Glossary
Chinese contemplative dictionary: characters, pinyin, translations.
Baoguang (葆光)
Baoguang 葆光, the 'concealed light' — the Zhuangzi's term for a storehouse that pours in without filling and ladles out without emptying: the tradition's own light-word, which names not brightness but the hidden depth that nothing exhausts.
Baoyi
Glossary: baoyi 抱一, 'embracing the One' — the Daodejing's phrase for holding to unity, the verbal root of the whole guarding-the-One (shouyi) family.
Dakuai (大块)
Dakuai 大块, the 'great clod' — the Zhuangzi's name for the world-process: no maker, no plan, things born 'clod-like, of themselves.' It breathes out and the breath is called wind.
Dantian (丹田)
The 'cinnabar field' — the Huangting Jing's system of three body-fields that became the fixed map of Chinese contemplative practice, and its modern double life.
Dao
Glossary: dao 道 — 'way' and everything the word carries; why it is left untranslated.
Daoshu (道枢)
Daoshu 道枢, 'the hinge of the Way' — the pivot point the Qi Wu Lun names between the paired opposites: when that and this no longer get their counterparts, what remains is the hinge, and the hinge comes to rest at the ring's center, answering the endless. The hinge is an achievement, not a default.
De
Glossary: de 德 — virtue, power, integrity; the Dao's working in things.
Guan
Glossary: guan 观, 'to observe' — the Daodejing's word for contemplative seeing, from 'observing its subtleties' to 'observing the body with the body' — the gaze that the inner-contemplation classics inherit.
Hua (化)
Hua 化, 'transformation' — the book's cosmic verb: the fish becomes the bird, the worm becomes the butterfly, the body becomes soil, the words become new words. And the book's own warning about it: when it is time to transform, do not ask whether you are transforming.
Huanzhong (环中)
Huanzhong 环中, 'the center of the ring' — the place the pivot stands: once the hinge of the Way is found, it sits at the ring's center and answers the endless without taking a side. The book's one-word geometry for how to respond to everything and be touched by nothing.
Jiafuzuo
Glossary: jiafuzuo 结跏趺坐, the crossed-leg sitting posture — the manual tradition's base position, with its two standard forms and its modern sitting-protocol translation.
Jiandu (见独)
Jiandu 见独, the 'seeing of the alone' — the summit stage of the Nü Yu ladder: after the dawn-clearing, the practitioner sees the solitary, and only then does time fall away.
Jing-Qi-Shen
Glossary: jing-qi-shen 精气神 — the 'three treasures' of Daoist cultivation, and what they are not.
Jingzuo
Glossary: jingzuo 静坐, 'quiet sitting' — the Neo-Confucian seated practice and its translation.
Jiren (畸人)
Jiren 畸人, the 'odd one' — the Zhuangzi's own name for its outsiders: odd among people, matched with Heaven. From the same passage that ends: Heaven's small man is the world's gentleman.
Jixin (机心)
Jixin 机心, the 'machine-mind' — the mind a machine breeds, the Zhuangzi's earliest argument that tools train the mind that uses them: machines bring machine-dealings, and machine-dealings lodge a machine-mind in the chest.
Liangwang (两忘)
Liangwang 两忘, 'forgetting both' — the Zhuangzi's name for letting the pair of praise and blame dissolve together: 'rather than praising Yao and condemning Jie, better to forget both and transform along the Way.'
Liangxing (两行)
Liangxing 两行, 'walking two roads' — the Qi Wu Lun's word for the sage's motion after the morning-and-evening story: holding right and wrong in harmony while resting on the heavenly balance. Not taking one side; taking both, and so being held by neither.
Moruo Yiming (莫若以明)
Moruo yiming 莫若以明, 'nothing equals using the clear light' — the Qi Wu Lun's method-sentence, spoken twice: once against the Ru-Mo dispute of affirming each other's negations, once as the close of the hinge passage. Not a doctrine to hold but the light by which both infinities are seen without either needing to win.
Neiguan (内观)
'Inner contemplation' — the Sui-Tang term for turning attention inward and settling the mind, which the tradition itself identified with sitting in oblivion.
Qi
Glossary: qi 气 — why 'energy' is a partial translation, and how to handle the term in English.
Qiwu (齐物)
Qiwu 齐物, 'the leveling of things' — the term inside the book's second chapter title: 齐 (to level, to make equal) + 物 (things). And the title itself is the term's own puzzle: 齐物-论 (a discourse on leveling things) or 齐-物论 (leveling the discourses about things)? The tradition has read it both ways for a thousand years, and the chapter does both.
Shen
Glossary: shen 神, 'spirit' — the third of jing-qi-shen, the mind's luminous and animating aspect, and what concentration condenses.
Shouyi
Glossary: shouyi 守一, 'guarding the One' — the early Daoist meditation term and its translation.
Tianji (天机)
Tianji 天机, the 'heaven-mechanism' — the self-running order of things, moved by no known driver. The Zhuangzi's word for how the centipede walks its ten thousand feet — and what the modern idiom turned into a secret.
Tianjun (天钧)
Tianjun 天钧, 'Heaven's wheel' — the Zhuangzi's image for where the sage rests: not choosing between this and that, but letting both go their way on the turning rim.
Tianlai (天籁)
Tianlai 天籁, the 'pipes of heaven' — the Zhuangzi's name for the way the ten thousand things sound themselves: not a third kind of sound beyond the human and the earthly, but the self-sounding of all sounds, whose answer ends in a question: who is the blower?
