The Woodcarver Who Fasted His Heart Before Carving the Bell Stand
A carver's secret for producing spirit-seeming work turns out to be a week-long process of forgetting reward, reputation, and eventually his own body.
Woodcarver Qing carves a bell stand so fine that everyone who sees it exclaims it must have been made by ghosts and spirits, and the Marquis of Lu asks what art made it possible. Qing plays down technique and describes a preparatory fast instead: on the third day of stilling his mind he has forgotten any thought of reward or rank; by the fifth day he has forgotten praise and blame, skill and clumsiness; by the seventh day he has forgotten he even has a body, forgotten the court and the state, collected in his skill with outside distractions melted away. Only then does he go into the forest to look at the natural shape and grain of the trees themselves, waiting until he sees one whose form already contains the bell stand within it — his own nature meeting the tree's, which he calls using Heaven to match Heaven. Chapter 19 presents the finished object's uncanny quality not as inspiration or technical virtuosity but as the visible result of clearing away the carver's self-interest until his perception could meet the material's own nature without interference.
I use Heaven to match Heaven.
Zhuangzi