The Cypress Tree in the Courtyard, and the Slack Rein
A Response to Chen Yan, with Reflections on the Boundary of "Method" and the Possibility of "Being-With"
After finishing the first three essays, I received a number of responses. Some came from fellow artists, who lingered over the paradox of “minimal intervention”; some from theorists, intrigued by the dialogue between “perceptual critique” and Foucault; others from friends who follow my work, who stopped at the passages about my grandfather's brush and ink, my grandmother's scissors, my father and the ox. I took all of these responses seriously, but most of them stayed within my own framework — they helped reinforce the house I had built, making its beams sturdier, its windows wider.
Only one person reinforced nothing at all.
After reading The Slack Rein: Attention and the Way of Being-With, he sent three short passages. None of the three was long — together they came to barely two hundred characters — and yet they made the house I had spent three essays constructing begin to shift at its very foundation.
This person is Chen Yan. He is not an artist, nor a theorist. He is a friend who has, for years, watched my creative work in silence — and that silent watching itself may come closer than any words to the state I have been trying to reach in Seeing Without Seeing. Precisely because of this, his criticism is one I cannot sidestep. He does not engage me “within the framework” — he stands outside it, points at the foundation, and asks: are you certain this is the right place?
I include his three passages here not as material I am “responding to,” but as an inseparable part of this response itself. They opened three windows. What follows is only my attempt to let the wind blow through.
Appended: Chen Yan's Original Critique
From the Xiang commentary to the Tai hexagram of the Yijing: “Nothing that has gone does not return — this is the meeting-place of heaven and earth.”[1]
1. If “perception” is taken to mean everything that can be meaningfully spoken, then “art” itself ceases to be “art” — what kind of “being-with” is this, exactly?
2. Compared with that transformation of a way of life which makes every question superfluous — think of “the cypress tree in the courtyard”[2] — “attention” can only be called a method, and a method crowds out every other method. “To have knowledge of one thing is necessarily to lack knowledge of another.”[3]
3. So, what matters is not the comparing of individual concepts and paradigms — if one has truly realized “form and emptiness are not two,” which is to say, has traced the way back to the source, one will see them all standing there, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. And what is thereby abandoned, or ended, is precisely one's own presence.
— Chen Yan, July 28, 2026, at Cloud-Wrapped Gulingshan
Chen Yan left these three passages after reading The Slack Rein. All three are so short they hardly seem like criticism at all — more like three nails, driven one by one through the house I had spent three essays building, straight through its foundation.
He is right. I agree with all of it.
But having agreed, I still want to say something more — not in my own defense. I only want this exchange to become a distinctive footnote to the entire “return” project. Sometimes the sharpest criticism does not come to tear a house down, but to open its windows. Chen Yan's three passages happen to open exactly three. They did not reinforce my house, but they let the wind in.
And once the wind is in, there is one more thing I need to do: stand inside the house that has been nailed through, and see which beams have truly come loose, and which nails are still lodged somewhere I had not noticed. What follows is a response to this criticism — and also an examination of that response itself.
I. Nothing That Has Gone Does Not Return, at the Meeting-Place of Heaven and Earth — Being-With Is a Threshold, Not a Oneness
Chen Yan opens by quoting the Image commentary to the Tai hexagram of the Yijing — nothing that has gone does not return, at the meeting-place of heaven and earth — and then poses his first question: if “perception” is taken to mean everything that can be meaningfully spoken, then “art” itself ceases to be “art” — what kind of “being-with” is this, exactly?
He offers no further explanation. He simply sets the line down, like a silent signpost.
Nothing that has gone does not return — what departs will, in the end, come back. This is not saying spring will return, or that someone who has left will come home. It is saying something more fundamental: going and returning are, in themselves, one and the same. The road that leads away from the origin, and the road that leads back to it, are the same road. And the meeting-place of heaven and earth — that “meeting-place” (jì) is a boundary, a threshold, the seam where heaven and earth touch. It is not heaven, not earth, but the gap between the two. Yin and yang converge there; going and returning happen there. True being-with does not reside in heaven, nor in earth, but in that threshold itself.
This gave me a new understanding of a scene I have written about again and again — the slack rein between my father and the ox.
