Zuowang Passage (Zhuangzi ch. 6): Full Translation
The complete sitting-in-oblivion passage 坐忘 from Zhuangzi ch. 6, with the translation problems of 'drop the body', 'expel knowledge', and 'Great Thoroughfare' worked through.
Chinese text
墮肢體，黜聰明，離形去知，同於大通，此謂坐忘。
Pinyin
Duò zhītǐ, chù cōngmíng, lí xíng qù zhī, tóng yú dàtōng, cǐ wèi zuòwàng.
Literal rendering
“Drop the limbs and trunk; dismiss the keen senses; leave the form behind and put knowledge away; merge with the Great Thoroughfare. This is called sitting in oblivion.”
Term-by-term problems
- 墮 (duò, “let fall/drop”): the character elsewhere means “collapse/destroy,” but with 肢體 (limbs and trunk) the sense is letting the body drop — a release of physical holding, not self-harm. Some translations (“demolish the body”) overstate.
- 黜聰明 (dismiss keenness of ear and eye): 聰明 is literal auditory/visual acuity, not “intelligence.” “Expel intelligence” (popular rendering) is a mistranslation that has fueled the cliché of Zhuangzi as anti-intellectual.
- 離形去知 (leave form, put away knowledge): the two removals — bodily identity and conceptual knowledge. “去” is “let go/put away,” softer than “destroy.”
- 大通 (dàtōng, “Great Thoroughfare/Great Pervader”): Ziporyn’s “Great Thoroughfare” captures the passage sense (通 = to pass through freely). Watson: “the Great Thoroughfare”; Graham: “the Great Pervader.” It names the Dao as unobstructed flow.
- 坐忘 (zuòwàng): literally “sitting-forgetting.” Watson: “sitting and forgetting”; Kohn’s monograph title: “Sitting in Oblivion” — the now-standard scholarly rendering. Recommended here: “sitting in oblivion” (Kohn), with the literal gloss “sitting and forgetting” on first use.
Context in the dialogue
The passage is Yan Hui’s answer to Confucius’ question “What does sit and forget mean?” — the climax of the famous dialogue in which the disciple reports progressively forgetting benevolence, righteousness, ritual, and music, and Confucius the teacher asks to become the disciple. The frame is fictional; the description became the classical definition of zuowang, and Sima Chengzhen built his seven-stage treatise on it (see the text page).
Traditional usage
Cited by the Tang Zuowang Lun as its charter; echoed across later Daoist meditation writing as the summary of the practice’s end state. The tradition reads the four removals as a sequence (body-holding, sense-seeking, identity, concepts), which the Tang treatise then turns into stages.
Western misunderstandings
- Reading 黜聰明 as anti-intellectualism. The text targets reliance on the senses and concepts in meditation, not the value of learning in general — Zhuangzi himself is a virtuoso of argument.
- Reading “drop the body” as hostility to embodiment. The Zhuangzi’s larger teaching treats body and mind as one qi-process (物化); the instruction is to drop grasping, not to condemn the body.
Recommended rendering (this site)
“Let the body fall slack, dismiss hearing and sight, leave the form behind and put knowledge away, and merge with the Great Thoroughfare — this is called sitting in oblivion.”
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 6 (Dazongshi), received text