Three Cries, and Out: Qin Shi Mourns Laozi
When Laozi dies, his friend Qin Shi cries three times and leaves. The disciples object — and Qin Shi explains what the mourners are doing wrong, and what 'resting in the season' would be.
The story
When Laozi died, Qin Shi went to mourn him. He cried three times and came out.
A disciple said: “Was he not your friend?”
“He was.”
“Then is it proper to mourn him like this?”
“It is. At first I took him for one of the others — now I see he was not. When I went in just now to mourn, there were old people crying for him as if crying for their son, and young ones crying as if crying for their mother. For them to gather like that, there must have been words spoken without being asked for, tears shed without being asked for. That is fleeing Heaven and doubling the feelings, forgetting what one has received — the ancients called it the punishment of fleeing Heaven.
“He came in his season — his time to come; he left in his season — his time to go. Rest in the season and dwell in what follows — then sorrow and joy cannot get in. The ancients called this Heaven’s release from the hanging.
“The finger’s fuel is spent, but the fire passes on — and no one knows its end.”
Framing: the chapter’s closing scene, and the two halves of the book’s death-teaching
- Three cries is the whole anecdote. The funeral norm of the time (and of every time) is more: the chapter’s own crowd demonstrates it — crying “as for a son, as for a mother.” Qin Shi’s three cries are not the rejection of grief but its measure: he came, he cried (秦失,人吊亦吊 — Guo Xiang’s note: “he mourned when others mourned”), and he stopped at the number the form allows. The objection comes from the disciples, not from him — the passage is built so that the mourners are the ones who seem strange.
- The diagnosis: 遁天倍情, forgetting what was received. The crowd’s excess — unsolicited speeches, unasked-for tears — is read as flight: from Heaven’s allotment, and from the self’s own measure. The commentary tradition glosses it as the “punishment” the emotions themselves inflict (郭注: 将驰鹜于忧乐之境，虽楚戮未加，而性情已困，庸非刑哉 — “racing through grief and joy, the feelings are exhausted though no executioner has come — is that not punishment?”). The drumming basin page holds the book’s other half of the same teaching: there, grief is real and transformed; here, grief is doubled and named a punishment. The site keeps both — the tradition never said mourning was easy; it said mourning has a measure.
- 安时而处顺 — the formula appears twice in the book. “Rest in the season and dwell in what follows; sorrow and joy cannot get in” is spoken here for a death, and the same words are spoken in the four friends passage of the Dazongshi for a sickness — 县解, “release from the hanging,” is the shared name for both. The hanging is the body one is tied into: 县 (the ancient graph for a suspended head) is the being-upside-down, and the release is not from death but from the terror of it. The education encyclopedia’s gloss, verified for this page, states it plainly: 死生无动于心 — life and death not moving the heart.
- 薪尽火传 — the chapter ends with its own immortality clause. “The finger’s fuel is spent, the fire passes on” (指穷于为薪，火传也) is the book’s last word in this chapter — and the source of the modern idiom 薪尽火传. The chapter that began with the cook’s blade ends with a fire: whatever the individual is, the flame is what is passed. The site records the idiom-tradition’s drift the other way here than in the frog and mantis cases: this idiom kept its meaning.
Why it belongs in this knowledge base
Because this is the Zhuangzi’s own funeral for its founding figure — Laozi dying inside the Zhuangzi, mourned by a friend, released from the hanging — and the Laozi page’s “died in no one knows where” and this chapter’s three cries are the same tradition holding the death without holding it fixed. The zuowang discipline’s “mourning without drowning” begins here.
Uncertainty preserved: an inner chapter passage (earliest stratum), fully verified in two editions; the event is fable (Qin Shi is not otherwise attested; Laozi’s death is the book’s scene, not a biography); the Guo Xiang commentary is quoted as the commentary tradition’s reading, not as the text’s.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 3 (Yangsheng Zhu, inner chapter), the Qin Shi passage. Verified against the Wikisource full text and the Shidian Guji Zhuangzi Yi (DZ1487) edition with Guo Xiang's commentary, which agree throughout