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.'
The term
两忘 (liǎngwàng) — 两, the pair, the two; 忘, to forget, let go, put aside. The Zhuangzi uses it once, in the Dazongshi chapter, as the second of two parallel lines:
“Rather than praise Yao and condemn Jie, better to forget both and transform along the Way.” (与其誉尧而非桀也，不如两忘而化其道。)
The first line is the fish: when the spring dries up, the fish on the dry ground keep each other damp with their spit — “rather than that, better to forget each other in the rivers and lakes.” The second line moves the same structure from the mutual register (相忘, the fish forgetting each other) to the judging register (两忘, forgetting both sides of the verdict).
Why the term matters
- The pair is the object, not the sides. The term does not say “judge more fairly between Yao and Jie” or “find the middle.” It dissolves the pairing itself — the stance that generates praise-and-blame. The fish line shows what the pair actually is: the spit of the stranded, a survival mechanism of the dried-out, not a healthy function of the mind. 两忘 is the tradition’s one-word refusal of the judging stance — the same refusal the mirror passage encodes as 不将不迎, no escorting out and no welcoming in: praise is an escort, blame a refusal, and the mirror does neither.
- 化其道 — the forgetting is not an end. The line does not stop at “forget both.” It says forget both and transform along the Way — 化, the word for flowing change, the same verb in the fish passage’s own water. Forgetting clears the channel; what then flows is not a new opinion but the Way’s own movement. The site’s zuowang concept page is this structure’s full development: the forgetting is the subtraction, and the subtraction’s product is never named in advance.
- It completes the forgetting family’s social member. Zuowang forgets the self; the ferryman forgets the water; 两忘 forgets the verdicts. The one the three-languages discipline most needs is this one: the editorial rule that keeps traditional claims, scientific findings, and practitioner reports separate but unranked is a 两忘 discipline — the site refuses to run a league table among its own registers.
Usage notes
The term appears later in Buddhist-influenced usage (两忘 as a Chan-flavored complementarity), but the site keeps the Dazongshi usage as primary, in pinyin with the gloss “forgetting both,” per the translation policy.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 6 (Dazongshi, inner chapter): '泉涸，鱼相与处于陆…不如相忘于江湖。与其誉尧而非桀也，不如两忘而化其道。' Verified against the Wikisource full text and a teaching edition with translation; the fish passage is the same text documented on the fish-in-the-dry-spring story page