My father is “heaven” — the one holding the rein, walking through the field. The ox is “earth” — head lowered, seeing only the mud beneath its feet, indifferent to direction. The rein is the “threshold.” It is neither heaven nor earth. It hangs there, slack, not there to command the ox. Its function is to let two beings, moving at entirely different paces, walk the same road, at the same slow rhythm, through an entire afternoon. It does not erase the difference between my father and the ox, and it does not “fuse” them into one. It simply holds exactly the right tension — tighten it by a degree, and the ox feels pain; loosen it by a degree, and the rein falls to the ground, becomes a meaningless length of hemp.
I don't know whether this state can be called “being-with.” But I know that my father and the ox never needed the word.
I have said, again and again, that the foundation of art lies in that “unable to tell” spring on my mother's back. And yet I have spent three essays, tens of thousands of characters, trying to say this “unable to tell.” I used Foucault's episteme to analyze seeing. I used Deleuze's percept to define encounter. I placed “form and emptiness are not two” alongside phenomenological bracketing, my father's rein alongside Heidegger's Dasein. Every one of these juxtapositions was an attempt to use the order of “what can be meaningfully spoken” to approach that which cannot be spoken at all.
This is, in itself, a paradox — I know it is a paradox; I have admitted, again and again in these essays, that it is one. But Chen Yan's question is not about whether I admit it — it is about whether I have truly reckoned with its depth. He is asking: when you fold even the “unable to tell” into the order of “speech,” have you, without noticing, let the word “perception” swell until it swallows everything? Has that “unable to tell” rainy day already, quietly, been replaced by your own theory?
I cannot defend myself here. I can only admit: yes, this risk exists. Every time I write down “form and emptiness are not two,” I move one step further away from form and emptiness being not two. Every time I define “perceptual critique,” I add one more veil of concept between perception and the thing perceived. This is not a failure of theory, but the fate of language itself — any speech about a “pre-linguistic” state must, in order to occur, use language, and is therefore destined to be a kind of betrayal.
And yet I still choose to keep writing. Not because I believe language can capture that rainy day, but because I believe language can serve as a finger pointing toward it. Chan Buddhism says: the finger that points at the moon is not the moon. My three essays are nothing more than that finger. Chen Yan's question reminds me: the finger has grown too long. The audience may end up staring only at the finger, forgetting to look at the moon. Even I myself, in the process of writing about the finger, may have gradually forgotten what the moon looks like.
I accept this reminder.
But I still believe the finger has its value. Not everyone grew up in that rainy day; not everyone's grandmother cut red paper flowers; not everyone's father let the rein hang slack while plowing. For those who never lived that “unable to tell” experience, the finger offers, at least, a direction — not an answer, only a direction.
If I stand before a wall thinking, “I want to be with this wall” — that very thought has already carried me away from the wall. True being-with happens precisely in the instant that thought disappears. Not “I am looking at the wall,” not “the wall is being looked at by me,” not even “we are together” — only, in that gap, seeing happened, being-with happened, and then it passed.
“What kind of 'being-with' is this, exactly?” Chen Yan asks. The most honest answer I can give right now is: I don't know. But this is not an evasion — it is the most honest starting point I can currently reach. That “being-with” may not live in the most precisely argued passages of my theory, but in the blank spaces I never got around to writing, or wrote and then deleted. In those afternoons of “feeling nothing,” when I put the camera down, having photographed nothing at all, and yet felt something pass through my body.
II. The Cypress Tree in the Courtyard — When the Question Itself Becomes Superfluous
Chen Yan's second passage, using the gong'an of “the cypress tree in the courtyard,” says the one sentence I find hardest to sidestep: compared with that transformation of a way of life which makes every question superfluous, “attention” can only be called a method, and a method crowds out every other method.
He is not saying my method is wrong. He is saying: method itself has a cost. He then quotes: “to have knowledge of one thing is necessarily to lack knowledge of another” — a line that cuts, like a blade, straight into the deepest fissure of my three essays.
Yes, I have been constructing a perceptual method of “letting the thing show itself”: suspend, gaze, purify, release. I believed this method was not adding anything, only stripping something away, and that it was therefore naturally closer to the wall itself than any other method. But Chen Yan lets me see: the moment it is named a “method,” it is destined to occupy a position of having been “chosen” — and a method that occupies a position necessarily crowds out every possibility outside it.
A person holding a rein in his hand — even if that rein is slack — still feels, in his palm, the rough texture of the rope. He knows what he is holding.
But the cypress tree in the courtyard needs no rein at all.
