Zhishui (止水)
Zhishui 止水, 'still water' — the Zhuangzi's companion image to the mirror: the mind can only reflect when it stops moving, and 'only the still can still the many.'
The term
止水 (zhǐshuǐ) — literally “stopped water,” still water. The Zhuangzi’s line is short and complete:
“People do not look at themselves in flowing water but in still water. Only the still can still the many.” (人莫鉴于流水而鉴于止水，唯止能止众止。)
Why the term matters
Three reasons, each structural to this site:
- It is the mirror’s twin. The mirror passage (ch. 7) says what the mind’s use should be like — respond and do not store. The still-water line (ch. 5) says how: reflection requires stillness. Flowing water does not reflect a face; a moving mind does not reflect what is there. The pair — mirror and still water — is the Zhuangzi’s complete theory of the reflecting mind, and the jing concept page inherits both.
- The second half is the tradition’s stillness claim in one line. 唯止能止众止 — “only the still can still the many” — is the classical statement of what the site’s sitting practice is: not the many things being managed one by one (the storehouse-mind of the mirror passage), but the one stillness that stills the rest. This is the zuowang lineage’s founding move in miniature.
- It names the instrument of the practice, not its goal. The still water is useful — people look in it. The tradition’s stillness is not withdrawal from seeing but the condition of accurate seeing. The sitting protocol and the seeing-light problem page both operate on this understanding: stillness is for reflecting, not for blanking.
Usage notes
The term enters the commentarial vocabulary early (the image is picked up across the inner chapters’ interpreters and reappears throughout later discourse on 定 and 静), and modern scholarship (Sun Mingjun, 2022) reads it as the working definition of the chapter’s word 止 — “stop,” the stilling that grounds all the other stillnesses. The site keeps the term in pinyin with the gloss “still water,” per the translation policy, and never confuses it with 死水 — dead water: the tradition’s still water is clear because it has settled, not because it has died.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 5 (Dechongfu, inner chapter): '人莫鉴于流水而鉴于止水，唯止能止众止' — as quoted in Sun Mingjun's scholarly essay (National Office for Philosophy and Social Science, 2022), which pairs it with the mirror passage of ch. 7