Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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No Place for Death to Enter

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No Place for Death to Enter

The second half of the chapter describes a person who cannot be harmed, and it is one of the passages that pulled this book toward the religious traditions that later grew around it.

One who is good at holding on to life travels without meeting a rhinoceros or a tiger, and enters a battle without armour. The rhinoceros finds nowhere to put its horn, the tiger nowhere to put its claws, and a weapon nowhere to put its point. The explanation given is not that he is protected but that in him there is no place for death.

The reasoning is spatial and it is consistent with the rest of the book. Death is described as needing somewhere to land, and the invulnerable person is invulnerable because he presents no target, in the same way that chapter forty-three describes what has no substance entering where there is no gap. What is absent is not danger but a surface for the danger to meet.

Read philosophically, that is a statement about attachment: the third group in the first half of the chapter died of holding life too thickly, and this figure holds it lightly and therefore offers nothing to be taken. Read literally, it is a claim about physical immunity, and the later Daoist religion, with its interest in transcending the ordinary limits of the body, had every reason to read it that way.

The chapter does not choose, and the Zhuangzi contains comparable passages about figures untouched by fire and water which are equally hard to pin down. Both readings are old, and the disagreement about which is meant is as old as the reception of the text.

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