A monk asked Zhaozhou: “What is the meaning of the Patriarch's coming from the West?” Zhaozhou said: “The cypress tree in the courtyard.”[2] The monk pressed further; Zhaozhou only repeated the same answer. He was not answering — he was refusing the very premise of the question. Where is the meaning of the Patriarch's coming from the West a question that could ever be “answered”? It is like a flower swaying in the wind, like rain falling on a stream, like a cypress tree standing in a courtyard — it has always already been there; it is only the one asking who keeps believing the answer is hidden somewhere far away, still to be reached.
Did I ever say the same thing, standing before that grey wall? It seems I did not. I stood there for an hour, but the whole time, my hand still held that rein called “methodology.” I knew I was “gazing”; I knew I was “stripping away”; I knew I was doing something I myself had named “perceptual critique.” Perhaps that wall remained forever unenterable not because it was silent, but because I was trying too hard.
The cypress tree in the courtyard points in another direction entirely. It needs no attention, no purification, not even “letting the thing show itself.” The cypress does not display itself for anyone; it simply stands there. Those who see it do not see it because their eyes are sharp, but because every obstruction has already gone — not stripped away, but let go of. Zhaozhou did not teach anyone how to look at the cypress. He simply lived there, standing in the courtyard, together with the cypress.
This is what Chen Yan calls “that transformation of a way of life which makes every question superfluous”: not a set of actions that can be “performed,” but a state that requires no performing at all.
In The Slack Rein, I treated “attention” as the core condition that lets seeing continue. But Chen Yan points out: this is still a “method.” And method itself is a choice — to choose this is to exclude that. While focused on using “attention” to reach resonant communion, was I, without noticing, also screening out those possibilities of being-with that need no attention at all?
“The cypress tree in the courtyard” — Zhaozhou's answer is not a method. He did not teach the monk how to concentrate his attention, how to bracket concepts, how to gaze. He simply pointed toward the cypress tree in the courtyard. There was no “method” in that gesture — only direct presentation.
But I immediately find myself running into an even deeper wall. This wall is not “The Grey I Could Not Enter” — it is the paradox constituted by the five characters Zhaozhou spoke, “the cypress tree in the courtyard” itself: I know I cannot live as Zhaozhou lived, cannot make language entirely superfluous. He spoke those five words — and those five words were, themselves, a form, an “erecting of an image.” That extended finger, in itself, already demonstrates the necessity of some kind of “method.” Zhaozhou could point at the moon precisely because there was a monk who genuinely needed to be pointed toward it. This paradox is not something I can “solve.” It is something I can “inhabit.”
And yet, if I stop here, I would too easily let slip the sharpest edge of Chen Yan's criticism. When he quotes “to have knowledge of one thing is necessarily to lack knowledge of another,” he is not saying “method is a necessary evil, and therefore forgivable” — he is saying “the cost of method is real, and you need to face it directly.”
The moment I chose “perceptual critique” as my method, I did, in fact, screen out certain possibilities that depend on no method at all. What might those be? They are: my grandmother, having finished cutting a paper window-flower, placing the scissors back in her sewing basket, without feeling that this act of “cutting” needs to be remembered. My father, having finished plowing a furrow, squatting on the field ridge to eat his porridge, without feeling that this act of “plowing” needs to be interpreted. That child lying against his mother's back — he needs no method, no theory, not even the noun “being-with.” He is already being-with.
These possibilities, crowded out by my method, may be closer to that rainy day than the entire system I have built. I cannot have both at once. Every “knowing” is, at the same time, a cloth draped over some “not-knowing.” Every word I speak drops a stone into a silent lake.
But facing this cost directly is, in itself, already a form of clarity.
And yet there is a deeper question here that I cannot sidestep — because the edge of Chen Yan's criticism rests precisely here too: when I fold “facing the cost directly” into methodological self-awareness, does this “clarity” itself become a new, higher-order method? “I know method crowds certain things out, so I stay vigilant” — is this “staying vigilant” still the presence of “I”? Might it become one more way for methodology to update and renew itself, rather than a true letting-go?
I cannot give a clean answer. Every time I try to stand outside “method” to examine “method,” that very act of examining pulls me back into the position of “the one who has a method.” It is like a receding parallax: I try to see my own seeing, but that “seeing my own seeing” itself becomes a new blind spot. This is not a problem that can be solved once and for all. It is an illusion that must be recognized again and again — like a screen continually regenerating itself, growing one degree more transparent each time I recognize it.
