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.
The term
两行 (liǎngxíng) — “walking two roads.” The term arrives at the end of the Qi Wu Lun’s central sequence, as its named conclusion: after the monkeys of the morning-and-evening story (the keeper changes nothing in name or substance — three in the morning and four at night, or four and three — and the monkeys’ joy and anger do the rest), the chapter says: 是以圣人和之以是非而休乎天钧，是之谓两行 — therefore the sage harmonizes right and wrong with them, and rests on the heavenly balance. This is called walking two roads.
Why the term matters
- The monkey story is the definition, not the decoration. 两行 sits immediately after the three-in-the-morning joke, and the site holds the order as doctrine: the keeper does not abolish the monkeys’ preferences, nor join them — he holds both (three-four and four-three are the same nuts) while letting each monkey keep its own road. 两行 is the name for that motion: the sage moves with right and wrong (和之以是非) rather than against them, and rests in the heavenly balance rather than in either side. The site’s qiwu page holds the standing warning this term completes: the leveling is not relativism — two roads are walked, but the walker is on the pivot, not on one road.
- The companion of the ring’s center. The term pairs precisely with the site’s huan-zhong page (the center of the ring, from the passage’s earlier half): 环中 is the position (the hinge comes to rest at the ring’s center and answers the endless) and 两行 is the motion (from that center, both roads are walkable at once). The tradition keeps the pair joined — 休乎天钧 is the resting that makes the walking possible — and the site keeps them as two pages of one doctrine: the stance, and the stride.
- The grammar of the harmonizing. 和之以是非 is easy to misread as “compromise” — and the site’s mirror page holds the corrective image: the perfect man’s heart is a mirror, 应而不藏 — it responds to everything and stores nothing. The sage in 两行 does not average the sides; he responds to both, the way the mirror responds to every face without keeping any. The true ruler page holds the same family of images for the self that is not one of the parties.
- The book’s own speech obeys the term. The zhi-yan page holds the Yu Yan chapter’s acceptance theory — 与己同则应，不与己同则反 — agree with us and we respond, disagree and we resist: the book’s own words walk two roads, and the site’s translation policy inherits the term’s discipline (register the readings, refuse to adjudicate, let each road stay open). 两行 is, in the site’s own practice, not only a term to explain but a procedure to follow.
- The recommendation. “Walking two roads” — kept literal, because the metaphor does the work (and the modern Chinese idiom that survives is not 两行 but the opposite habit: 非此即彼, either-this-or-that — the term’s drift is instructive: the language kept the habit the term diagnoses, and dropped the term).
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 2 (Qi Wu Lun, inner chapter), the pivot-and-balance passage, text previously verified on this site's tian-jun page and three-in-the-morning page (Wikisource and the chapter sources there): 名实未亏，而喜怒为用，亦因是也。是以圣人和之以是非而休乎天钧，是之谓两行 — the term 两行 appearing as the passage's named conclusion, directly after the morning-and-evening monkeys story and the hinge-and-ring passage