The Turtle Dragging Its Tail in the Mud
Offered control of a kingdom, Zhuangzi answers with a question about a revered, dead tortoise instead of a direct refusal.
Zhuangzi, without turning around from his fishing rod, asks two visiting officials of the King of Chu about a tortoise the state keeps: dead now three thousand years, its bones wrapped in cloth and kept in a box on the altar of the ancestral temple. He asks them: would that tortoise rather be dead, with its bones so venerated, or alive, dragging its tail in the mud? The officials answer, correctly, that it would rather be alive dragging its tail in the mud, and Zhuangzi tells them to leave, because he too intends to go on dragging his tail in the mud. Set in chapter 17, the story turns political honor into a version of the tortoise's gilded death — prestige and public office framed as a kind of ceremonial preservation that costs the very freedom that made the position worth having in the first place.
I would rather be alive and dragging my tail in the mud.
Zhuangzi
Written about in
- What Taoism says about envy and comparison
Without turning from his fishing rod, Zhuangzi asks two officials whether the state's sacred tortoise would rather be dead three thousand years with its bones wrapped and honoured, or alive dragging its tail in the mud. They answer correctly, and he declines the office they came to offer. The position you envy has a price, usually paid in freedom.