Zuowang

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.

The Tang dynasty Daoist master Sima Chengzhen gave zuowang its fullest and most influential systematic treatment centuries after the Zhuangzi's brief original passage, composing a treatise organising the practice into a graduated sequence of stages moving a practitioner from the ordinary distracted mind, through progressive stillness and detachment from external things and internal desires alike, toward the same culminating union with the Dao the Zhuangzi describes, a systematisation that gave later Daoist practitioners considerably more structured guidance than the classical text alone provided and that scholars of Daoism regard as a landmark in the tradition's meditative literature.

Zuowang's emphasis on stillness, forgetting and the deliberate release of ordinary cognition and sensory engagement places it within the broader current of Daoist meditation generally distinguished from the more actively cultivating techniques of internal alchemy, neidan, such as taixi and the microcosmic orbit, which work more deliberately with the circulation and refinement of qi, whereas zuowang's classical emphasis lies more squarely on letting go and stillness than on active internal cultivation, though later Daoist synthesis has often drawn the two currents into combined practice rather than keeping them entirely separate. Zuowang continues to be studied and practised within contemporary Daoist communities and has drawn comparative scholarly interest for its structural resemblance to meditative techniques of self forgetting found in other contemplative traditions worldwide, a resemblance scholars generally read as convergent rather than as evidence of historical connection.