Story of Taoism

Drumming on the pot.

Huizi arrives to pay respects and finds Zhuangzi sitting with his legs out, banging on a tub and singing, his wife dead beside him. Asked how he can do this, he says he wailed like anyone else at first — and then thought about where she had been before she was born, and could not go on treating it as a disaster.

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Where it is toldZhuangzi, chapter 18

Who appearsZhuangzi, his dead wife, an appalled Huizi

What it teachesThat his friend found him drumming on a pot and singing, and that he said he had wept at first, and then thought about where she had come from, and stopped

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

In chapter 18 Huizi comes to offer condolences on the death of Zhuangzi's wife and finds him squatting with his legs sprawled, drumming on an upturned basin and singing. Huizi is appalled — she raised your children and grew old with you, and not weeping would be bad enough. Zhuangzi answers that of course he grieved at first, like anyone. Then he looked back to her beginning, before she had a life, before she had a form, before she had qi, and saw that in the confusion of the formless something changed and there was qi, and it changed and there was form, and form changed and there was life, and now it has changed again and there is death — like the passing of the four seasons. She is lying peacefully in a great chamber, he says, and if I were to follow her about howling, it would show I understood nothing of fate. The story is quoted constantly in Chinese writing on bereavement and is not usually treated as coldness.

From the sources — the passages this rests on; concise renderings, cited

She is lying peacefully in a great chamber. If I were to follow her about howling and wailing, it would show that I understood nothing of what is allotted. So I stopped.
Zhuangzi, chapter 18 (rendered)
Said to a friend who had arrived to find him drumming on a pot beside his wife's body.

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