Following the "Buddhist system" and "inner volume", "lying flat" has become the annual hot word of the Internet, not only was selected into the newly released "Top Ten Buzzwords of 2021" list of "Chewing Words", some netizens believe that Zhuangzi's thought is the ancient version of "Lying Flat Learning", and "Leisure" is a kind of mentality of being comfortable after lying flat, and some netizens say that Zhuangzi is the originator of "Lying Flat Learning".
In this regard, we interviewed Professor Yang Lihua of the Department of Philosophy of Peking University and asked him to talk about how we should view the culture of young people lying flat, and how to understand the phrase "Zhuangzi is the originator of 'lying flat learning'". Professor Yang believes that if "lying flat" means maintaining oneself, which means having the courage to say "no" to the constraints in life, then why not be a person who lies down calmly and explores oneself and maintains initiative.
[Yang Lihua] If Zhuangzi is the originator of "lying flat learning", then we really give "lying flat learning" a more positive, dynamic, self-determined meaning.
Why did Professor Yang affirm the "lying flat learning" presented by Zhuangzi's thought? How is Zhuangzi's "Lying Flat Learning" different from the popular "Lying Flat Learning"? Today, Movable Type Jun shared with book friends the "Philosophy Class of Peking University, Trying to Give an Answer to "Unsolved Life"" compiled by Peking University Press.
Popular philosophy class at Peking University,
Try to give an answer to "life without solutions."
—
Author: Dong Zhaoyan | views are compiled from:
Fifteen Lectures on Chinese Philosophy and Studies on Zhuangzi's Philosophy, by Yang Lihua
After Professor Yang Lihua, the "male god" of the Department of Philosophy of Peking University, entered the B station, many readers left messages in the background, saying that they also joined the army of "cloud students" and followed Yang Zi to appreciate the charm of Zhuangzi.
"Yangzi" is the honorific title of Peking University students to Teacher Yang Lihua, the "Yangzi" in the eyes of students, both Confucian gentle and elegant, calm and solid temperament, but also Zhuangzi's dashing and open-minded; he has no shortage of "literary and artistic style" nourished by philosophy and poetry, but in fact, according to the "breaking news" of informed classmates, this professor was also a "rock youth" who loved Cui Jian when he was young.
At Peking University, Teacher Yang's "Zhuangzi" Intensive Reading class was always full: 15 minutes before the class, the chairs in the classroom were already crowded with people, and some students simply put their school bags aside and sat directly on the ground...
At Station B, Teacher Yang also brought "Zhuangzi" as a Chinese philosophical classic into the audience's field of vision, solemnly and solemnly faced the great ideas in it, and presented a different "philosopher's version" of Zhuangzi to the audience.
Why did Teacher Yang Lihua choose Zhuangzi?
Why can we modern people feel empathy and emotion in this sage of a thousand years ago?
For the average reader, Zhuangzi is perhaps the work of Chinese philosophy that we have the most exposure to. But reading more does not mean that it is simple and easy to understand, on the contrary, most people have a sense of trance after reading this work, "understood but not fully understood".
However, the biggest charm of "Zhuangzi" is that:
No matter what kind of life we are experiencing, at some point we will always meet Zhuangzi unexpectedly.
In the face of death, which has to bear the weight of life, people who have lost their loved ones may be able to give themselves comfort with Zhuangzi's idea of "peace and security", face the other side of life, and not be shaken by change;
When overwhelmed by the burden of school and 996, Zhuangzi's "leisure" may allow us to stop, take a break, and carefully consider the meaning and value of life;
Even if it is only to recall a beautiful and mysterious dream in the afternoon, it may remind us of the story of Zhuang Zhou Mengdi, leaving infinite mysteries and regrets.
At the same time, when reading "Zhuangzi", we are often prone to fall into multiple misunderstandings. For example, zhuangzi's thought is negative, nihilistic, and relativistic, and even directly equivalent to Buddhist thought.
In this regard, teacher Yang Lihua showed the other side of Zhuangzi: a positive and active Zhuangzi came into our field of vision. He once said:
Zhuangzi is like a huge whirlpool in Chinese culture, all of whom are caught up in appreciation and fascination with him to varying degrees, but we can only go around the core of the whirlpool, and seem to be constantly touching it, constantly approaching it, but it seems that it can never be approached.
As a philosophical classic, Zhuangzi has a constant meaning and value, the ideas embodied in it are contemporary, and the distance between Zhuangzi and us is not far away.
In the turbulent and uncertain modern life, classic reading is like a solid anchor, providing support and direction for the lonely boat.
