The Marsh Pheasant: Ten Steps, One Peck
The pheasant takes ten steps for one peck, a hundred for one drink — and does not ask to be kept in a cage. Even kept like a king, it would not be good.
The story
Gongwen Xuan saw the Master of the Right and started: “What sort of man is this? Why one foot? Heaven — or man?”
“Heaven, not man. Heaven’s engendering made him this one-footed one. A man’s form is given as it is given — so I know it was Heaven, not man.”
The marsh pheasant takes ten steps for one peck, a hundred steps for one drink — and does not ask to be kept in a cage. Even kept like a king, it would not be good.
Framing: the chapter’s shortest teaching, and the book’s animal logic
- Ten steps, one peck. The pheasant’s liberty is expensive — ten steps of work for a single peck, a hundred for a drink — and the passage does not pretend otherwise. The freedom it refuses to trade is not leisure; it is the effort itself. 神虽王，不善也: even if the cage treated it as king, it would not be good — the phrase is the passage’s whole argument, and the site reads it as the turtle of Pu’s logic in animal form: the choice between the tiring open field and the honored cage is not a choice between comfort levels but between being fed and being the one who feeds itself.
- The opening scene sets the theme. The chapter stages Gongwen Xuan’s shock at the one-footed officer — 天与？其人与？ heaven or man? — and answers: heaven. The ziran concept page holds the term this answer belongs to: what is given is given, and the pheasant passage follows as the same answer applied to appetite — the form is not to be corrected, and the freedom is not to be enclosed.
- The chapter’s four scenes. The site now has the full chapter: the cook (skill’s measure), the pheasant (freedom’s price), and Qin Shi (grief’s measure) — the three scenes after the opening statement (吾生也有涯，而知也无涯). The pheasant is the middle term: between the blade that finds the spaces and the mourner who finds the measure, the bird that pays ten steps a peck.
Why it belongs in this knowledge base
Because it is the shortest complete statement of the tradition’s freedom: not the removal of effort, but the refusal of the cage — and the site’s practice pages are written on the same arithmetic: the practice costs ten steps a peck, and is not for sale as a king’s keeping.
Uncertainty preserved: an inner chapter passage (earliest stratum), verified against the Wikisource full text; the figures are fable; the Taiwan study’s reading (the pheasant as the natural against the fenced) is recorded as scholarly interpretation, not as the text’s own.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 3 (Yangsheng Zhu, inner chapter), the marsh pheasant passage with its opening scene (Gongwen Xuan and the one-footed officer). Verified against the Wikisource full text; the passage's interpretation is also discussed in a Taiwan scholarly study of the chapter (Nanya University teaching-research paper), quoted on this page