"All existing things are really one. We regard those that are beautiful and rare as valuable, and those that are ugly as foul and rotten The foul and rotten may come to be transformed into what is rare and valuable, and the rare and valuable into what is foul and rotten"
About this Quote
Zhuangzi dissolves the divide between beautiful and ugly, precious and rotten, by appealing to the deeper unity of the Dao. All things arise within one continuous process, and any value judgment we attach to them is a momentary snapshot within ongoing transformation. What dazzles one season becomes dust in another; what reeks today becomes rich soil tomorrow. Jade and perfume fade. Compost and mud give life. The distinctions we make are real in use but not ultimate in nature.
Written in the Warring States period, this vision pushes back against rigid moral and aesthetic hierarchies promoted by rival schools. Zhuangzi often targets the habit of asserting this vs. that, right vs. wrong, as if names could freeze the world. In the chapter often called Equalizing Things, he argues that our pronouncements arise from our positions and needs, not from fixed essences. Change unsettles every label. The rare is valuable because people agree to prize it; scarcity itself shifts over time. The foul is condemned because it offends present senses; yet rot is also a necessary stage in the cycle that nourishes what we later admire.
His parables sharpen the point. The useless, gnarled tree lives long because carpenters ignore it; the straight, fine tree is cut down. What looks worthless in one frame becomes protective in another. Even identity is fluid, as in the butterfly dream that unsettles the boundary between dreaming and waking, self and other.
The ethical posture that follows is not cynicism but humility and ease. Do not cling to valuations as if they were eternal. Work with circumstances, not against them. Let things be as they are, and meet them without the hard edge of fixed judgment. To see all existing things as one is to inhabit a spacious perspective where loss and gain, beauty and ugliness, are recognized as turns in a single, boundless transformation.
Written in the Warring States period, this vision pushes back against rigid moral and aesthetic hierarchies promoted by rival schools. Zhuangzi often targets the habit of asserting this vs. that, right vs. wrong, as if names could freeze the world. In the chapter often called Equalizing Things, he argues that our pronouncements arise from our positions and needs, not from fixed essences. Change unsettles every label. The rare is valuable because people agree to prize it; scarcity itself shifts over time. The foul is condemned because it offends present senses; yet rot is also a necessary stage in the cycle that nourishes what we later admire.
His parables sharpen the point. The useless, gnarled tree lives long because carpenters ignore it; the straight, fine tree is cut down. What looks worthless in one frame becomes protective in another. Even identity is fluid, as in the butterfly dream that unsettles the boundary between dreaming and waking, self and other.
The ethical posture that follows is not cynicism but humility and ease. Do not cling to valuations as if they were eternal. Work with circumstances, not against them. Let things be as they are, and meet them without the hard edge of fixed judgment. To see all existing things as one is to inhabit a spacious perspective where loss and gain, beauty and ugliness, are recognized as turns in a single, boundless transformation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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