Be a "useless" person? Nothing is really idle
If reading Zhuangzi is seen as a practice of life, then the first lesson That Zhuangzi taught us is to accept ourselves as "useless" people in this utilitarian world.
Many people are used to asking before doing something: What's the use of doing it? What are the benefits? It is difficult to say that this is a common problem of modern people, but over time, "utilitarianism" has been linked to this idea, and then it has taken on a pejorative color.
Looking back on the road of growth, there are many such teachings: the use of reading is to help us enter a good university, to enter a good university to find a decent job, and to have a so-called happy and successful life after starting a family... However, when I really entered the university and entered the workplace, I found that everything was not as simple as I thought.
Undergraduate degree in the workplace has lacked competitive advantage, high-paying jobs often graduate students start, and for the purpose of conveniently finding a job to continue further study, whether it is to protect research or go abroad are inseparable from high grades, internship experience and other "hard levers", so the selection of water course paper grade points, running internship brush resume has become the unspoken rule that many college students know, for modern people, the inner volume, internal friction has long been no longer fresh.
While rejecting this claim, it is difficult to completely get rid of the utilitarian perspective, so "whether it is useful" becomes a secret and subtle criterion for making choices.
In order to resist this utilitarian value, the term "lying flat" was invented again, and instead of fluttering in the inner ocean, it was better to lie down and make a useless "salted fish".
Regarding the decision to be a useless person, Zhuangzi also had something to say. Closely related to the idea of "use" is "The Getaway".
As the beginning of the seven articles in Zhuangzi, "The Getaway" is the most familiar one for most readers, and it is also the one that is often misunderstood. Many people believe that Zhuangzi's thought is the ancient version of "lying flat learning", and "leisure" is a kind of mentality of being comfortable after lying flat. However, is "leisure" really the ultimate goal of life in Zhuangzi's eyes? Before answering this question, we should first understand what is truly idle.
Gazing into the abyss of true knowledge and domination has always been the main theme of "Zhuangzi", and the first step to true knowledge is "leisure".
The work "shake", "eliminate" has the meaning of elimination, "shake" refers to shaking, breaking free, both are negative, opening up a vision of endless distance after removing the obscuration, and this is precisely the premise of true knowledge to be revealed.
Only through the most thorough negativity, free from all passive factors, can the fullest initiative be achieved, starting from the subject, and this negativity is first embodied in the "knowledge of ignorance".
Individuals are essentially unable to know each other, and all that is in common is "treating the other", that is, dependence on the other, and this kind of stay in life is often manifested as specific "knowing and using". Therefore, idleness points to the elimination and breaking free of "use", and only by getting rid of "use" can it be possible to do nothing and lead to true knowledge.
"Idleness" does not mean doing nothing, but not doing unnecessary pretense for the purpose of "usefulness".
Our desire to incorporate all kinds of changing experiences into one of our own bodies for our own domination, and thus to be able to use them, seems to create a certain world, but these "knowledge" and "use" that people seek make it more difficult for us to realize that the so-called laws are not universal and inevitable, and that man is doomed to dominate his life only with limited knowledge.
And if there is something useful, there must be something, and this active seeking for my own use often causes itself to fall into passivity, and man loses his own self-sufficiency.
When we try to make ourselves a "useful" person who can be used by others, aren't we reducing ourselves to a tool for service? And if we look at the world from such a utilitarian perspective, others, other things, everything is reduced to a tool that can be used, and then lose our initiative.
If we think that idleness is lying flat learning, then this kind of "lying flat" does not call for a lazy and idle lifestyle, but a vision of "truly treating people as people" and giving people the initiative and self to show space.
Walking into the human world, everything is "fate"
In the increasingly stressful modern society, have you found that there are more and more people around who put "faith in fate" on their lips, and more and more young people are beginning to be keen to pin their hopes on the metaphysical fields such as the eight characters and constellations.
The second revelation that Zhuangzi gave us was to recognize what "fate" was before confessing destiny.
If you want to summarize a few keywords for modern life, "uncertainty" may be at the top of the list - life is no longer an indomitable straight line, but entangled in a mess, we learn to use a series of Network hot stems such as "cabbage" (there is a heart that wants to roll in and is too dish), "sauerkraut fish" (sour and redundant) and a series of Internet hot stems to laugh at themselves, but after laughter, the pressure is still there.
Many netizens have asked, when will life get back on track? But in fact, changes happen all the time, compared to the quiet years, "Zhuangzi" tells us that uncertainty may be the only certainty, is the truth of life.
