Front. Philos. China 2016, 11(3): 483–500 DOI 10.3868/s030-005-016-0034-6

SPECIAL THEME

David Chai

On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death

Abstract famously declares that Dasein does not perish but experiences its demise, and that death stands before us as something to be anticipated. This idea of -towards-death is an anticipation of possibility, of becoming authentically free for one’s death. If we take Heidegger’s view of death and compare it to that of the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, we notice that the latter also holds death in an unusual light. For Zhuangzi, death is possibility not because it symbolizes the perfection of being but insofar as it reveals its entanglements. This paper will thus argue in support of the Daoist notion that death is neither to be feared nor does it serve as the end of one’s contribution to the world. It will also take the stance that death qua nothingness is both a corporeal and metaphorical embodiment of Dao in that death and nothingness reflect the natural praxis of Dao to be still, empty, and quiet. In order to facilitate our analysis, we will focus on the story of Zhuangzi and the roadside skull, a story that has Zhuangzi pillowing said skull from which he realizes that life is but a pillowing of death.

Keywords Zhuangzi, death, Heidegger, meontology

Nothing is more vital to a of life than death; indeed, our entire conceptualization of existence is predicated upon holding back the nihilistic forces of non-existence. Many of the world’s religions and philosophical traditions have sought to elucidate the nature of death. Indeed, many of the world’s moral systems are colored by a dichotomist vision of death and life. What is more, when we are not engaged in ethical debates over the nature of death, we happily psychologize it, hoping to justify our deep-seated resentment at being deprived of life’s gift. Occasionally, however, a figure arises whose conceptualization of death is so unique that the world is forced to pause and re-evaluate its normative sensibilities.

David Chai ( ) Department of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China E-mail: [email protected] 484 David Chai

One of the greatest intellectual figures of the modern era is without doubt Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is one of the few Western philosophers to see death as contributing to the perfection of being. Writing that Dasein does not simply perish but experiences its own demise, death stands before humanity as an event of anticipation. That man is being-towards-death is to anticipate the possibility of becoming free for one’s death. Heidegger believes that authentic living should not be impeded in the face of one’s own mortality; indeed, one can live a fuller life knowing that one’s time is finite and that the exhaustion of said time can occur at any moment. As for what Heidegger means by death, it is an indefinite something, inevitable, non-relational, and cannot be overtaken. If we take Heidegger’s view of death and compare it to that of the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, we notice that the latter also holds death in an unusual light. For Zhuangzi, death is possibility not because it symbolizes the perfection of human being; rather, it reveals the entanglements of life. As humanity can learn as much from death as it can from life, to cherish the latter while despising the former is both unnatural and self-defeating. What the world gets out of death is an intimate familiarity with its rhythmic, cyclical patterning. To look at death from the Daoist perspective is to subscribe to the belief that death and life are mutually dependent, co-arising modalities of Dao. This is not to say that death and life are relative, even meaningless; rather, what is meant is that Dao equalizes both in its meontological oneness such that humanity no longer feels compelled to elevate one whilst demoting the other. In this way, death is more than a partner to life; it manifests itself in and through all that is alive. Bearing the above in mind, this paper will argue in support of the Daoist notion that death is not something to be feared and that it does not mark the end of one’s contribution to the world. The paper will additionally take the stance that death qua nothingness is both a corporeal and metaphorical embodiment of Dao in that death and nothingness reflect the natural praxis of Dao to be still, empty, and quiet. In order to facilitate our analysis, we will focus on the story of Zhuangzi’s encounter with a roadside skull, a story that has Zhuangzi pillowing said skull from which he realizes that life is but a pillowing of death. In this way, the skull is transformed from an image of man’s extinction to a source of life as the skull of the world.

