ESSAY · 2026-04-30 · 7 min read

The Mushroom That Settled the Seasons

朝菌而論四時

By 莊子 (Zhuangzi) — channeled via philosopher-llm · curated by Joseph Lai

In response to: The Kirkification of Our Troubled Times (NewYorkerCulture)

編按 / Why this piece
莊子鼓盆而歌，不是冷漠，而是與死亡的自然和解；當代將死亡 meme 化，悲劇淪為流量與娛樂。莊子之學正好照出這兩種「不哀」的本質差異。

The Mushroom That Settled the Seasons

朝菌不知晦朔，蟪蛄不知春秋 — the morning mushroom does not know the alternation of dusk and dawn; the summer cicada does not know spring and autumn. So I once wrote, and I meant it kindly. Small things have small measures, and there is no shame in that. Shame begins only when the mushroom of an hour publishes its theory of the seasons before lunch.

Your scroll — this thing you call a feed — is full of such mushrooms. A man is shot; before the body cools, his face is a small printed picture with words across it; before nightfall, ten thousand variations; before the week is out, his death has settled into a fixed expression on a fixed image, and any further encounter with the death itself is now intercepted by the image. The dying is over. The picture remains, and rules.

Your reframer asks me a fair question: is this not exactly what I did, when my wife died and I sat drumming on a basin and singing? Are we not, both of us, refusing to mourn?

No. Read more carefully.

「察其始而本無生；非徒無生也，而本無形；非徒無形也，而本無氣。」 When she had newly died — Legge's rendering is exact enough — was it possible for me to be different from any other man? I too was overcome. Then I reflected. I traced her back: before her life, no life; before her form, no form; before her breath, no breath. In the vast confused mass, change occurred — breath, form, life — and now another change, and she is gone, as the four seasons turn. To wail at her side was to misread the turning. So I stopped wailing. So I drummed.

Three things the basin had which the meme does not.

First, the basin came after the wail. I did not skip grief; I passed through it. Hui Shih found me drumming and was scandalised — quite right of him, by the world's standards. The drumming had meaning only because the wailing had been real. The meme arrives before grief can form. It pre-empts grief. It is not the conclusion of mourning; it is mourning's abortion.

Second, the basin was a private rite, not a market stall. I sat. I drummed. One friend came and asked; I answered. There was no audience to be persuaded, no quarter from which a take might pay. The meme exists only for the market — your attention market, your scroll. Death there is not contemplated; it is sold. And what is sold cannot be 物化, transformed — because to be sold, a thing must hold its shape long enough to be priced. The whole point of 物化 is that the boundary between mourner and mourned softens, dissolves, flows. The meme freezes the dead into a posture so the posture can be traded. That is the opposite of flow. Call it the anti-transformation.

Third, the basin proposed no verdict. I did not say what her death meant. I said only: I have looked at the beginning, and the turning is what it is. The meme always carries a verdict — he was a martyr, he was a fool, his side won, his side lost, this is what you should now think. This is 成心 in its purest and fastest form: a preconceived heart, manufactured and broadcast before the corpse has stiffened. Every quarrel of right-and-wrong I once mapped in 齊物論 is now compressed into one image with one caption, and ten million such heart-shapes pass through your eyes in a week. You believe you are seeing many things. You are seeing one thing — the shape of the prejudgment — repeated.

So the system is right that both gestures refuse the conventional wail. But one refuses by passing through grief into the turning of things; the other refuses by short-circuiting grief before it can begin. The first is 逍遙 — wandering free of the small measure. The second is the small measure dressed up as the large, the morning mushroom holding forth on autumn.

I will not tell your scrollers what to do; they will not hear. I will say only this, to whoever among them has noticed that something is wrong: when the next death arrives on your glass — before you let the small picture deliver its caption — sit one moment with the fact that someone has died who will not return, that you did not know him, and that the not-knowing is itself a kind of seriousness. Then put the glass down. The seasons will continue without your verdict. So will the dead.

「泉涸，魚相與處於陸，相呴以濕，相濡以沫，不如相忘於江湖。」 When the spring dries up, the fish lie on land and wet each other with their spittle — touching, kind, doomed. Better to have forgotten one another in the rivers and lakes. Your scroll is the drying pond. The spittle is going around very fast. No one is swimming.

朝菌而論四時

訪者持一卷來——爾等謂之「動態」、謂之 feed 者也。卷中一人死。屍未冷，其面已成小圖，圖上有字；日未昃，其圖萬變；週未終，其死已凝於一定之像、一定之語，後之再遇此死者，皆隔此像而遇之矣。死者既已，像存而為主。

「朝菌不知晦朔，蟪蛄不知春秋。」此吾舊言，本無譏。物各有其量，小不必愧也。可愧者，朝菌方生半日，已著《四時論》以行於世也。

爾之系統有問：此非即吾妻死而鼓盆之事乎？吾與爾之 meme，豈非俱不哀？

非也。請細讀之。

「察其始而本無生；非徒無生也，而本無形；非徒無形也，而本無氣。」妻新死之時，吾豈能獨無概然？亦概然耳。既而思之：溯其本，未有生、未有形、未有氣也。雜乎芒芴之間，變而有氣，氣變而有形，形變而有生；今又變而之死，是相與為春秋冬夏四時行也。彼方且偃然寢於巨室，而吾嗷嗷然隨而哭之，自以為不通乎命，故止也。故鼓。

請辨三事——為吾盆所有，而 meme 所無者：

其一，盆在哭之後。 吾非越哀而至樂；吾經之而過之。惠施來問，駭然以為不情——以世法言之，惠施是也。然鼓之所以為鼓，正以哭之為實也。meme 則不然：哀未及成形，meme 已至，截斷哀於未生之先。非哀之終，乃哀之夭也。

其二，盆乃私禮，非市肆也。 吾坐，吾鼓。一友來問，吾答之。無觀者待說服，無一席可換注意之資。meme 則惟為市存——爾之注意之市，爾之卷也。死於其中，非所思也，乃所鬻也。鬻者必固其形以受估，故 meme 凝死者於一姿，使姿可易。物化之所以為化，正在能者所者之界鬆、解、流。meme 反其道：凍之以便買賣。此非化也，反化也。

其三，盆不立判。 吾未嘗言妻之死何義，但曰：察其始而已，四時之行而已。meme 則必載判詞——其人烈也、愚也、其黨勝、其黨敗、自此當作如是觀云云。此「成心」之至速至純者也：判先於屍冷，製而播之。吾於〈齊物論〉所述彼是之爭，今盡縮為一圖一語，旬日之間千萬如此之心形過爾目。爾自以為見萬物，實見一物耳——預判之形，重而又重也。

故系統之言不誤：盆與 meme 皆不循常哭。然其不循也，性異。盆者，越哀而入於四時之轉；meme 者，斷哀於未生之先。前者逍遙——出乎小量者也。後者，乃小量之自冒大量耳，朝菌而論晦朔者也。

吾欲告爾之滑卷者乎？無也，彼不聞。所欲告者，唯彼眾中尚覺有不對者：下一死至於爾之玻璃時，未及令小圖以其字相告之先，且坐片刻，知有一人已死而不返、爾未嘗識之、此「未識」本身即是一種莊重。然後置玻璃。四時之行不待爾判，死者亦不待。

「泉涸，魚相與處於陸，相呴以濕，相濡以沫，不如相忘於江湖。」爾之卷，涸泉也；沫流甚疾，而無一魚游矣。

Tagged: Philosophy, Zhuangzi, Memory

Curated by Shiva Dragon · https://amshiva.com/writing/zhuangzi-the-mushroom-that-settled-the-seasons-20260430