The respected Trappist monk Thomas Merton spent several years reading and The Way of Chuang Tzu, by Thomas Merton, is the product of five years of. Chuang Tzu—considered, along with Lao Tzu, one of the great figures of early The respected Trappist monk Thomas Merton spent several years reading and. A light bulb went off as well when I realized that Chuang Tzu was also one of Thomas Merton’s favorite writers. Merton wrote his own versions.
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This is one of the first books I read some time ago after first reading the Chuang Tzu. Read it because I needed to read other interpretations of the Chuang Tzu.
If this if life, then pigeons in a cage Have found happiness! I will definitely read this again. The Way of Chuang Tzu Shambhala library.
What comes when the unknowable God reveals himself? If you want to understand Merton then this translation may well help. I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. Instead of propounding hi I am finally reading it after conversations about Chinese ztu and religion with several Chinese undergraduates on a field trip to Chicago.
Oh to know fully that all that is needed has already been given! The wind is jealous of the eye. It is not “conditioned” or “limited” by thomaw own individual needs and desires, or even by our own theories and ideas.
Basically, Chuang Tzu insists on abandoning the chhang to win”, and gives attention to the humility of fully realizing one’s own nothingness.
The dawn must look different to one living on a small lake from which he gets his ghomas, idling about alone, without work, without a spouse, without a child and without a mortgage. Like an infant, be free from care and be unaware of self. Return to Book Page. According to traditional dating, he was an almost exact contemporary of the Confucian thinker Mencius, but there appears to have been little to no communication between them.
The result is this collection of poetic renderings of the great sage’s work that conveys its spirit in a way no other translation has and that was Merton’s personal favorite among his more than fifty books. This is not a new translation, unlike several other editions on my shelf many of which have been sitting unread for nearly as long as this one.
Best stories would be the Great and Small, which points out that everything is relative; and Means and Ends which talks about the purpose of a tool and the importance of not making the tool itself the object of admiration. What Hemingway is with efficiency for sorrow, Chuang Tzu – as interpreted by Thomas Merton – is the master of efficiency for spiritual awe. What is this power? A couple of paragraphs from Merton’s introduction stand out as worthy of citing: In other words, it is not a new apologetic subtlety This humility is not only ‘cosmic’ mertob it is also full of life and awareness.
chjang He wishes to lead them past the practices to the heart within all of us. As they say, the tao that can be spoken is not the true tao. The first theme that stands out to me is the notion Of course there is the irony of all the institutional trappings of a class in connection with Zen.
He can go down into the lowest of low places and find people.
The Way of Chuang Tzu (Shambhala Library)
Perhaps that is due to the fact that Chuang Tzu realized the dangers of claiming knowledge or trying to convert others into one’s own beliefs. He can stand in the highest of high places and see meaning.
What does butchering a cow have to do finding joy? That which is not, goes his way. Though, from the point of view of scholarship, I am not even a dwarf sitting on the shoulders of these giants, and though not all my renderings can even qualify as ‘poetry,’ I believe that a certain type of reader will enjoy my intuitive approach to a thinker who is subtle, funny, provocative, and not easy to get at 9.
Li is the acting out of veneration and love, not only for parents, for one’s sovereign, for one’s people, but also for “Heaven-and-earth. One example would be the story of “Good Fortune.
However, the content of his translation is too frequently wrong to make this translation a reliable representation of what Zhuang Zi Chuang Tzu meant. Yet it is not nature that does the damage: My library Help Advanced Book Search. Modern society is all about that.
As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. Chuang Tzu believed that abstractions such as “happiness,” “virtue,” and “justice” were concepts placed into the world of objects to be attained, and should be considered ambiguous at best, dangerous at worst. Conversations with Tengjiao Chen and Zhi Chai.
The Way of Chuang Tzu by Zhuangzi
From his fishing spot, he can contemplate the holistic fabric of the universe in the glimmer on the lake, and then look upon the road and frown on the senseless worries of the people around him. This is the most important fact to remember when merhon westerners confront the seeming antinomianism of Chuang Tzu or of the Zen masters.
The more, therefore, chunag concentrates on the means to be used to attain it. Engages in a self-conscious and deliberate campaign to ‘do his duty’ in the belief that this is right and therefore productive of happiness. In so doing they are alienated from themselves, and exhaust themselves in their own service as though they were slaves of others.
Be like a fish that swims unconcerned.