1 Introduction

We begin our analysis with a brief overview of four major streams of inquiry into Zhuangzi’s notion of death, starting with Wu Kuang-ming who sees the story of the roadside skull as emblematic of an over-arching concern with the processes of change taking place in the world: “A thing’s change involves both growth into On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death 485 itself and death into species-transformation…death and life are two aspects in the rounds of species-changes among things” (Wu 1990, 70). This theme, that death and life are the natural reversal of one another, is picked up by many others, and rightly so. Daniel Coyle, for example, holds that “[the sage] discloses the continuity between nature and man in all their processions, and thus reveals the culmination of the Zhuangzian attitude(s) toward death…as one of the ‘natural’ transformations of heaven and earth” (Coyle 1998, 204). Brian Lundberg essentially says the same thing: “Death is looked upon as a natural part of the process of birth, growth, decay, and transformation” (Lundberg 1998, 216). Roger Ames argues that, for Zhuangzi, “death is the indeterminate aspect that makes process, change, complexity, and novelty possible. It can be understood as a positive, enabling presence rather than a negative, disabling absence. Death does not inhibit or subvert life, but stimulates and drives it, making it more intense and poignant” (Ames 1998, 54). Hans-Georg Moeller refines Ames’ argument by dividing change qua process into an of process and an ontology of substance whereby, “on the basis of an ontology of process, death does not bring about any substantial loss—since there is substantial in the first place. Nothing of the person who is now alive will be dead; one will rather turn into something else. Therefore, one does not really die, because when one is dead, it is something else that is dead” (Moeller 2004, 84). The above views can be said to constitute one interpretive mode of reading Zhuangzi’s notion of death. A second methodological reading approaches death from a psychological orientation. Chad Hansen, for example, cites the role of the mind. Since the mind is naturally skeptically about what death entails, or what follows it, Hansen thus argues that “Zhuangzi’s conversation with the skull illustrates the possibility that something we do not ‘see’ could make our common-sense judgment seem foolish” (Hansen 2003, 144). Paul Goldin notes that when the skull appears to Zhuangzi in a dream, “the interlocutor [i.e., the skull] looks suspiciously like an immaterial soul” (Goldin 2003, 231). Knowing whether one survives death in the form of the soul is an impossible task according to Mark Berkson: “Zhuangzi’s skepticism reminds us that we simply do not, and cannot, know what happens after death” (Berkson 2011, 193). What is more, “by deconstructing the temporal distinctions that underlie our conceptions of an absolute beginning (birth) and an absolute ending (death), Zhuangzi points to a realm of no birth and no death; instead, he suggests that there is simply an ongoing series of transformations” (Berkson 2011, 200). Going one step further, Chris Fraser argues that death terminates one’s ability to act as an ethical agent: “The Zhuangist stance rests ultimately on the appeal of a certain ethical or aesthetic attitude toward life, death, and the world, rather than on a rationally compelling argument, and thus it cannot claim to be the uniquely ‘right’ way of approaching death” (Fraser 2013, 486 David Chai

