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.
The term
吾丧我 (wú sàng wǒ) — “I have lost my me.” The book’s sharpest grammatical move: 吾 and 我 are both first-person pronouns, and the sentence runs the first through the second — the subject (吾) announces the loss of the object he had taken himself to be (我). The state it names is the whole chapter’s opening scene: Nan-Guo Ziqi sits at the armrest, breathes up to heaven, looks vacant, as if he had lost his companion (荅焉似丧其耦) — and answers his startled student’s question with the sentence itself: 今者吾丧我，汝知之乎 — “just now, I have lost my me — do you understand this?”
Why the term matters
- The companion that is lost is the self. 丧其耦 — the phrase the book uses for the visible symptom (looking like one who has lost a partner) shares its verb with 丧我: the me is the companion, and losing it has the grammar of bereavement — something familiar that is gone, and the world is then met differently (the chapter proceeds at once to the three sounds — human piping, earth piping, heaven piping — audible only after the loss). The site’s butterfly page is the same chapter’s other half: what is lost and found across the transformation.
- The symptom pair, held exactly. 形如槁木，心如死灰 — body like withered wood, mind like dead ash: the chapter’s diagnostic description of the state, and the site keeps both halves honest — the words describe the appearance of a state, not a state to imitate (the student’s question proves even the appearance is legible from outside: 今之隐机者，非昔之隐机者也 — “the one at the armrest today is not the one at the armrest before”). The drowsiness pattern is the site’s standing warning here: dead ash is not sleep, and sleep is not dead ash — the tradition’s own texts insist the difference is the point.
- The family of self-loss. 吾丧我 is the state; 坐忘 is its method (drop the body, drop the knowing); 心斋 is its organ (hear with the qi); the empty room is its place. The site holds the four as one constellation with different doors — and the Qiwu Lun’s opening as the tradition’s own naming: the I that loses is the one that stays.
- The Guo Xiang reading, registered. The commentary tradition compresses the sentence to 自忘 — self-forgetting — and the site marks the compression as the tradition’s own: 丧我 is not the annihilation of the subject (the sentence’s grammar forbids it — an annihilated 吾 could not announce anything) but the dropping of the claim, the acquired me: name, role, appetite, opinion. The Qiwulun translation carries the full passage; this page carries the term.
- The recommendation. Render it “I have lost my me” (the Watson tradition renders “I have lost myself” — idiomatic, but it dissolves the 吾/我 distinction the sentence exists to make). Keep the Chinese in parentheses on first use; the term is the book’s own, and the pronoun-split does not survive any single English word.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 2 (Qi Wu Lun, inner chapter), the opening passage, verified against the Wikisource full chapter, the Zhihu full-text column, and the Dudianji text (all carrying the same received text: 南郭子綦隐机而坐…今者吾丧我，汝知之乎), with the Guo Xiang commentary registered from the tradition: 吾丧我，我自忘矣 — losing the me is self-forgetting, which the commentaries call the dissolution of the paired body (丧其耦)