When we read a book, we usually start from the beginning. Jumping straight to chapter seven below without understanding its context wouldn’t make much sense. Life often works in a similar way. Some people suggest treating each day as a fresh start, an opportunity to adjust our path, “to forget the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements in the future.” (Apologies to the Optimists—I used to be one too. Just ask Charlie Jerman.)
The chapter “Yang Chu” in “My Travels with Lieh Tzu” delves into questioning the status quo and re-evaluating what we accept as true or false, asking if truth and falsehood even matter.
It suggests that enjoyment in life shouldn’t be limited by moral conventions and what might conflict with our desires for a good reputation. Yang Chu is not a typical chapter in keeping with Lieh Tzu. It encouraged what is known as hedonism. The entry below is used to create a paradigm shift in looking at our attitudes and things that might appear as similar, but in a new, or different way.
Hedonism is a philosophy that prioritizes pleasure. It can also say that all human behavior is motivated by the desire to maximize pleasure and minimizing pain. As a form of egoism, it suggests that people only help others if they expect a personal benefit. It’s here that ego can inflict pain on oneself.
The ancients taught us that ignoring past mistakes leads to consequences and emphasized the importance of understanding context to make things right. 
Taoists, much like Confucians, emphasize moderation, acting as mediators who weigh every perspective against its counterpart steering clear of extremes.
A great deal of my own writing is focused on applying Taoist inner cultivation practices with Confucian self-cultivation.
It seems we all could use some mediation and moderation that sees both differences and similarities exist in all things found in nature. Especially what we make of our own actions and opinions.
The differences are what drive things to adapt and change, allowing us to eventually thrive. What remains true is that old ideas just like all things found in nature become old and brittle and cannot stand up against change.
Hard as we try, we cannot control outcomes yet to occur as there are no absolutes. What is considered right today might be seen as wrong tomorrow, as the circumstances that supported it could vanish. The opposite is also true and what is true today can change over time.
Unforeseen consequences, inherent in nature, often give rise to contradictions that grow in ways beyond our control or anyone else’s. But with human nature being what it is, there will always be someone claiming they were the ones who suffered or that the mistake harmed them the most. Life is rarely that straightforward.
Without our memories of success and failures history tells us that we are destined to repeat them until we learn what they are here to teach us. Sometimes failures especially feel as though they act this way.
My travels with Lieh Tzu / Interpolations along the Way
Chapter Seven – Yang Chu
107. Looking beyond one’s moment in time
If we acknowledge we are here only for an instant and in death know we are gone for only a moment, then is not the true course of action simply to follow one’s heart? To not thwart the spontaneity of our immediate desires. To have no thoughts or be seduced by the hopes of recognition or reputation and what comes to be expected by living with others.
Yang Chu says:
“A hundred years is the term of the longest life, but not one man in a thousand lives so long. If someone is lucky enough to live so long, infancy and senility take nearly half of it. Nights are lost in sleep, and the days are all wasted when we are awake taking up almost half the rest.
Pain and sickness, sorrow and toil, ruin and loss, anxiety and fear take all the rest. Of that which is left, if we tried to determine how long we are at ease and content, without the least care, it does not amount to the space of an hour.
If we know that our time is limited, then what can there be to live for? Can it be to dress in fine clothes and to eat the best food? To listen to music and enjoy the company of women?”
Yang Chu continued:
“What can be open to the whims of society be but to be checked by punishments and seduced by rewards, led forward by the hopes of reputation, driven back by the fear of the law. We compete against each other for an hour’s empty praise and scheme for glory that will outlive our death.
Even in solitude we comply with what we see others do, hear others say, and repent of what our own thoughts approve and regret. We are constantly striving for what we think we do not have, thereby losing the utmost enjoyment in the prime of our life. What kind of prison do we ourselves put ourselves into? How much different would it be than if we spent all our time in chains?
How is it that one becomes awakened to be able to see beyond what is real and unreal and begin to understand and appreciate what is? Is not the answer that anything of real importance lies within ourselves simply waiting to come forward?”
Yang Chu finishes by saying:
“Have not our ancestors and the sages of antiquity told us that in life we are here for a moment and in death are gone for only an instant. Therefore, they acted as their hearts prompted and did not rebel against their spontaneous desires; while life lasted, they did not refuse its pleasures, and so they were not seduced by the hope of reputation.
They roamed as their nature prompted and did not rebel against the desires common to all things; they did not prefer a reputation after death, and so punishment did not affect them. Whether they were reputed and praised more or less than others, whether their destined years were many or few, they did not take into account.”
Knowing all this, how can we care if we are praised now or hope for a reputation after death? How could accolades or punishments affect us? How could our destined years, they be many or few, then matter? Even though Yang Chu cannot fathom how one can be traveling from one lifetime to the next, only looking at the finality of death how can he not accept that it may not occur and say so? Always seen to be questioning convention, is not Yang Chu himself simply looking beyond his own hour of freedom and what may lie ahead? 6/30/95
Number one hundred seven of one hundred fifty-eight entries.
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