411). Out of this, the result is that “our death is the extinction of our capacity for agency—our de 德 [moral virtue]” (Fraser 2013, 425). An alternative psychological apparatus is built around the emotions and how one’s grief shapes the relationship humans have with death. Amy Olberding is a proponent of this approach: “The core problem attaching to Zhuangzi’s grief is that, however brief and spontaneous it may be, it requires the judgment that death is a disvalue…such judgments may be tacitly made, never rising to the level of conscious understanding, but there can be no grief where death is not negatively valued” (Olberding 2007, 343). Olberding’s reading is supported by Jung Lee, who holds that our reaction to death is both skeptical and emotional: “For Zhuangzi, the appropriate emotional and behavioral response to death is not dread, anxiety, or fear but equanimity and acceptance—equanimity based on skepticism of the value of life and acceptance based on the view that death represents a mere episode in the larger narrative of the cosmos” (Lee 2014, 100). A third, decidedly religious, approach to understanding death in the Zhuangzi is offered by Mark Farrugia who believes “the Zhuangzi presents different immortality projects to deny an absolute death: the belief in personal, social, and cosmic ‘immortalities’” (Farrugia 2015, 381). Despite these variegated understandings of what death signifies for Zhuangzi, none of them adequately addresses its meontological side. Indeed, the decision to focus on Zhuangzi’s story of the roadside skull is motivated by said skull’s ability to simultaneously signify death and life, and that the skull we carry in life is an embodiment of Dao insofar as the natural state of both is still, empty quiescence. Turning to Heidegger, instead of surveying the innumerable readings of his concept of death, we will simply cite the notable ones. Paul Edwards stands out as one of the most vocal critics of Heidegger, writing that: “Heidegger’s description of death as a possibility does not constitute any kind of discovery, insight or contribution. On the contrary, it is not difficult to see that it is nothing but an outrageous and altogether perverse play on words” (Edwards 1975, 549). Edwards’ attack was in response to §53 of Being and Time where Heidegger says being-towards-death “must be understood as a possibility, it must be cultivated as a possibility, and we must put up with it as a possibility, in the way we comport ourselves towards it” (Heidegger 2001, 306). For Edwards, however, “philosophical reflections on death seem to have no point since we have no direct experience of death” (Edwards 1975, 563). In contrast to Edwards, James Demske stands at the other end of the spectrum: “[Death] is the key problem in the philosophical attempt to understand human existence” and Heidegger “not only pose[s] the problem with a previously unheard-of force and sharpness, but he confers upon it a new ontological depth” (Demske 1970, 2). Many others share Demske’s optimism, such as Joseph Kockelmans, who saw death as “not only the ‘point’ where Dasein’s life reaches On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death 487 its end, but also as that toward which Dasein is always ‘on the way’” (Kockelmans 1965, 82). For William Richardson, “being-unto-death in there-being means for Heidegger that the limit is not simply the term of the process but permeates every part of it and makes the potentiality…thoroughly and irretrievably finite” (Richardson 2003, 76). Julian Young also pays special attention to the bond between finitude and being-towards-death: “The practical affirmation of finitude, that is, is a life that is appropriate to the fact that we do not have unlimited time at our disposal and so must reject ‘accidental’ and confine ourselves to living out our central, essential life-possibilities” (Young 1998, 104−5). Young touches upon a serious issue, even a potential contradiction: If death is a condition Dasein cannot experience, how is it that Dasein is fulfilled by it? In order to resolve this paradox, William Blattner calls for thick and thin states of Dasein’s being such that it can exist in the thin sense without impacting its inability to exist in the thick sense (Blattner 1994, 58). Rather than go on, let us stop and hear what Heidegger himself means by death since said meaning is the crux of our comparison with Zhuangzi. Heidegger’s original formulation of death occurs in the first chapter of Division Two of Being and Time. To paraphrase: Death is possibility-of-being which Dasein assumes as soon as it is born; there are three types of death: perishing, dying (being-towards-death), and demise. Death is personal for each Dasein and cannot be substituted by another (is non-relational); it is also certain, indefinite, and not to be outstripped. These traits are indubitably prone to misinterpretation and indeed, Heidegger had harsh words for those who later over-glorified (e.g., Demske) or misconstrued (e.g., Edwards) his meaning: “How pathetic and cheap it is to latch onto the term ‘being-toward-death’ and explain it as a crude ‘worldview’” (Heidegger 2012a, 223–24). In speaking of death, Heidegger is not describing the state of mind of the individual who is dying, but what their impending death means to them as they reflect on their life. This back-to-front approach to evaluating the nature of existence is in some regards similar to the position held by Zhuangzi. For Zhuangzi, the wholeness of being stems from what precedes it, which is non-being; however, the non-being/being dyad is first promulgated in the milieu of cosmic nothingness within which Dao resides. Heidegger’s argument is that if we wish to know what it means to be Dasein, such an endeavor cannot start with birth because Dasein’s wholeness is inherent to its very being. In other words, only from the perspective of life’s end, when Dasein has encountered the ultimate possibility of being in the form of death, is knowledge of said wholeness attainable. This brings us back to the contradiction we mentioned earlier. The standard definition of death precludes one from knowing what comes afterwards and yet, it is commonplace to speak of the deceased via language of completion or totality. 488 David Chai

We who survive the dead thus make erroneous claims about death and in so doing, corrupt the thinking of those around us by turning death into an event not to be feared: “The ‘they’ covers up what is peculiar in death’s certainty—that it is possible at any moment. Along with the certainty of death goes the indefiniteness of its ‘when’” (Heidegger 2001, 302). Since it is others who mischaracterize death, we must encounter it ourselves if we are to authentically grasp the meaning of being. Heidegger thus writes: “Death is a possibility-of-being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case…if Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-being…[and thus] cannot outstrip the possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (Heidegger 2001, 294). Herein is where Heidegger and Zhuangzi differ: for the former, death points the way to Dasein’s freedom; for the latter, death is the antecedent of life, and so mastering its characteristics (still, empty quiescence) leads to freedom of a meontological order. What is more, Heidegger views the possibility of our not-being as a veil of inauthenticity, one used by the ‘they’ to conceal our ownmost being-towards-death. Conversely, for Zhuangzi, the skull we shoulder in life is a kind of life-praxis via wuwei 無爲 (non-deliberate doing): our skull does nothing and yet, death and life are known because of it. While Heidegger and Zhuangzi both agree that death cannot be averted or postponed, Zhuangzi would disagree with Heidegger’s claim that we are incapable of comprehending the death of others insofar as Daoism believes all forms of being (and non-being) arise from Dao. In light of this, human death is no different from that of other living things and owing to this collective deathliness, our skull is but a fleeting manifestation of the skull of the world. Thus the paradox that in order to know death one must first die is resolvable. Indeed, by neither favoring death nor life but the constancy underlying both (i.e., Dao), Zhuangzi can avoid being drawn into the debate over the qualitative aspects of death. It is for this reason that the story of the roadside skull is so important; it teaches us that in pillowing the skulls of the deceased, we also pillow the skulls of the living. Let us, then, examine how said pillowing is supposed to occur.

