The Camaldolese Institute
for East-West Dialogue

Through Detachment to Vision: Chuang Tzu and Meister Eckhart

by Joseph Wong, OSB Cam

Various people have compared Eckhart with Buddhism. My paper is an attempt at comparing Eckhart and Chuang Tzu, commonly considered the second patriarch of Taoism. The purpose of the comparison is to illustrate their similar views of the relation between emptiness/detachment and light/vision. The two terms of “detachment” and “vision” in the title of the paper stand for “purity of heart” and “contemplation” respectively. Though the texts of the Lao-tzu and of the Chuang-tzu have subsequently inspired different types of Taoist meditation, my paper does not deal with meditation practice, but with Chuang Tzu’s insight that true light or vision comes from emptying the mind. This insight is expressed in various chapters of the Chuang-tzu, but especially in chapter 6, “The Great Teacher.” My reflection on Chuang Tzu is mainly based on this chapter, together with chapter 2, “The Equality of Things.”

In “The Great Teacher,” Chuang Tzu gives descriptions of what he calls a “true person” or “sage” in great detail. A true person, he tells us, is one who does not mind having little, does not boast of his accomplishments, is not concerned with success or failure, not even with his own life or death. In short, a true person is one who, having obtained Tao, is wholly detached and utterly free. Toward the beginning of the chapter, Chuang Tzu makes a striking statement: “There must be the true person before there can be true knowledge.” By true knowledge Chuang Tzu means knowledge or vision of the Tao. In this chapter Chuang Tzu points out the concrete ways of becoming a true person and thus achieving true knowledge or enlightenment. He does so especially through the following two colloquies: “sitting in forgetfulness” and “seeing the One in the brightness of dawn.”

In the first dialogue, “forgetfulness” is explained as curbing the desires of the body and forgoing the use of the analytical mind. As a result of this self-emptying one attains the experience of being one with the Great Universal, the Tao. In the second dialogue, Nu-yu, a person who has attained Tao, teaches the journey of progressive detachment through disregarding worldly matters, material things, and finally one’s own life and death. Then, all of a sudden, the morning sun dawns in the empty, detached mind and it sees the One, or Tao, as present in the myriad things. Such vision abolishes the distinction among things as well as that of past and present. As a consequence, one enters into the realm beyond life and death, with a profound experience of unity with Tao and the universe.

When one turns to Eckhart, one finds the theme of “detachment” present in nearly all his writings. The classical place is of course the small treatise On Detachment. The German word Abgeschiedenheit means the state of being “cut off” and “away from” something. Rather than a physical or spatial distance, detachment indicates the inner freedom of the heart. In this treatise, Eckhart contends that detachment is the highest virtue which brings humans closest to God. The reason for this is because God himself is “immovable detachment,” which characterizes his metaphysical nature as well as defines his dealings with humans and the world. Hence, humans are brought into the greatest likeness to God through immovable detachment: “You should know that true detachment is nothing else but a mind that stands unmoved by all accidents of joy or sorrow, honor, shame or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. This immovable detachment brings a man into the greatest likeness to God.”

Just as in the Chuang-tzu emptiness leads to light and true vision, so also for Eckhart, detachment has a positive as well as negative aspect. The positive aspect of detachment is the manifestation of God’s image in humans or the “birth of the Son in the soul.” For this reason, The Nobleman of Eckhart should be viewed as a twin treatise of On Detachment. Eckhart employs the term “nobleman” for the “spirit” or “inner man” of the human person. He is convinced that the divine seed or God’s image is firmly planted or engraved in the depths of each human being, waiting to be set free and manifest itself. The “nobleman” is realized when a person with God’s grace is able to remove, through detachment, all obstacles and veils which cover up God’s image and allow that image to shine forth and become visible. The idea of the manifestation of the divine image in humans is also expressed through the metaphor of the birth of the Son in the soul, which constitutes a major theme in Eckhart’s vernacular sermons. Detachment is seen as essential in both cases. Rather than seeing the divine image or the Son of God in oneself, Eckhart is primarily concerned with becoming that image which is made manifest in us or becoming the Son who is born in the soul.

In spite of the great distances, geographical, temporal and philosophical, between Chuang Tzu and Eckhart, one finds a profound resonance in their wisdom teachings. The first parallel is between Chuang Tzu’s true person and Eckhart’s nobleman. Though a “true person” is a concrete person and a “nobleman” stands for the inner self, they both stress the quality of perfect detachment or inner freedom. Another parallel can be seen in the way they perceive the positive aspect of self-emptying or detachment. For Chuang Tzu, it leads to true vision or enlightenment in which one sees Tao as present in all things. For Eckhart, detachment frees a person and allows the deeply engraved divine image to shine forth in humans or the birth of the Son to take place in the soul. Moreover, for both of them, the result of enlightenment is not a total negation or rejection of people and things of the world. For Chuang Tzu, enlightenment leads to the vision of the unity and equality of all things which helps to foster communion, while overcoming discrimination and selfish clinging. For Eckhart, detachment brings about the realization of the divine image present in human persons and hence upholds human dignity. A detached mind also sees the unity and equality of all things as they were spoken by God in the one eternal Word and are rooted in God as the ground of their existence. This view at once affirms and relativizes all things in the world.

It only remains to point out a major difference between the two views. The chief emphasis of Chuang Tzu is the vision of an empty, detached mind, which sees Tao present in the myriad things and enjoys the experience of oneness with Tao and the universe. Eckhart, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with the emergence of the “nobleman” through the manifestation of the divine image hidden in humans. For Eckhart, vision is implied by and based on the emergent being as its self-luminosity.