Tiaoxi (调息)
'Regulating the breath' — the Tiantai manual's systematic pre-sitting adjustment of body, breath, and mind that became standard vocabulary across Chinese sitting traditions.
Tuoyue
Glossary: tuoyue 橐籥, the bellows — the Daodejing's image of the space between heaven and earth: empty yet inexhaustible, moved and yielding more. The tradition's machine-metaphor for emptiness as productivity.
Wu He You Zhi Xiang — 无何有之乡 (The Land of Not-Having-Anything)
The Zhuangzi's name for a place that is defined by what it lacks: the land of not-having-anything, where the useless tree can finally be planted, where the world-ruler's advisor goes when tired of the world. Three appearances, three functions — a transplant site, an escape destination, a touring ground — and one grammar: the place exists only as the negation of the places that matter.
Wu Sang Wo (吾丧我)
Wu sang wo 吾丧我, 'I have lost my me' — the opening of the Qiwu Lun: Nan-Guo Ziqi sits at the armrest, breathes up to heaven, and looks as if he has lost his companion. The book's name for the state every one of its practices aims at: the subject who has let go of the object he took himself to be.
Wu Shi Wu Zhong — 无始无终 (No Beginning, No End)
The Zhuangzi's four-character deletion of time: no past, no present, no beginning, no end — spoken by Confucius in the Zhi Bei You dialogue with Ran Qiu, where the question 'what was before heaven and earth?' is answered by removing the line the question presumes. The child-and-grandchildren example, the refusal to make the origin a thing, and the grammar: this is not a claim about the deep past but a correction of the question.
Wuhua (物化)
Wuhua 物化, 'the transformation of things' — the last two words of the butterfly dream, and the book's answer to its own most famous question: the boundary between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly is real (there must be a distinction), and it is exactly the boundary that transformation crosses. Not the self changing the world, but the world changing the self.
Wuwei
Glossary: wuwei 无为, 'non-action' — translation options and common mistranslations.
Xi
Glossary: xi 息, 'breath' — the fourth and finest of the Xiao Zhiguan's four breath types, 'as if present, as if absent'; the target state of tiaoxi and the bridge word to taixi.
Xianjie (县解)
Xianjie 县解, 'release from the hanging' — the Zhuangzi's name for what rest-in-the-season achieves: not escape from death, but untying from the terror of it. Spoken once over a death, once over a sickness.
Xiaoyao (逍遥)
Xiaoyao 逍遥, 'free wandering' — the Zhuangzi's name for the state the whole book opens with: not leisure but the movement that depends on nothing, wandering at ease beside a tree that nothing wants, in a business of no business.
Xin
Glossary: xin 心 — the heart-mind; why the classical word is not 'mind' and not 'heart'.
Xinzhai
Glossary: xinzhai 心斋, 'fasting of the mind' — the Zhuangzian emptying practice and its translation.
Xuan
Glossary: xuan 玄, 'dark' — the Daodejing's word for what is deep beyond naming; the root of 'Twofold Mystery' (chongxuan) and the family name of everything profound in the tradition.
Xuanpin (玄牝)
Xuanpin 玄牝, the 'mysterious female' — the Daodejing's most explicit maternal image: the valley-spirit that does not die, whose gate is the root of heaven and earth.
Xushi sheng bai (虚室生白)
Xushi sheng bai 虚室生白, 'the empty room gives birth to brightness' — the climax of the fasting-of-the-mind passage: when the heart's room is emptied, the light appears, and the auspicious comes to rest. The Zhuangzi's one-line answer to what the emptied mind finds.
Yingning (撄宁)
Yingning 撄宁, 'stillness in disturbance' — the Zhuangzi's name for the stillness that is made inside the chaos, not away from it: 'disturbed, and only then complete.'
Yuandu Yiwei Jing (缘督以为经)
Yuandu yiwei jing 缘督以为经, 'following the middle as the constant' — the Yang Sheng Zhu's opening rule: do good without nearing fame, do bad without nearing punishment, follow the middle as the warp-thread. The word du names both the body's central line (the Du meridian of the back) and the middle course between the two named edges — the chapter's life-version of the butcher's gap.
Zhaoche (朝彻)
Zhaoche 朝彻, the 'dawn-clearing' — the turning point of the Nü Yu ladder: after the three puttings-outside, the mind clears like daybreak, and only then can it see the alone.
Zhaoche (朝彻)
Zhaoche 朝彻, the 'dawn-clearing' — the Zhuangzi's name for the sudden turn after the ladder's three exclusions: the mind clears like morning light, and only then can it see the alone.
Zhenzai (真宰)
Zhenzai 真宰, the 'true driver' — the Zhuangzi's name for the mover that might stand behind everything, put forward with an as-if and then left unfound. The word the tradition uses to say: no one is at the wheel.
Zhishui (止水)
Zhishui 止水, 'still water' — the Zhuangzi's companion image to the mirror: the mind can only reflect when it stops moving, and 'only the still can still the many.'
Zuochi
Glossary: zuochi 坐驰, 'sitting while galloping' — the Zhuangzi's named failure state of meditation: the body sits, the mind races. The negative twin of zuowang.
Zuowang
Glossary: zuowang 坐忘, 'sitting in oblivion' — translation options and why the term resists a single rendering.