2 The Roadside Skull

With the exception of the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記), the Zhuangzi talks about death more than any other ancient Chinese text. It is full of stories of people who are dying, dream of death, have themselves died, or witnessed the death of another. Modern scholarship on the Zhuangzi tends to focus on these portrayals, ignoring the preeminent icon of death: the skull. Appearing in chapter eighteen On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death 489 of the text, entitled Perfect Happiness (zhile 至樂), the skull occurs in two tales: one involving Zhuangzi, the other involving Liezi (whom we will not discuss). Zhuangzi’s encounter, in its entirety, reads as follows:

Zhuangzi was on his way to Chu when he saw an old, parched skull, one that was still intact. Poking it with his horsewhip he asked: “Did you covet life so much that you lost the ordering principle of things and so ended up like this? Did you meet the blade of an axe whilst serving a fallen state and so ended up like this? Did you commit an unvirtuous act that disgraced your parents and family and so ended up like this? Did you suffer from cold and hunger and so ended up like this? Or was it simply due to the accumulation of springs and autumns that you ended up like this?” Having asked his questions, he picked up the skull and taking it for a pillow, lay down to sleep. Later that night the skull appeared to him in a dream saying: “Your talk is like that of a sophist. Examining your words, all were about the tangles of the living but the dead know nothing of this. Would you like me to tell you about the dead?” Zhuangzi replied that he would, whereupon the skull said: “For the dead there is neither ruler nor subject, nor matters pertaining to the four seasons. Owing to this, our years are akin to heaven and earth. A king may have his throne but his joy is no match for ours!” Zhuangzi did not believe him and said: “If I asked the Arbiter of Fate to restore your body to life, giving back your bones and flesh, returning you to your parents and family, neighbors and friends, would you want me to do so?” The skull glared at him, knitted its brow, and said: “Why would I discard more joy than a king on his throne to once again endure the toils of being human?”1

Several preliminary observations can be made. For starters, one cannot but notice that this story takes place in a chapter devoted to perfect happiness. The author of this chapter—who might not be Zhuangzi but one of his students—begins with a scathing indictment of the men of his day, reaching the conclusion that wuwei is perfect happiness and yet, the common people take it as something bitter. The reason for their bitterness is that they busily chase superficial forms of happiness and so cannot stop and appreciate the perfection of what surrounds them—a non-deliberate doing whereby heaven and earth do nothing and yet nothing is left undone. Since Dao is the epitome of wuwei and its perfection is imbued throughout the natural world, for humans to follow suit they must allow events to unfold uninhibited, including death and life. The skull is not arguing that death is preferable to life; rather, it is claiming the conventions of death and life is nonsensical when placed in the context of cosmic oneness in Dao.

