Riding the six breaths: free and easy wandering

The Zhuangzi opens with a fish so large that no one can say how large. It turns into a bird whose back spans thousands of li, a li being roughly half a kilometre. The bird gathers wind beneath its wings and rises toward the southern sea. A cicada and a little dove watch it go, and laugh. We fly up, they say, and sometimes cannot even reach the elm branch and drop back to the ground. Why would anyone go ninety thousand li to the south?

The book does not side with the laughter. It does not side against it either. Small creatures have small reach and large creatures have large reach, and each is where it is. Then comes the sentence the chapter is built toward. In our translation:

Suppose someone rode the true course of sky and earth, steered by the changes of the six breaths, and so wandered without limit. What would such a person have to wait for?

James Legge, in 1891, wrote of one who “mounts on (the ether of) heaven and earth in its normal operation” and “drives along the six elemental energies of the changing (seasons).” We prefer the plainer word breath for qi, because that is what the word first meant. The chapter’s title, xiāo yáo yóu, is usually rendered free and easy wandering.

The six breaths

Which six? The old lists name yin and yang, wind and rain, dark and bright. In other words, the weather, and the turning of day into night. To ride the six breaths is to go with all of it. Not only on fine days. Not only at the hour of your choosing. In Calgary the list includes a minus-twenty morning and a chinook afternoon.

Depending on nothing

The word translated “wait for” is dai (待). It means to wait on, to depend upon. The chapter goes through who depends on what. The little birds depend on the elm branch. The great bird depends on the wind. Even Liezi, who could ride the wind and come home after fifteen days, still depended on something, the text says: the wind.

The person at the centre of the sentence depends on nothing, and it is worth noticing how. They do not cut themselves off from the weather. They ride all of it. They need no special conditions, because every condition is something to ride. This is wu wei at its widest: not forcing the day to be other than it is.

In our method this is the third depth: hold your own. To be able, anywhere, in a few breaths, to come back to yourself. Not because the room is perfect, but because you no longer need the room to be.

Wandering

The Chinese word for wandering is you (游). It means to move without arriving, and it is the word behind our roaming practices. One is called Roam the ridge: five minutes of walking a ridge in the Rockies in your mind, where the view moves forward only as you breathe out. The breath is the wind, and you ride it.

Try a different kind of roaming too. Take a ten-minute walk with no destination. At each corner, choose by the weather: toward the light, or out of the wind. See whether you can enjoy it when the weather is not what you would have ordered.