Chapter 50

This chapter contains one of the best known numerical puzzles in the book, and the puzzle is entirely a matter of how two characters are read.

The phrase repeated three times can be taken as three out of ten, giving a distribution of the population into thirds: three in ten are companions of life, three in ten companions of death, and three in ten are people who, living, move toward the ground of death because they live life too thickly. On that reading a tenth is left over and unaccounted for, which some readers take to be the sage of the second half.

The same phrase can also be taken simply as thirteen, and an old commentarial line does exactly that, glossing the thirteen as parts of the body, the four limbs and the nine openings, so that the chapter is about the routes by which life and death enter a person rather than about proportions of a population.

Both readings are ancient, both are grammatically available, and the choice determines what kind of chapter this is: a piece of social observation or a piece of physiology. English versions have to pick, and the pick is usually invisible to a reader who has only one version.

The third group is the interesting one on either reading. These are not people who die of misfortune or violence. They are people who move toward death by the intensity of their attachment to living, which is the fault chapter fifty-five calls adding to life and calls ill omened, and which chapter seventy-five attributes to those above.

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.