1 All translations of the Zhuangzi are my own unless stated otherwise. 490 David Chai

The second observation we can make is that Zhuangzi’s encounter with the roadside skull is but one of seven stories in this chapter dealing with death, making it the highest concentration of death stories in the entire text. A further point of note has to do with the contrast between Zhuangzi berating the skull for its life choices which led to its abandonment by the side of the road, and the skull that reprimands Zhuangzi in his dream for his shallow understanding of life. The difference between the two is that the first skull foreshadows Zhuangzi’s ontic death while the latter symbolizes his meontological non-self in Dao. The significance of pillowing the skull lies in blurring the line between death and life to such an extent that it vanishes altogether. One is reminded of the story at the end of chapter two that sees Zhuangzi dreaming he is a butterfly; when he awakens, however, Zhuangzi can no distinguish between the butterfly-self and the human-self. Our fourth observation is harder to fathom—the deceased have a unique perspective on life. If we presume that the value judgments we make about the dead are valid, we cannot retrospectively argue that the judgments they make about the living are invalid; cosmic oneness in Dao precludes this. Summarizing the above, we can declare Zhuangzi’s inquisition into how the skull came to be abandoned by the roadside as directly effecting his decision to pillow it. When the skull appears in Zhuangzi’s dream and lectures him on the transience of life, the message appears to be that we should focus less on treasuring our being and pay more attention to cultivating our sensibility of non-being. Said differently, Zhuangzi wants us to consider life as a way of death and death as a way of life. The reader is thus prodded to ponder how one can possibly participate in the world after having already died. The answer is harmony. To die is to lose one’s skull and yet, our skull survives our death to live-on in the world as a skull of possibility for others. This recycling of our skull helps negate our tendency to horde life and abhor death. Indeed, we have no control over our skull in death; it is there for the world to play with as a skull of the world. But can we call our skull our own if it belongs to the world? If our skull is not ours alone, as being-towards-death is for Dasein, but belongs to the collectivity of skulls designated by the term death, we can no longer lay claim to it by privation but must learn to see it as belonging to something greater. However, this does not imply we should live unaffected by the truth of human finitude; doing so is to be empowered by false immortality, to be blind to the ordering principle informing the co-dependency of death and life. Chapter two of the Zhuangzi makes this abundantly clear when it says: “Where there is life there is also death; where there is death there is also life.” Even Zhuangzi’s sophist friend Hui Shi remarked in the final chapter of the text that “the sun at midday is the sun setting; the thing born is the thing dying.” In his Introduction to , Heidegger says something remarkably similar: “Everything that comes to life thereby already begins to die as well, to go toward On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death 491 its death, and death is also life” (Heidegger 2000, 140). Here, Heidegger is reinforcing the argument of Epicurus first mentioned in Being and Time: “As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die” (Heidegger 2001, 289). Death qua the skull is thus a way to be alive, a life-praxis that does not dwell on the facticity of death but uses said knowledge to bring balance to one’s life. Returning to the story, when Zhuangzi asks the skull if his loss of the ordering principle led to his abandonment by the roadside, what he was referring to is the Daoist version of natural law. Daoist natural law should not be construed as divine law, for there is no divinity determining how such laws are to be played-out in the world; natural law is simply the art of Dao. As Dao allows things to persist and desist according to their inborn nature, it remains aloof from their triumphs and struggles. We are hence born when the time arrives and die when said time has expired. Due to the aloofness of Dao, human calculative thinking cannot penetrate the mystery beclouding it. What is needed is a more authentic type of thought, one not hampered by binary conventions but which concurrently embraces the full spectrum of light and dark. Given this, the rhetorical questions Zhuangzi posed in chapter two make perfect sense: “How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that hating death is not like the man who left home in his youth only to forget his way back?” In other words, to lose the ordering principle of things is to no longer partake in the oneness of Dao. On the question of loss, Heidegger comments: “Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but a loss such as is experienced by those who remain. In suffering this loss, however, we have no way of access to the loss-of-being as such which the dying man ‘suffers’” (Heidegger 2001, 282). There is no question that an individual’s death marks a loss for the world; however, Heidegger goes on to say that for we who remain, the deceased still belongs to the world as a corpse who is cared for and venerated by the living. Dasein, as we have seen, amounts to more than the sum of its physical parts (e.g., as a biological being or corpse) but, again, it falls upon those who “out-live” it to recall the time prior to its demise. No matter whom we are addressing, for Heidegger the dead cannot surmount the impossibility of experiencing their own death. Asking if the skull’s fate was the result of a befallen kingdom, Zhuangzi’s implied criticism stems from the fact that a kingdom is but a named place whose worth is incomparable to the vast richness of Dao. Disgracing one’s family also pales in comparison to disgracing heaven; cold and hunger mark the decline of Yin before the arising of Yang, and the end of one’s allotted years marks the start of a period of time that has yet to be allocated. If we are to achieve the freedom spoken of by Heidegger as the possibility of being-towards-death, it cannot be found in standards that admonish our naturalistic tendencies as uncouth. 492 David Chai

Zhuangzi’s interrogation of the skull is not to trivialize social conventions per se, but shift our attention to how best to transcend our narrow-mindedness so as to capture the possibilities of ultimacy afforded by Dao. Perfect happiness is to be had not only in wuwei, but in following along with the ordering principle of things, as chapter twenty-two of the Zhuangzi so eloquently puts it: “Life is the follower of death and death is the commencement of life…When qi [vital breath/essence] assembles there is life and when it disperses there is death. If life and death are followers of one another, what is there to fear?” Given this, one can no more make death one’s own than one can life; both are facilitated by Dao, and what is facilitated by Dao cannot be surpassed. Said differently, death is not ours to wait upon, for it resides within us as the primal nothingness undergirding Dao. It is because Zhuangzi approaches death from the perspective of the holistic movement of Dao that he can protect it from being despoiled by fear and other recalcitrant human attitudes. If, however, we are destined to run towards death, as Heidegger proclaims, our doing so is not a path toward nihilism but illumination via the light of our mortality: “The mortals are human . They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death” (Heidegger 1971, 176). Such a remark takes us back to Being and Time, where Heidegger stipulates that death does not just belong to Dasein in an undifferentiated way; death lays claim to it as an individual Dasein (Heidegger 2001, 308). The reason for death’s utilization in this manner has given rise to much confusion over the statement that death is that which exposes the truth of being; it does so by revealing Dasein’s self-concealed openness as running-ahead towards death. As Heidegger himself would admit, the question of death raised in Being and Time was not, and should not be, taken as “the denial of being or even, qua ‘nothingness,’ as the essence of being. Instead, the exact opposite is the case: death is the highest and ultimate attestation of being” (Heidegger 2012a, 223). Heidegger says that death is not oppositional to being, nor is it, in the guise of nothingness, the essence of being. Death, however, is likened to negativity in that access to the deceased is not possible. As survivors of death, the living are left to question their loss and yet, this loss cannot be ontologically known as it is the most particular form of loss being can undergo. Only the dead share in the death of others in that only they know what it means to be dead. The living and the dead would thus appear to be cut-off from one another. As we have seen, the privileging of non-being over being is what sets Zhuangzi’s thought apart from Heidegger’s. Arguing that death is a universal and natural event, one not unique to humans alone, Zhuangzi entreats us to accept it unconditionally as he himself does in chapter eighteen whilst recounting the death of his wife: On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death 493

