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.
The term
县解 (xuánjiě) — 县, the ancient graph for a suspended head (read and written 悬, to hang); 解, to untie, to release. The term appears exactly twice in the Zhuangzi, both times as the reward of the same formula:
- Over a death (ch. 3, Qin Shi mourning Laozi): 安时而处顺，哀乐不能入也，古者谓是帝之县解 — “rest in the season and dwell in what follows; sorrow and joy cannot get in — the ancients called this Heaven’s release from the hanging.”
- Over a sickness (ch. 6, Zi Yu’s crumpled body): 得者时也，失者顺也，安时而处顺，哀乐不能入也，此古之所谓县解也 — “what I got, I got in its season; what I lose, I lose in the order of things; rest in the season and dwell in what follows; sorrow and joy cannot get in — this is what the ancients called release from the hanging.”
Why the term matters
- The hanging is the body’s bond, not the body. The image is a person tied head-down — and the release is not from life or from the body, but from the binding: what hangs one is attachment’s grip, the terror of what comes. The education encyclopedia’s gloss, verified on the Qin Shi page, states it: 死生无动于心 — life and death not moving the heart. The site keeps this because it is the term’s whole correction: the tradition does not promise release from dying; it promises release from the punishment of dying (the ch. 3 passage calls the un-released state 遁天之刑, the punishment of fleeing Heaven).
- One formula, two scenes. The word-for-word identity of the formula in ch. 3 and ch. 6 — same clause, same term, one over a death, one over a sickness — is the book’s own evidence that 县解 is one thing, not two: the release is from whatever comes, because what comes is always “in its season” (时) or “in the order” (顺). The site’s two story pages cross-reference by this formula.
- Its relation to the forgetting-family. The zuowang concept is the method (sitting in oblivion), the liang-wang term the social form (forgetting judgments), and 县解 is the result-word: what the untying feels like when the body is the rope. The three terms form the site’s release-vocabulary, and this page is its anchor.
Usage notes
The term stays in pinyin with the gloss “release from the hanging”; the graphic note (县 = 悬) is kept because the suspended-head image is the term’s engine; both occurrences are cited, per the site’s rule that a term with two attested uses gets both.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 3 (Yangsheng Zhu): '安时而处顺，哀乐不能入也，古者谓是帝之县解。' and ch. 6 (Dazongshi): '得者时也，失者顺也，安时而处顺，哀乐不能入也，此古之所谓县解也。' Both verified on the qinshi-mourning and four-friends story pages, which quote the passages in full
- Education encyclopedia (pedia.cloud.edu.tw) entry on the chapter, glossing 帝之悬解 as 'life and death not moving the heart' — verified on the qinshi-mourning page