The account of "idleness" opens the path of true knowledge based on the "knowledge of ignorance": as the subject, the only definite knowledge is the fundamental ignorance of the self. This reveals to us the existence of an object that can neither be understood nor controlled, and which as a whole appears as a universal "destiny."
Death and survival, poverty and wealth, meritocracy and inferiority, reputational ruin, hunger and thirst, cold and heat, are the changes of events, and the journey of fate is also the way to go. ("De Chong Fu")
From the death in life inside, the external wealth that is difficult to control, to the qualities such as virtuousness and inferiority, and the actual state of hunger, thirst, cold and heat, etc., they are all included in the domination and domination of "life".
This universal "destiny" is expressed in the human world as a variety of unavoidable:
... He who is a husband who does things for his relatives, who does not choose the land, is filial piety; he who is a husband who is a king, who does not choose anything, is at peace, and who is loyal is prosperous; those who do their own things, mourning and happiness are not easy to give before, and they know that they cannot help but be at peace, and they are virtuous. He who is a subject and a son is inherently unavoidable. ("De Chong Fu")
The inherent "last resort" is an internal necessity, and the "helplessness" contains external uncontrollable accidents, and we do not know its origin or its specific content.
As children, we have inner moral commands that we have to obey; as individual beings who have to wait, we are equally dependent on others, which is a manifestation of passivity.
However, caught up in a web of uncertainty and chance, have we completely lost the possibility of autonomy? Zhuangzi gave a negative answer.
Keeping the self-identity, "health" is the right solution
People often lament that under the pressure of modern life, no one's life is difficult, and even stars who seem to eat and wear are beginning to choose the exam editor, which has led netizens to jokingly call "the end of the universe is the exam editor".
But in Zhuangzi's view, the "end of the universe" may lie in "health maintenance".
Contemporary youth have long invented a series of trendy health care methods: such as the "punk health" after 90s while dying while saving themselves, using the most expensive eye cream to stay up the deepest night; and "as long as you eat snacks fast enough, calories can't catch up with me" "Drinking iced milk tea has no calories"...
But behind it, it is not difficult to see the dilemma faced by modern people: neither can get rid of the trivialities and pressures brought by school, work, and social interaction, nor do they want to lose the pursuit of happiness and self, and are completely wrapped up in the pressure of life. We want to dominate our own lives, but we can't do it.
In the face of the rules and regulations in life, we lack the courage to say "no", because we do not know what kind of life is worth living, we are afraid that our life is not "really good" and "worth pursuing", at this time, we may wish to get some inspiration from the "health" life that people should live in Zhuangzi's eyes.
Let us return once again to the "knowledge of ignorance" just mentioned: the clearer we know the limits of our knowledge, the more profoundly we can understand the essential ignorance of man, and thus the prudence and fear arise.
Proceeding from this measure, holding on to the Middle Way and thinking that constantness is the truly rational attitude towards life.
If the holder is unbiased, his direction is only his own maintenance. This self-sustainment is not moved by the changes around it, of course, it is autonomous and active.
Such autonomy not only makes the inherent inherent necessity fully realized, but also makes the external uncontrollable accident truly become the accident—the pure accident that the subject can transcend and is inherently unconstrained.
This prudent attitude towards life is the true meaning of "health" in Zhuangzi's eyes.
In the article "Health Lord", "health maintenance" is concretized as "can protect the body, can be fully born, can raise relatives, can be full of years", this attitude of life is both directed to the self, including the existence and realization of the nature of the self's life; but also to the other, since the concern for the parents is the inherent nature of man, then the health is no longer limited to the closed individual life, but also contains the whole life associated with the other.
For Zhuangzi, "self-preservation", "full sex", "raising relatives" and "exhausting the year" are the basic connotations of the individual's life, and in the past, they are all additional burdens and additions. From this point of view, the various alluring products and images created by consumerism, and the lifestyles that seem to be deterministic but are actually full of stereotypes, have become unnecessarily redundant.
The subject is the most fundamental thing about being the subject, and the consciousness of the identity of one's own existence. Maintaining oneself means not changing under the influence of others. Not being moved by the changes of others fundamentally removes passivity and becomes active.
Let's return to the question of "whether Zhuangzi's thought is lying flat or not" again, instead of using Lying Flat to interpret Zhuangzi, it is better to use Zhuangzi to see Lying Flat:
If "lying flat" means maintaining oneself, and having the courage to say "no" to the constraints in life, then why not be a person who lies down and explores oneself and maintains initiative?
"Professor Yang Lihua of Peking University Lectures on Zhuangzi Philosophy"
Peking University's original hardcore "Zhuangzi" intensive reading class
Restore Zhuangzi as a philosopher with the most solemn attitude