Taoism

Zhuangzi's Wife Died and He Sang, Drumming on a Basin

Zhuangzi's own explanation for not mourning his wife rests on tracing her death back through a chain of prior transformations to before she had a body at all.

Huizi arrives to offer condolences and is shocked to find Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing, instead of weeping, and asks how this can be an appropriate way to treat the death of the woman who raised his children and grew old with him. Zhuangzi answers that he did grieve when she first died, same as anyone, but then thought back to before she had a body at all — not just before her birth, but before there was a shape, before there was even breath, when she was mixed in an undifferentiated blur among other things, until a change produced breath, then a change in breath produced form, then a change in form produced life, and now one more change has produced death. He compares this sequence explicitly to the passing of the four seasons and concludes that to wail loudly over her death would show he didn't understand fate, so he stopped. The passage, from chapter 18, is one of the clearest statements in the Zhuangzi that death is not the negation of life but one more transformation within the same continuous process that produced life in the first place.

Zhuangzi

Written about in

• What Taoism says about death

  Challenged for not mourning, Zhuangzi says he did grieve at first, then traced her back through change after change to before she had a body at all. Her death, he concludes, is one more change in the same series.