The state Cook Ding describes — and Zhuangzi returns to it with the wheelwright, the cicada-catcher, the swimmer in the falls, the ferryman — is total absorption in a practised activity, in which deliberation drops away and the action fits the material exactly. It is the tradition's picture of what a good life looks like from the inside, and its setting is significant: these are butchers, artisans and boatmen, not sages on mountains. Modern psychology's flow, as described by Csikszentmihalyi, is an obvious cousin and the comparison is routinely made, though Zhuangzi's framing is not about optimal experience but about the disappearance of the calculating self. What the stories consistently deny is that the state can be reached by trying, or explained afterwards; the wheelwright tells the duke he cannot teach it to his own son, which is why he is still making wheels at seventy, and why the books the duke is reading are, he says, the dregs of dead men.