Between method and the abandonment of method, between the rein and the letting-go of the rein — this zone, perhaps, is exactly where the Returner ought to remain. Chen Yan is not asking me to give up method. He is only telling me: do not grip it so tightly. The cypress tree in the courtyard is not some higher method beyond method — it is what one sees, looking back, once method has been used up.
And I am willing to remain in that gap between “used up” and “seeing.” Continuing to use method, but no longer believing method can arrive on my behalf. Continuing to speak, but no longer believing language can hold anything in place for me.
III. They All Stand Side by Side There — What Is Ended Is One's Own Presence
The third passage is the lightest, and also the heaviest. Chen Yan says: if one has truly realized “form and emptiness are not two,” which is to say, has traced the way back to the source, one will see them all standing there, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. And what is thereby abandoned, or ended, is precisely one's own presence.
Reading this, I was sitting in my studio. Outside the window, the usual July afternoon at Jialiangshan — the tree canopy hanging low, an occasional wind coming down from the valley, wrinkling the surface of the lake behind the house, then slowly settling flat again. I don't know why, but I suddenly thought of my grandfather's study — that place where he spread out coarse paper, ground his ink, and copied geomantic manuscripts by hand.
While my grandfather was alive, I never once asked him: “Grandfather, are you copying these books to pass them on to someone?” He never seemed to say these books had any “purpose,” either. He simply copied, and once copied, set them down. If someone came to borrow one, he handed it over. If no one came, the books lay quietly in the drawer, slowly yellowed by mothballs and damp.
I think now: perhaps my grandfather never once thought these books needed to “express” something, “prove” something, “enter into” anything. He simply, in that side room of the old house called Chaoyang Hall, copied out, page by page, the characters that were his to copy in this life. He did not know what art was, what return was, what perceptual critique was — he did not need to know. He was, from the start, the kind of person who has no need of “return.”
And what of me? I wrote three essays. I named myself “the Returner.” I carefully distinguished my own path from Kandinsky's abstraction, Duchamp's readymade, Mono-ha's philosophy of thingness. I spent so much energy explaining “who I am” and “who I am not.” All of this effort was sincere, and necessary. But Chen Yan's line lets me see: all of this sincere, necessary effort ultimately stands on the very same source — that “I.” That “I” needs to be recognized, needs to be established, needs to occupy a position — however small, however marginal — within art history. Every subtraction that “I” performs is, in the end, still a subtraction that proceeds from “I.”
And true “form and emptiness are not two” is letting go of “I” and “subtraction” together.
I suddenly feel that all this work I have done may only be so that, one day, I might do what my grandfather did after copying a book no one would ever read — close the cover, set the brush back on its rest — and need to say nothing more, need to prove nothing more, only, in that gesture, become one among all the things already there.
That gesture need not be described. Need not be given meaning. My grandfather closes the cover. The brush rests on its stand. Light from the wooden lattice window falls into the study, onto those manuscripts that will never be read. He never thought about whether these manuscripts would be seen. He simply finished copying, closed the book, and walked away. The chair, left empty, was slowly filled by the afternoon light.
Chen Yan says all my concepts and paradigms stand “shoulder to shoulder, side by side.” He is not belittling this work — he is saying: they have completed their task, and then made room, for the thing that truly matters — the position vacated by that absent, abandoned, ended “I.” That position, perhaps, is the very thing I have been calling “the origin,” all along.
They — Foucault, Crary, Deleuze, Bataille, Levinas, Stiegler, Zhuangzi, Heidegger. And my grandfather's compass, my grandmother's scissors, my father's rein, my mother's hands. All of these, I spent three essays comparing, distinguishing, juxtaposing, trying to find the tensions and dialogues, the fissures and sutures, between them. But if one truly traces the way back to the source — that rainy day on my mother's back, that “unable to tell” primordial experience — these concepts and paradigms are no longer two opposing poles, no longer a fissure needing to be sutured. They are different faces of the same mountain range. They set out from different foothills, and finally point toward the same peak. They need no “unifying,” because they were never truly separate.
And I — the “I” who has been comparing, distinguishing, juxtaposing — have no position at the source. He will stand there, watching them line up side by side, and then turn and walk away. Not because he has negated them, but because he finally no longer needs them.
