral accomplishment.”                    

                                                                                                                                                     ---- Zhuang Zhou

 

Zhuang Zhou (Master Zhuang, 庄子) is a famous philosopher, a representative of Taoism and a pursuer of freedom of spirit and body. In his book Zhuang Zi, there were two chapters Ren Shi Jian (人世间In the land of the living) and De Chong Fu (德充符 The enrichment and confirmation of potency and morality) describing the life of several people with disability or extreme form of appearance. The disability figures here were relatively neutral without much devaluation nor praise, and were used by Zhuang Zhou to convey his philosophical ideologies in the freedom and fluidity in the form of life and the relationship among morality, physical body and nature. One of the stories Zhuang Zhou told is about how a man with disability lived a happy life as a tailor without any worries of becoming a soldier (a lot of men were forced to become soldiers at the time of Zhuang Zhou). Zhuang Zhou argued that this man with disability showed the usefulness in the normally defined “useless” beings. In Zhuang Zhou’s philosophy, the appearance of the human body is defined by “Dao” (way, road, law of nature) and “Tian” (sky, God, nature), and the highest state of morality is to find your own comfort following the guide of nature. Thus, a disabled body would not block the way of achieving morality accomplishments and an abled body does not necessarily have higher morality.