Chuang Tzu

Chuang Tzu does not ease you in. His book opens with a fish in the northern ocean, many thousand li in size, which turns into a bird whose wings darken the sky like clouds. Giles calls them the Leviathan and the Rukh, borrowing names from Western and Arabian legend; in Chinese they are the K'un and the P'êng.

At the right season the bird climbs a typhoon to ninety thousand li and flies south for six months.

Then, before you can settle into awe, Chuang Tzu pulls the view back. Looking down from that height, the bird sees the same endless blue that a mote of dust sees in a sunbeam. The biggest thing you can imagine is small from somewhere else, and the chapter has only just begun.

Between marvels, Chuang Tzu slips in an observation anyone can test. Tip a cupful of water into a small hollow and a mustard seed will float on it like a boat. Set the cup itself down there and it sticks. Shallow water cannot carry a large vessel.

Air is no different. The great bird needs ninety thousand li of it beneath its wings before it can even set off.

So the enormous climb is not vanity. It is what a large thing requires. A big undertaking needs a depth of support that looks absurd from close to the ground, and all that preparation looks like wasted effort to anyone whose own trip is short.

Now the laughter. A cicada says to a young dove, more or less: when I fly with all my might I barely get from one tree to the next, and sometimes I drop to the ground halfway. What could be the use of going up ninety thousand li just to head south?

Chuang Tzu tells the story twice. In the retelling it is a quail, fluttering a few yards among the reeds and wondering where ever that creature thinks it is going.

Notice what the laugh is made of. The cicada is not wicked, and not even foolish about trees. It simply takes its own few yards of air as the measure of what flying is for, and anything past that measure looks pointless.

Why do the cicada and the quail find the great bird's flight ridiculous?

• They are envious of its size and hide the envy behind a joke.
• They measure what flying is for by the distance they can manage.✓Correct answer
• They are right that such a long flight wastes the bird's strength.
• They have good reason to think the south is no better than the north.

The cicada says outright that tree to tree is the most it can do, and then asks what more could possibly be for. Its own reach becomes the yardstick; the text gives no hint of envy, and no real argument about the south.

Chuang Tzu answers the cicada with packing advice. A walk into the nearby countryside takes three meals, and you come home as full as you left. A hundred li means grinding flour for a night's stop. A thousand li means provisions for three months.

Nobody calls the long-distance traveller a fool for his heavy pack. You only understand the preparation if you can picture the journey.

Then comes the line the whole chapter hangs on: "Small knowledge has not the compass of great knowledge any more than a short year has the length of a long year." It is not an insult. It is a matter of range, the way a day-tripper honestly cannot imagine what a thousand li asks of a person.

He makes the same point with time. The mushroom that springs up in the morning never learns that day gives way to night. The chrysalis never sees spring turn into autumn. Their years are short, and nothing inside those lives could show them otherwise.

Meanwhile, in the State of Ch'u, lives a tortoise whose every spring and every autumn lasts five hundred years, and there was once a tree whose seasons ran eight thousand.

And P'êng Tsu, China's Methuselah, who lived some eight hundred years? He is still, alas, envied by everyone. That "alas" is the joke. We envy a lifespan the tree would call brief, because it is longer than ours, and never think to look at the tree.