Heaven and Earth Are Beautiful and Silent

Reading it step by step

Page thirty. Our journey began with a giant fish, and today it ends in the quiet of heaven and earth.

Let's take it in three steps.

First: heaven and earth don't speak. Spring arrives without an announcement. Flowers open without explaining themselves. Mountains are high and don't show off. “Great beauty, and they do not speak.” The most beautiful things are usually the quietest. It carries on from “an empty room fills with light” on Day 15 and “a mind like still water” on Day 27: only stillness reflects.

Second: the seasons have clear laws. The round of spring, summer, autumn and winter is clearer than any law people make, and it never argues. On Day 23 Zhuangzi compared life and death to the turning seasons; on Day 25 Cook Ding “followed the natural pattern.” Everything we've read has been about one thing: walking with the way heaven and earth already are.

Third: look to heaven and earth. The sages invented nothing new. They simply looked well: at fish, trees, wind, cicadas, water. In thirty days you've looked at a great deal too: the great bird, the useless tree, the monkeys, the mantis, the tortoise, the butterfly, the wooden rooster, Cook Ding's knife. Zhuangzi's book is a book about how to look.

Look back along the road: from free wandering, to the troubles of the world, to the fasting of the heart, to bending outside and staying steady inside, and finally to beauty. A person can become great: not more famous or more useful, but with a heart big enough to hold heaven and earth, and quiet enough to see their beauty.

Thank you for walking these thirty pages. From now on you don't need this site to tell you what to read. Heaven and earth open a new page every day.

Heaven and earth say nothing, and teach us every day.