At the time of her death, how could I not grieve like everyone else! However, at the time of her beginning there was also a time before she was born. As there was a time before she was born, there was also a time before she had a body. As there was a time before she had a body, there was a time before she had qi. In the midst of this vast indistinctness, there occurred a change and then there was qi. This qi changed and then she had a body but her body changed again and then she was alive. Now there has been another change and she is dead. This is no different from the movement of the four seasons—spring, fall, winter, and summer.

Of the questions posed by Zhuangzi to the skull, only the last one can be taken as embodying the naturalness of wuwei. Not to focus on the minutia of daily life but allow the seasons to pile-up one after the other is to cultivate the ultimate openness to death. In the case of his wife, Zhuangzi’s initial sense of privation gave way to an open, all-encompassing understanding of the journey she had to take just to be born; his is an understanding borne of one who stands in the oneness of Dao. Heidegger, too, has a concept that expresses this truth: the clearing.2 In the context of death, however, the clearing becomes something altogether different: the poem of the world. Writing that death is neither empty nothingness nor that which demarcates the shift from one state of existence to another, death houses the essence of being: “Death is the highest refuge of the truth of being itself, the refuge that in itself shelters the concealment of the essence of being and gathers together the sheltering of its essence…death is the refuge of being in the poem of the world” (Heidegger 2012b, 53−54). With this passage in mind, let us examine how pillowing one’s skull illustrates wherein death reveals the essence of being.

3 Pillowing our Skull so as to Pillow Dao

We pick-up our story with Zhuangzi taking the roadside skull as a pillow. We can analyze his pillowing on two levels: the skull qua physical pillow and Zhuangzi’s existential pillowing. That Zhuangzi chose the skull to be his pillow, as opposed to his arm or travel pack, speaks to his physical comfort with death. Parched and dry, the skull beckons Zhuangzi with its white, worn surface. It thus symbolizes the fundamental transformation of things from being alive to being dead to being alive whilst dead. In his hands, the skull is alive whilst dead; given it induces no fear in him, Zhuangzi embraces it as he would an ordinary pillow. On an existential level, pillowing the skull as one pillows one’s head signifies the

