The Empty Room: Brightness Is Born (Xuzhi Sheng Bai)
Word-for-word translation of the Zhuangzi's meditation core: 'gaze at what is empty — the empty room gives birth to brightness, auspicious things stop in the stopping. If it does not keep stopping, this is called sitting while galloping.'
Chinese text
瞻彼阕者，虚室生白，吉祥止止。夫且不止，是之谓坐驰。夫徇耳目内通而外于心知，鬼神将来舍，而况人乎！
Pinyin
Zhān bǐ què zhě, xū shì shēng bái, jíxiáng zhǐ zhǐ. Fú qiě bù zhǐ, shì zhī wèi zuòchí. Fú xùn ěrmù nèi tōng ér wài yú xīnzhī, guǐshén jiāng lái shè, ér kuàng rén hū!
Literal rendering
Gaze at that which is empty (阕): in the empty room, brightness is born; auspicious things stop in the stopping. If it does not keep stopping — this is called sitting while galloping. Let ears and eyes communicate inward and stand outside of the mind’s knowing: then spirits and gods will come to dwell there — how much more will people?
Term-by-term notes
- 瞻彼阕者 (gaze at that which is empty): 阕 (què) — the closed gate, the emptied place. The instruction is to look at the emptiness itself: the object of meditation here is not a thing but the vacancy things rest in. The xu family’s root image.
- 虚室生白 (the empty room gives birth to brightness): the room of the heart-fasting (心斋) dialogue made productive: emptiness is not darkness but the condition in which “whiteness”/light appears. The seeing-light problem page treats this image as tradition (not as a promise of literal light), and the translation policy keeps that line.
- 吉祥止止 (auspicious things stop in the stopping): the doubled 止 — the verb and the state it produces. The tradition’s definition of stillness as arrival: what is well-omened comes to rest in the resting. The jing page’s “the mind moving without being moved” is the same claim from the other side.
- 坐驰 (sitting while galloping): the named failure — full entry at the zuochi glossary. The text’s own warning immediately after the positive image: the room does not stay empty by itself.
- 徇耳目内通 (let ears and eyes communicate inward): the senses’ energy turned back from objects — the “inner hearing” strand that later traditions (the Taiping Jing’s inner viewing, neiguan) systematized.
- 外于心知 (stand outside the mind’s knowing): the echo of the ladder’s third rung — “not listening with the mind but with the qi.” The “knowing” here (心知) is the mind’s habit of matching and naming, the 符 of the earlier passage.
- 鬼神将来舍 (spirits and gods will come to dwell): the tradition’s strongest promise in its own vocabulary — the emptied room hosts. This page renders it literally and does not extend it: whether and what “dwells” belongs to the tradition’s register, not this site’s.
Where this passage sits
This is the second half of the heart-fasting dialogue (the first half, “listen not with the ears,” is translated here). Together they are the complete classical meditation instruction: the ladder of listening, then the empty room, then the warning about the gallop. The sequence — build the emptiness, watch the stopping, beware the relapse — is the oldest statement this site has of the practice curve.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 4 (Renjianshi), received text. Full passage double-source verified (Shanxi University Philosophy Department complete text-and-translation page and Baidu Baike entry for the idiom jixiang zhizhi)