But there is an honesty here I cannot sidestep: the words I am writing at this very moment — “letting go of 'I' and 'subtraction' together” — still flow from the pen of “I.” I cannot use a non-attached “I” to declare the end of “I.” This is precisely the sharpest edge of Chen Yan's criticism: he lets me see clearly that even as I speak of “no-self,” that very speaking is still the presence of “self.”
Even the word “let go” needs to be let go of. I have written “let go,” “abandoned,” “ended” again and again — even as these words gain their emotional force, are they also, secretly, becoming a new form of grasping? When “letting go” is given such profound beauty and meaning, have I quietly taken hold of its shadow? Chan Buddhism says: let go, and also let go of the letting-go — release even the thought of “release.” All I can do now is admit: I may not have reached that point yet. I am still circling at the edge of “letting go,” still writing “letting go” into sentences, still searching for the right rhythm for those sentences. But at least I can recognize this fact: I am circling.
“What is abandoned, or ended, is precisely one's own presence” — this line is the deepest cut, and the greatest liberation. That “I” — the “I” who wants to return, who wants resonant communion, who wants his own work to be understood, recorded, acknowledged — he is indeed the last thing that needs to be let go of.
Isn't this exactly the “I have lost myself” I keep quoting?[4] Zhuangzi says “I have lost myself” — not annihilating oneself, but letting that stubborn, attachment-laden “I” step off the stage, for a time. But while writing these essays, did that “I” truly step off the stage? Or did he simply change into a more exquisite set of clothes?
Chen Yan's criticism lets me see one thing clearly: the true endpoint of return is not returning to that child on his mother's back — it is letting the “I” who wants to “go back” also exhale, no longer needing to “go back” at all. That child lying against his mother's back does not know what “return” is. He is simply there, together with the spring. He needs no method, no theory, no “perceptual critique” in any sense of the term. He does not even know the name “being-with.” He is simply there.
And I, having walked so far a road, having written so many words, find that what I must finally return to is nothing more than that “simply being there.”
On the old table in my family home sit my grandfather's compass and a gospel tract my grandmother brought home from church. Wind blows in through the door; the tract's corner lifts and settles; the compass needle does not move at all. No one ever told me this was “coexistence”; still less did anyone call it “contradiction.” It simply sat there like that — the way my grandfather and grandmother lived together, under the same roof, for decades. Foucault and Heidegger, Zhuangzi and Harman, phenomenological bracketing and form-and-emptiness-are-not-two — they, too, can stand side by side on that same table. The wind can stir the pages, and the needle can remain perfectly still.
And the one who placed them all together there need not stand there himself. He can turn, walk out of the study, and walk into the rain.
I have not yet reached that point. But Chen Yan's criticism has let me see clearly the direction of the next step.
IV. Two Reins
Chen Yan's criticism lets me see that I am, in fact, holding two reins in my hand.
One is the rein between my father and the ox — slack, almost imperceptible, letting two different beings walk the same road, each at its own pace, through the same afternoon. This is the rein of being-with.
The other is the one I added myself — the rein of theory, of method, of perceptual critique. It is the condition I use to let seeing continue. Without it, a person trained by algorithms to linger only three seconds might not survive even the first ten.
Chen Yan has not come to cut either rein. He is only telling me: one is enough.
But perhaps even this needs softening. Not “one is enough” — that would only become a new standard — but rather: when I no longer need the other one, it will loosen on its own. This is not something that needs to be “achieved.” It is a process that can simply be let go, to unfold as it will.
And when I am truly leading the ox forward with only that one slack rein — when I no longer need “perceptual critique” to prove what I am doing — that child lying against his mother's back may, in fact, not be far away at all. He is not at the end of the road. He is at the edge of it. He has been there all along, from beginning to end. It is only I who keep circling.
The rein was never a “method.” The rein is the threshold itself — the seam where heaven and earth meet, the gap where yin and yang converge. It hangs slack between my father and the ox, favoring neither heaven nor earth. It holds two different paces in tension, on the same road — neither fusing them, nor separating them. The road is precisely what gets walked out, step by step, within that tension.
My father said “the road comes from walking” — which road did he walk onto? This very threshold. No presupposition, no choice — walk onto it, and the road unfolds beneath your feet. And that road was never at either end — it exists only in the gap the rein maintains.
Chen Yan, you are right. I am, indeed, taking the long way round. That child lying against his mother's back needs no Foucault, no Deleuze, no “four-step method of perceptual critique.” He is already within being-with. And I, having written three essays, having built a precise, self-consistent, respectable edifice of discourse, may, precisely because of it, be drifting further and further from that rainy day.