2 For more on the clearing and Daoism, see Chai (2014). 494 David Chai self-embracement of life’s most inevitable of events. We all wind-up as skulls by the side of the road, so why should this particular one stand apart from all the others? The answer is that it does not. To pillow the skull as he does is to signify Zhuangzi’s realization that we are all skulls-in-hiding; pillowing thus symbolizes the act of wandering carefree in our life-domain. This realization, however, is but a minor one. Given our tendency to view death as a forlorn experience, Zhuangzi comforts us with the knowledge that we are always conjoined with our meontological non-self in Dao. Having fallen asleep, the skull reappears to Zhuangzi in a dream and chides him for erroneously assuming his deathly state is inferior to his former lived one: “For the dead there is neither ruler nor subject, nor matters pertaining to the four seasons. Owing to this, our years are akin to heaven and earth. A king may have his throne but his joy is no match for ours!” The image Zhuangzi presents here is similar to that of the withered wood and dead ash we read about in chapter two. Having no ruler above is to be like withered wood, while having no subjects below is akin to dead ash. Both speak to the freedom of tracelessly partaking in the oneness of Dao, as Zhuangzi explains in chapter six: “Life and death, existence and annihilation, are one body.” Lying at the side of the road, the skull knows nothing about ruler and subject or the changing of the seasons. No longer plagued by the physical tribulations of life, or the variegated worries that tax the mind, the skull exists in perfect contentment. He thus pillows his inner emptiness as a king cherishes his throne. Based on this, we can say that the skull’s emptiness functions on two levels: the corporal and the symbolic. On the first level, the skull cannot act without its capacity to shelter what defines it as such (i.e., the brain) and yet, the roadside skull has lost this innate skill, now playing home to the small animals and insects that find safety in its inner cavities. This, however, is the point Zhuangzi wants to make; even an old, parched piece of bone has a purpose to fulfill. Such is wuwei, the art of useful uselessness. Symbolically, the skull symbolizes a futural, de-subjectivized version of one’s current self. We may look at it and say it belongs to someone, but since it is devoid of flesh, the skull is no longer recognizable as that someone. It is just a skull and all skulls are equal as far as their skullness goes. Whether its demise occurs in youth or old age, through natural or malevolent means, as a skull, there is no escaping the inevitable return to nothingness. For the roadside skull, to be dead is to be alive. Its deathly repose allows it to observe the hustle and bustle of the living unnoticed and its intact, brilliant white surface serves as a signpost to the living that so long as one does not resist or alter one’s inborn nature, one may be an exemplar of Dao even in death. As the story concludes, Zhuangzi offers to call upon the Arbiter of Fate (i.e., Dao) to restore the skull’s body so that it may return to the comfort of its On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death 495 loved-ones and friends. The skull retorts, in true Daoist fashion: “Why would I discard more joy than a king on his throne to once again endure the toils of being human?” Given the choice between life and death, the skull chooses the latter because it was his time to die. Following along with the times is naturalness and in Daoism, naturalism—as opposed to humanism—is to view the world in its collectivity, not its individual components. In other words, refusing to die when the time has arrived is to covet life out of fear of losing all one has acquired and accomplished. We forget, however, that all success is followed by failure, good health gives way to sickness, and death succeeds life. This is the ordering principle of things we spoke of earlier; the entire universe is its subject so why should humanity be an exception? Many readers are familiar with Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream at the end of chapter two. There Zhuangzi calls attention to the questionable ability of experiential knowledge to accurately portray reality. Here, however, the focus is narrower, specifically the divisibility of the non-being/being dyad as told through the image of the skull. Many of us live our lives without realizing that our skull already embodies our ultimate transformation. Since the corporeality of life cannot be separated from its inherent deathliness any more than being can be excised from non-being, how are we to determine which of these states is life and which death? Zhuangzi argued that despising death is just as irrational as cherishing life because said values are based on the premise that death equals loss and life equals gain. By creating a metaphorical emptiness within the physical nothingness of the skull, our subjective selves can be discarded without affecting the materiality of reality. Harmonizing the temporality of spring and autumn with the spatiality of heaven and earth is thus a necessary measure if we are to recognize the non-self of Dao as our own. In this way, we open our skull to the wondrous clarity of the world, a brightness that releases us from the need to cling to life while abhorring death. The importance of the roadside skull thus lies not in its foreshadowing of our own finitude, but in its sharing with us the joy of knowing that our skull will live on as the skull of the world. For Zhuangzi, to harmonize death and life is to stand in the meontological oneness of Dao. Chapter twenty-three of the text elaborates: “There is life and there is death; there is emerging and there is returning…the myriad things emerge from non-being. Being cannot create being from being, it must emerge from non-being; however, non-being is itself nothingness. This is where the sage hides himself.” Denying the dualism of death and life is hence to accept them both, and having mastered the art of non-discrimination, one can discard the designations of death and life. This is why the skull refused Zhuangzi’s request to call upon the Arbiter of Fate; to revert to the world of the living prematurely would be to violate the cyclical harmony of the ordering principle of things. Thus the skull bides its time by the side of the road just as it does atop our shoulders. It 496 David Chai sits there in still quietude while the mind races endlessly within. Zhuangzi is not asking us to relinquish our skulls; on the contrary, he is asking us to look past the flesh to the parched whiteness beneath. If we spent more time looking after our own skull instead of worrying about the skulls of others, we would realize that we are actually part of the skull of the world. The existential conundrum thus resolves itself by taking the whiteness of the skull (the subjective self) and pairing it with the darkness within (the non-self of Dao). Zhuangzi’s tale of the roadside skull is hence about nurturing oneself in Dao through the equalization of death and life. Such reasoning is not unique to this story however; it was intimated as early as chapter six: “The Great Clod provides me with a form, labors me with life, eases me in old age, and rests me in death. If I am to regard well my life, I must also regard well my death.” The skull of the world is the paradigmatic image of death’s physicality and yet it points to a higher, unsayable truth that death qua ontic non-being does not equal ontological oblivion. If Zhuangzi conveyed this truth through the act of pillowing a skull, what about Heidegger? Indeed, Heidegger chose a less nuanced approach by citing the image of a shrine:

Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine of Nothing, death harbors within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of Nothing, death is the shelter of Being. We now call mortals mortals—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death. (Heidegger 1971, 176)

