Sitting in Forgetfulness — Zuowang
Yan Hui reports a progressive sequence of things he has learned to forget, ending in a state Confucius admits he has not himself reached.
The dialogue unfolds in stages: Yan Hui first tells Confucius he has forgotten benevolence and righteousness, the core Confucian virtues, and is told it's a start but not enough; he returns having forgotten rites and music, and is told the same. On his third visit he reports, "I sit and forget" — Confucius, startled, asks what that means, and Yan Hui explains: I smash my limbs and body, drive out perception and intellect, cast off form, do away with understanding, and make myself identical with the Great Thoroughfare, the Tao. Confucius's response inverts the expected teacher-student relationship — he asks to become Yan Hui's follower — which is itself part of the chapter's irony, putting this practice of self-forgetting in the mouth of Confucius's most beloved disciple rather than a stranger to the tradition. Zuowang describes a progressive shedding of exactly the things a Confucian education is trained to value — moral categories, then cultural forms, then the sense of having a separate body and mind at all.
I sit and forget.
Zhuangzi