An Elemental Thing

by Eliot Weinberger

Chang Ch’ao, in the 17th century, said: “Flowers must have butterflies, mountains must have streams, rocks must have moss, the ocean must have seaweed, old trees must have creepers, and people must have obsessions.”

Chang Jung, a poet in the 5th century, was given a fan made of white egret feathers by a Taoist priest, who told him that strange things should be given to strange people.

A teenager, I was hitchhiking across that sunless desert, and for hours the only living thing I saw was a shirtless man in a loincloth carrying an enormous wooden cross. “Who’s that?” I said and the truck driver shrugged, “Oh, just another penitent.” When we reached the ruins of Chan Chan, I asked to be dropped off and wandered alone into the grid of crumbled mud walls that seemed to have no end. There was no one around, but the landscape was scattered with mounds and rectangular pits dug by grave robbers, as random as mole hills. Lying next to one of them was a skull. I sat down, feet dangling in the pit, and put the skull on my knee. I stuck my hand inside, and talked to it, or imagined that we talked, on that empty plain in nowhere. Decades later, a friend who was near death told me he had been reading the passage where Chuang Tzu finds an old skull and, using it as a pillow, falls asleep. In a dream, the skull appears and tells Chuang Tzu that among the dead there are no rulers or subjects, no work to be done, and spring and autumn are endless. Chuang Tzu asks: “If I got the Arbiter of Fate to give you a body again, make you some bones and flesh, return you to your parents and family and your old home and friends, you would want that, wouldn’t you?” The skull replies: “Why would I throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human being again?” “It is comforting,” my friend said, “but I don’t believe it.”

The Taoist universe is an infinity of nested cycles of time, each revolving at a different pace, and those who are not mere mortals pertain to different cycles. Certain teachings take four hundred years to transmit from sage to student; others, four thousand; others, forty thousand. It is said that Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, spent eighty-one years in the womb.