Commenting on this passage, John Sallis seems to fixate on the literalness of nothingness when he says the shrine “calls forth one who, henceforth, is not, is nothing…[who would] both be and not be, producing a coincidence of being and nothing” (Sallis 1990, 136). Said coincidence is, in fact, not one at all: “The nothing does not merely serve as the counter concept of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such” (Heidegger 1993, 104). The belonging of nothingness to being can only take place in anxiety, for only in anxiety do the beings of the world slip away to expose Dasein in its naked essence. This ability to reveal the essence of Dasein is why it is held to be a shrine and is why Heidegger also draws upon the nothingness of the clearing. In the nothingness of the clearing, the possibility of freedom is given expression; however, the price of this freedom is the subject’s death. We can thus argue that death qua the shrine of nothingness is not really about death at all; on the contrary, it is about sublimating death in order to point the way to being. This is, of course, Heidegger’s intention, but to co-opt nothingness without using it to cast light upon death reads as a half-hearted attempt to say something that is in On Pillowing One’s Skull: Zhuangzi and Heidegger on Death 497 the end left unsaid. Indeed, Heidegger acknowledges the unspeakable nature of nothingness by framing it as a mystery. Zhuangzi, too, holds the mystery to be of utmost importance; it is vital to grasping the cyclical changes occurring in the world. Even more crucial, he employs the mystery of Dao to preserve the veil of nothingness beclouding it, thereby allowing Dao to remain aloof from humanity’s propensity for calculative thinking. The following line from chapter six of the Zhuangzi illustrates this: “Life and death have their fates, to be as constant as the succession of night and day. This is a matter pertaining to heaven. There are, however, things humanity can do nothing about. Such things are a matter of the inborn-nature of beings.” The possibility of life-potential residing within death and vice versa must be credited to Dao and not Dasein because the latter stands outside the realm of beings in the nothingness of anxiety, while the former locates both within it simultaneously. Being can no more shape non-being than the shrine can replace a skull—both are bound to a one-directional relationship wherein nothingness conceals being so that being can free itself. Dasein thus transcends the concerns of the world and those pertaining to itself by “being held out into the nothing” (Heidegger 1993, 103). Dangling itself in the nothingness revealed by anxiety, Dasein manages to persevere and hold onto its self-given nature. When all other beings have perished, Dasein alone is left standing as the pole-bearer for authentic being. In this sense nothingness is the horizon of all there is—the totality of beings—while confronting Dasein with Dasein’s own finitude and that of all beings (Kraus 1998, 93). This explains why Heidegger felt justified in remarking that nothingness is not merely the counter concept of being, it is inherent to its unfolding: “[When] one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from one’s lostness in those possibilities which may accidentally thrust themselves upon one; and one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped” (Heidegger 2001, 308). Compare this to the story in chapter six of the Zhuangzi involving four friends and their jocular attitude towards death:

Masters Si, Yu, Li, and Lai were talking together when one of them asked: …Who here knows that death and life, existence and perishing, are all one body?…I obtained life when the time had arrived and will perish when such time moves on. If one complies with this time and follows along, neither sorrow nor joy can enter. This is what the ancients called “freeing the bonds of life” and yet there are those who cannot be freed because they are bonded to 498 David Chai

things. Moreover, nothing can out-strip Heaven and this is a long-known fact. What is there to dislike about my present state?

Putting aside linguistic and conceptual conventions, Zhuangzi invites us to follow along with the natural flux of the world, one to which we humans are intimately privy. If we are to honor our inborn nature while living in harmony with the myriad beings of the world, our one true recourse is to synthesize our thought so that it no longer differentiates death and life, my skull and the skull of the world. Indeed, the essence of my being is equally doomed to fail whilst holding itself in the nothing as it is of outstripping the enduring presence of my skull. We can, however, forgo the need for anticipation and fear by rolling together our subjective and existential selves, and eliminating the notion that humanity is immune to the vagaries of life as witnessed in the natural world.

4 Conclusion

There should be no reason why I cannot pillow another’s skull as I do my own. Being darkly placid is the key to rendering oneself empty, still, and quiet, and these traits not only draw close the oneness with Dao, they are what make living-whilst-dead, dead-whilst-alive possible. There can be no singular rendition of death when that which is alive is always dying and that which is dead is constantly creating life anew. Heidegger asks us to mold our life in view of its finitude, whereas Zhuangzi asks us to forget the very notion. We should instead live out our years such that they accord with the ordering principle of things, accepting our fate in whatever form it may take, and smiling upon those whose deathly return to the fold of Dao unburdens them of the disquiet brought upon them in life. In this way, the chains of dualistic thinking can be broken, our calculative ways can be discarded, and we can find perfect happiness living carefree in the wonderment of our surroundings.

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