Sitting and Forgetting

Zuowang, sitting and forgetting, is one of the oldest named meditative practices in the Daoist tradition, its classical description found in the Zhuangzi, where the term appears in a passage attributed to Confucius's disciple Yan Hui, who describes to his teacher a progressive practice of letting go, first dropping awareness of the limbs and body, then dismissing structured perception and acquired knowledge, until the practitioner merges entirely with the Great Pervader, the Zhuangzi's term for the vast, unifying Dao underlying all things, a state the text presents as a genuine spiritual attainment rather than mere ordinary forgetfulness or inattention, the everyday meaning the words might otherwise suggest. The Zhuangzi's brief account gives zuowang no detailed technical method, describing instead the stages and the culminating state the practice moves toward, which has left later Daoist commentators and practitioners across the centuries since to develop their own fuller technical elaborations of how the practice's progressive letting go might actually be cultivated in sustained meditative sitting.