Tonight, a classic
story. When the wife of Chuang Tzu died, his friend Hui Tzu came to offer his
condolences and he was surprised to find Chuang Tzu sitting down, drumming on a
potter pan and singing. Hui Tzu said, “You lived with her, raised children with
her, and grew old together. Even weeping is not enough, but now you are
drumming and singing. Is it a bit too much?” Chuang Tzu said, “That is not how
it is. When she just died, how could I not feel grief? But I looked deeply into
it and saw that she was lifeless before she was born. She was also formless and
there was not any energy. Somewhere in the vast imperceptible universe there
was a change, an infusion of energy, and then she was born into form, and into
life. Now the form has changed again, and she is dead. Such death and life are
like the natural cycle of the four seasons. My dead wife is now resting between
heaven and earth. If I wail at the top of my voice to express my grief, it
would certainly show a failure to understand what is fated. Therefore I
stopped.”
Chuang Tzu makes it
clear that death in our society makes us sad but does not need to stop us from
moving on with our life. Excessive and formularized expression of grief at the
death of our fellow man is a sign of our civilization. Chuang Tzu held himself
back from the local custom, the human culture.
