Should We Believe the Legend of Mount Guye as Told by a Madman?

In the chapter “Free and Easy Wandering” of the Zhuangzi, there is a story in which Jianwu asks Lianshu whether he should believe what Jieyu says. Jieyu is the famous madman of Chu. As the Tang poet Li Bai wrote, “I have always been the madman of Chu, with my phoenix song I laughed at Kong Qiu.” This madman of Chu describes the world of the immortals to Jianwu, saying that on distant Mount Guye dwell divine beings whose “skin is like ice and snow, as delicate as a young girl’s. They eat no grain, inhale the wind, and drink the dew. They ride the clouds, harness flying dragons, and wander beyond the four seas. Their spirit is concentrated, so that creatures are free from blight and disease and the yearly harvest ripens.” Jianwu finds this hard to accept and regards Jieyu’s words as “grand but impractical, sweeping on without return; I am frightened by his words, which are like the Milky Way, without limit.” Hence “I regard him as mad and do not believe him.” Although he has decided not to believe him, Jianwu seems to want Lianshu to confirm that he is right and Jieyu absurd. Lianshu, however, expresses admiration for Jieyu’s words and severely criticizes Jianwu: “True. The blind cannot share in the spectacle of fine patterns, nor the deaf in the sound of bells and drums. Is it only the body that has its deafness and blindness? The understanding, too, has them.”

From a modern standpoint, the description of these divine beings on Mount Guye is hard to credit. Like us, Jianwu rejects Jieyu’s ethereal legend on the basis of everyday experience, and this is a rather rational response. Why, then, does Lianshu criticize him so severely? Perhaps the question is not whether one should believe the madman of Chu, but whether one should unhesitatingly shut the door on listening and reflection and refuse to explore a world beyond one’s own common sense.

People are accustomed to measuring the unknown by the known, to taking their own everyday experience or common sense as the sole yardstick for everything. In doing so, they lose the capacity to understand the transcendent and to apprehend new realms. Whatever exceeds the bounds of ordinary feeling and reason is dismissed as mad or perverse. Common sense and experience are in themselves sharp tools for analyzing the world and stepping stones to higher insight, but if they are held too firmly and turned into dogmatic walls, the fog of self-righteousness will blind us, trapping us within existing knowledge and shutting us off from higher spiritual transcendence.

This deafness and blindness of the understanding is also vividly illustrated in the widely read work of popular psychology The Courage to Be Disliked, by the Japanese philosopher Ichiro Kishimi and the writer Fumitake Koga. A depressed and irritable young man comes to speak with a philosopher. He is convinced that human suffering stems from past trauma, that character is shaped by one’s family of origin, and that personal destiny is hard to change. Such a view accords with the young man’s own experience and with everyone’s everyday experience. But the philosopher, drawing on the thought of Alfred Adler (1870–1937), tells him that people are not governed by the past but by the meaning they give it, and that they do not live for some given purpose but choose for themselves how to live. At this, the young man is thoroughly provoked and repeatedly refutes the philosopher’s views and accuses him of being cold, absurd, and unfeeling. The philosopher’s words are not without reason; precisely because that reasoning is so jarring, it shakes the cognitive foundation on which the young man has built his life. In this, the young man’s extreme rejection of ideas beyond his own experience resembles that of Jianwu in “Free and Easy Wandering.” Unlike Jianwu, however, the young man, though he objects vehemently again and again, does not simply walk away. Rather, through round after round of debate, he gradually begins to reflect in earnest and is ultimately enlightened by Adler’s “counterintuitive” philosophy, finding liberation of mind and psychological healing.

Common sense and experience are in themselves the fulcrum of thought, yet they may also become a prison of the spirit. The philosophies of Zhuangzi and Adler, the one aimed at free and easy spiritual wandering, the other at freedom of mind, both remind us that if we are to embrace pioneering and creative ideas, we must first be psychologically prepared to break down the walls of experience. An excessive attachment to experience only makes one complacent about what is already known, whereas intellectual progress and the growth of mind and character begin with tolerance for, and curiosity about, voices that are “grand but impractical, sweeping on without return.”