Research: Zhuangzi on Reality, Dreams and Mediation

Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi comments on the relativist aspects of reality mediation using dreams analogies

(Extracted from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/)

When we have an accommodation (you and I come to a common agreement) you and I may both rate it as progress. However, it does not imply we have moved to a higher state of overall insight along an absolute scale—or from any arbitrary third point of view. Exchange of points of view can be valuable to each (perhaps in different ways) and broadening perspective in this way can make us wiser—but always as judged from our already operative 成 chéngfixed dàos . We can advise and recommend our normative perspective on others, but their being able to appreciate and use it depends on their capacities, options and situation.

At this point, Zhuangzi starts to draw an analogy of dreaming and waking up to the shift in gestalt that comes when we leap to a more comprehensive perspective. At awakening, we immediately appreciate the unreality of the dream, yet within the dream, we can have a similar gestalt shift and dream of having dreamed and interpreted that deeper dream.

How do I know that loving life is not a form of ignorance? How do I know disliking death is not a weak farewell of the sort when we don’t know about the return? Miss Li Zhi cries when she is betrothed to someone’s son, and when she first goes off to the Jin state soaks her clothing with her tears; but then she arrives at the kings abode, sleeps with the king in his bed, eats fattened livestock and then starts to regret her tears. How do I know the dead do not regret their former clinging to life, We dream of eating and drinking and on awaking cry bitterly, we dream of weeping and wailing and awake in a good mood to go off hunting. When we dream, we don’t know it as a dream, and in our dreams, judge something else as a dream. On awakening, we know it was a dream, and there could be another greater awakening in which we know a greater dream, and under these the conditions the ignorant think they are as enlightened as if they had learned it by an investigation. Gentlemen to shepherds inherently do this! (Ibid., HY 6/2/78–83)

So, is there an ultimate or final possible such shift in gestalt—some final state of knowing what to do? Zhuangzi’s relativism is mildly skeptical because he cannot know either that there is not nor that there is a final or ultimate “awakening”

The dream theme is memorably carried over to the story of Zhuangzi dreaming a butterfly and/or vice versa. It seems to suggest that the gestalt sense of liberation from error may even be reciprocal. Perhaps our subsequent perspective is one from which most would move to our former perspective. Adolescent conversion can be to or from a religion.

Once before, Zhuangzi dreamt of being a butterfly, gaily butterflying and himself embodied in this sense of purpose! He knew nothing of Zhuangzi. Suddenly awakening, he then is rooted in Zhuangzi. He doesn’t know if Zhuangzi dreamt being a butterfly or a butterfly is dreaming being Zhuangzi—though there must be a difference. This is called “things change.” (Ibid., HY7/2/94)

Elaborating the complexity this way makes Zhuangzi’s proposals seem disappointing as solutions. They amount to mildly suggesting that we allow the exchange of views to go on without the domination of any dogma and with some vague “glances at natural constancies” and see what comes out “in the long run.”