The Philosophy of Zhuangzi and the Wisdom of the Useless Tree for Sleep

The story appears near the end of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, the chapter called Free and Easy Wandering, and it takes the form of one of those exchanges between Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi, Huishi in some translations, that recur throughout the book like a running argument between two people who like each other well enough but cannot stop disagreeing.

Huizi was a logician, a man fond of categories and definitions and hard-edged reasoning, and in the Zhuangzi, he often plays the role of the person who sees the world as a problem to be solved.

Zhuangzi, by contrast, tends to see problems as invitations to dissolve, to back up far enough that the problem reveals itself as a frame rather than a fact.

In this particular exchange, Huizi is complaining about a tree.

He has a large tree, he says.

The text calls it an ailanthus, though other translators have rendered it as the shoe tree, a large, rough, malodorous thing sometimes called the stink tree, and he is frustrated with it.

Its trunk is so full of knots and bumps and irregular swellings that no carpenter could apply a line to it.

You could not run a chalk string along it and get a straight mark.

Its branches are so twisted and crooked, bending back on themselves, curving where they ought to be straight, that no one with a square or a compass could make use of them.

It stands by the road, Huizi says, and not a single craftsman gives it a look.

And then he turns the complaint into a jab.

Your words, he tells Zhuangzi, are like that tree, big, grand, showy, and completely useless.

Everyone turns away from them.

It is a sharp little insult, and you can hear behind it a genuine irritation.

Huizi is not a fool.

He is a man who believes in usefulness, in the application of ideas to problems, in the world as a place where things should work.

And here is his friend Zhuangzi, telling stories about giant fish and enormous birds and winds that carry you to the edge of the sky.

And none of it, to Huizi's mind, does anything.

It is all air and poetry.

It is the intellectual equivalent of a tree too crooked to cut.

Zhuangzi's answer is one of those moments in the text that seems at first like a simple reversal, like a debater scoring a point, but that opens into something wider if you let it breathe.

He does not defend the usefulness of his words.

He does not explain how, actually, his philosophy has practical applications if only you look at it from the right angle.

Instead, he takes Huizi's image and turns it.

You have this great tree, Zhuangzi says, and you are distressed that it is useless.