But I cannot promise myself I will stop taking the long way round. For a middle-aged man who has already left that rainy day, who has already spent half a lifetime steeped in concept and language, “not taking the long way round” may no longer be a possibility at all. The only thing I can do is carry the full weight of half a lifetime, the full sediment of concept, the full exhaustion of every roundabout path — and still stand before that wall. Not as one who has attained enlightenment, not as one in spiritual practice, but simply as someone who knows he is taking the long way round, and still chooses to walk it.
Taking the long way round may not be an obstacle to arrival. Taking the long way round may be arrival itself. Or rather: taking the long way round is my own threshold — I am not at the end that belongs to heaven (pure being-with, needing no method), nor at the end that belongs to earth (an operation entirely governed by method). I am only in the gap between the two, still walking. I cannot pretend I can, like my grandmother, make a single cut of the scissors without a single thought. I cannot pretend I can, like Zhaozhou, sever every entanglement with just five words. I am exactly the person who needs method, who needs speech, who needs to circle back again and again. This is not a flaw that needs to be overcome. It is the condition I have been given.
Admitting this condition comes closer to honesty than longing for a state that needs no method at all.
So, Chen Yan, all I can tell you is this: I will keep standing before that wall, keep pressing the shutter, keep writing these words. Not because I believe these acts will let me “arrive,” but because they are the only way I know to draw near that rainy day.
The cypress tree in the courtyard. The rein is still held in my hand — but I no longer feel that I need to be holding it.
But this sentence — “I no longer feel that I need to be holding it” — even as I write it, a voice in me is asking: is this true? Or am I only writing the state I hope to reach? I answer honestly: I don't know. Sometimes, for an instant, it truly does feel as though I don't need to hold it. But more often, I am still the one holding the rein, feeling the rough texture of the rope in my palm. This back-and-forth between the two states may be the most real “threshold” I am able to reach.
Conclusion
Chen Yan, your criticism is not a negation of my three essays — it is their deepest completion. You said, on my behalf, the thing I had always wanted to say and could never quite say: all of this writing is, in the end, meant to be let go of. But “meant to be let go of” is, itself, a kind of grasping — it turns “letting go” into the purpose of the writing, into a reward that should follow a long labor of composition. Perhaps it is not “meant to be let go of.” Perhaps it is only this: the writing is finished, and so the brush should be set down. Like my grandfather closing the cover — no reason needed.
“The road comes from walking” — when my father spoke these four words, he did not know what “perceptual critique” was, or “readymade abstraction.” He had simply walked a lifetime of roads, and then handed this sentence to me. My three essays have been nothing more than a commentary on that sentence. But the work of commentary, too, should come to a pause.
The road that must be walked will still be walked. What must be let go of will, in the end, be let go of.
That rein hangs slack, between heaven and earth. Not heaven, not earth — the gap that lets two different beings walk the same road through the same afternoon.
The road comes from walking.
— Shuguang, July 31, 2026, at Jialiangshan
Translator's Notes
[1] Yijing, Xòng guà (泰卦, the “Peace”/“Great Progress” hexagram), Xiàng zhuàn (象传, “Image Commentary”): 无往不复，天地际也. Translated here directly from the source.
[2] Zhaozhou's “cypress tree in the courtyard” (庭前柏树子) is Case 37 of the Wuménguan (无门关, “The Gateless Gate”), where the question posed is “What is the meaning of the Patriarch's coming from the West?” (如何是祖师西来意) — see the established glossary entry. A separate essay in this series (Essay Six) quotes the same answer paired with a different question (“What is the Buddha?”), which is not the standard pairing for this particular gong'an in Chan literature (that question is more commonly answered elsewhere with “three pounds of flax,” 麻三斤). The artist has confirmed the version given here — paired with “the meaning of the Patriarch's coming from the West” — as the intended and textually correct pairing, and Essay Six has been revised to match.
[3] 夫有所知，则有所不知： a classical formulation in the spirit of the Zhuangzi's epistemological skepticism (cf. the “Qiwulun” chapter's meditations on the limits of knowledge), translated here directly rather than via any single existing published rendering.
[4] Zhuangzi's “I have lost myself” (吾丧我) appears in the “Discourse on Making All Things Equal” (齐物论) chapter — see the established glossary entry and its use in Essays Four and Five.