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.
The term
虚室生白 (xūshì shēng bái) — the empty room gives birth to brightness. The term comes from the book’s heart-fasting passage (ch. 4), in the climax the site holds in full:
瞻彼阕者，虚室生白，吉祥止止 — “Look at that opening: the empty room gives birth to brightness; the auspicious comes to rest, rests.”
The sentence before it is the passage’s method (气也者，虚而待物者也。唯道集虚。虚者，心斋也 — “the qi is empty and awaits things; only the Way gathers in the empty; the empty is the fasting of the mind”), and the sentence after it is the passage’s warning (夫且不止，是之谓坐驰 — “if it does not come to rest, this is called sitting-while-galloping,” the site’s zuochi page).
Why the term matters
- The room is the heart. The passage’s room (室) is the heart’s room — the metaphor the xinzhai page documents in full: stop the ears at hearing, stop the mind at matching, and what remains is the empty room. The term is the tradition’s answer to the question the site’s practice pages constantly meet — what, if anything, is found in the emptiness? — and the answer is a state-word, not a thing-word: 白, brightness — not an object seen, but the room itself lit. The site keeps the metaphor’s grammar strictly: the light is born from the emptiness, not placed in it.
- 吉祥止止 — the doubled resting. The clause’s grammar is famous and the tradition reads it as the stillness family’s consummation: the auspicious (吉祥) comes to rest, and its rest is itself doubled (止止) — “rests, and in resting, rests.” The site registers the doubling without choosing among the traditional readings (auspicious-resting / stop-and-it-stops), per the disagreement rule: what all readings share is the passage’s claim that the good is not sought but arrives and stays — the wuwei family’s grammar applied to fortune itself.
- The boundary the site enforces. The term’s afterlife in later internal-alchemy and modern 修行 talk turns 虚室生白 into a vision claim — “seeing white light in the room.” The site’s seeing-light page enforces the boundary: the source-text term is a state-metaphor for the emptied heart; the later light-practice readings belong to later lineages and are not adopted; and the two must not be merged into a license for chasing lights. The translation policy holds the same line: the term stays in pinyin, glossed as “the empty room gives birth to brightness.”
- The pair with 坐驰. The passage defines its own opposite in the next breath — 坐驰, sitting while galloping — and the site’s zuochi glossary already holds it. The two terms are one sentence apart and the site keeps them as a pair: the empty room gives birth to brightness; the un-emptied room gallops while sitting. The drowsiness-and-stillness pattern page is the same pair in the site’s experience record.
Usage notes
The term carries its passage’s full context whenever cited (the fasting method before it, the galloping warning after it); it is never used to license vision-practices; the 止止 doubling is registered with its readings unadjudicated; cross-linked always with xinzhai, xu, and zuochi.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 4 (Renjian Shi, inner chapter), the mind-fasting passage, verified against the Wikisource full text: 若一志，无听之以耳而听之以心…气也者，虚而待物者也。唯道集虚。虚者，心斋也…瞻彼阕者，虚室生白，吉祥止止；夫且不止，是之谓坐驰
- A Baidu Jingyan teaching entry on the phrase's meaning, confirming the standard gloss (the emptied room and the light) and the passage's location