“Discussion on Making All Things Equal” begins not with a definition but with someone noticing a change.
Ziqi of the Southern Suburb sits leaning on a support, looking upward and breathing out. Something about him seems absent. His student, Yan Cheng Ziyou, asks what has happened. Can a body be like withered wood and a mind like dead ashes? The person sitting there now seems different from the one he knew before.
We need not turn that before into precisely yesterday. The student recognizes a difference without yet understanding it.
Ziqi welcomes the question. Just now, he says, I lost myself. Do you understand?
He does not immediately define the self that has been lost. He begins talking about wind.
Openings that were empty
The great earth breathes, and we call that breath wind. When it rises, countless hollows sound.
Some openings resemble noses, mouths, or other shapes. Some are deep, others shallow. Their voices differ too: cries, rushes, whistles, low responses. A little wind produces a small chorus, a stronger wind a larger one. When the wind passes, the hollows fall quiet.
The description is abundant, but the student has not forgotten the initial distinction. Human piping, he says, is the sound of bamboo instruments; the piping of earth is these openings. What, then, is the piping of heaven?
Ziqi answers with a difficult sentence about the many different sounds, each being itself and taking its own course. Who makes them sound as they do?
The wording has supported different interpretations. I want to follow one line through it: how does a sound come to happen? This is a route into the passage, not a claim that the passage is a riddle with only one permissible solution.
The sound belongs to more than one side
We hear a noise and readily call it the sound of wind. Yet wind passing through different openings produces different sounds. The shape of the hollow participates in what we hear.
Conversely, the hollow considered alone is not yet the sounding event. When the wind dies away, the previous cries and responses no longer continue.
This is not a physical law that wind itself can never produce sound. Nor is it a laboratory arrangement in which every opening experiences identical conditions. The story offers an image of a relationship. To ask how the sound occurs, attending to only one side is insufficient.
Carried into an account of human judgment, that image changes the question. I hear a remark or read a set of figures, and a conclusion arrives. What in that conclusion comes from the material? What comes from what I noticed, omitted, expected, or already feared?
The material is not unreal. Nor is everything determined by me. My participation simply tends to be less visible than the evidence I point toward.
The self that is lost
The phrase about losing oneself invites a beautiful explanation: a false self disappears and a true self remains.
That may be a possible interpretation. But the presence of two different Chinese first-person words cannot alone establish a strict philosophical division between two kinds of self. A reading needs more than a grammatical contrast to support it.
We can begin with what the scene does show. Ziqi still speaks. He recognizes the student and responds to a question. Losing himself therefore need not mean becoming a person without thought, action, or a voice of his own.
I understand it here as a loosening of something that ordinarily occupies the center. The familiar conviction that this is simply how things are no longer effortlessly represents the thing itself.
This does not erase memory, temperament, or experience. A single realization does not create a person untouched by history. It is more like suddenly noticing that the sting I attributed entirely to someone else's words also passed through expectations I brought to the encounter.
Noticing that does not automatically absolve the other person. It may keep my first reaction from becoming my final verdict before anything further can be heard.
One email, three sounds
An email says: “Let's confirm the timing.”
One recipient hears pressure. Another hears an offer to help. A third hears a superior expressing distrust. All three might be sincere. They may have different histories of work and remember different parts of the preceding conversation.
Sincerity does not guarantee accuracy, however. What the sender previously promised and what the present request concerns can still be checked. Some interpretations may fit the context better than others. Someone may have misunderstood.
If the story helps, it is not by certifying that everyone has an equally good point. It adds a step to the discussion: why did I first hear this meaning? What additional information might change it?
Sometimes we can simply ask the sender whether they are worried about insufficient time or want to know how far the work has progressed. Instead of continuing to speculate, we create something that can be clarified together.
People are not fixed hollows. We explain, supply missing context, and learn from responses. That difference must accompany the analogy rather than being erased by it.
The previous gourd is still here
In the preceding essay, Hui Shi judged a gourd useless because it failed as a container. We asked who had brought the measure of use into the scene.
The wind and hollows bring the question closer to the person judging. A familiar purpose participates in the conclusion, rather as the shape of an opening participates in its sound. The result feels like an announcement delivered by the object: useless.
This does not mean that everyone given Hui Shi's experiences would necessarily reach the same conclusion. A history is not a program from which every future sentence can be calculated. Nor does it mean the defects he observed were imaginary.
What needs restoring is the presence of the measure itself. It belongs to what is happening. It is not a referee outside the encounter, entitled to judge without explanation.
That applies to this essay too. I connect these stories because of questions I bring and details I emphasize. A reader who notices another detail has not necessarily failed to follow. They may be helping me hear something my own account left out.
Speech is not merely wind
A sentence soon afterward in the chapter deserves to sit beside the opening image: speech is not simply blowing air; speakers have something to say. The text then asks whether what is said has become settled.
We should therefore resist sliding from sounding hollows into the claim that opinions are only noises and nothing can be true or false.
What a person says still matters. Whether a claim has support, and whether it harms someone, cannot be passed over with a picturesque analogy.
When the same data produce different conclusions, we can examine sampling, definitions, omissions, and inference. Understanding how differences arise should help us judge more carefully, not release us from judging.
Nor does the silence after the wind imply that consequences vanish when an argument ends. A misread email may already have damaged trust. An assessment may already have closed an opportunity. Those effects are reasons to clarify sooner, not evidence that nothing outside our perspectives mattered.
The metaphor directs attention toward our participation. It does not swallow the world in which that participation has consequences.
Do not make perspective your final weapon
Two responses to this lesson are easy to learn and easy to misuse.
The first says that everyone has an angle, so further discussion is pointless. What withdraws first is often not prejudice but the opportunity to correct it.
The second is more confident. I know that people have perspectives, so I can explain everything you say as a product of yours. I no longer need to listen carefully because I believe I already possess the explanation of your speech.
This is not far from Hui Shi assigning Zhuangzi the motive of wanting his position. A principle intended to open inquiry has become a way to close it.
The harder action returns the observation to oneself. It does not require performing total uncertainty. It requires being able, while convinced, to identify what supports that conviction and what could change it.
Listening to another voice need not mean surrendering one's own. Sometimes it gives one's own voice something more definite and accountable to say.
The question can continue
Who makes them sound? Placed where the answer about heaven's piping should be, the question both invites an explanation and unsettles the expectation of finding a single director behind every voice.
We can discuss nature, the spontaneous course of things, or the different interpretations the passage has received. I do not want to pretend that Ziqi offers an empty question without philosophical content. Neither do I want to turn my preferred account into the final answer.
What remains useful to me is the hesitation before assigning a sound wholly to its most convenient source.
Reading this essay, you may have agreed with some sentences and resisted others. Those responses need not be canceled. They may contain precisely what the essay should answer. We can ask together what prompted them in the writing and what each of us brought through experience.
A hollow can wait for wind. A person can also question, check, reply, and change.
Through that exchange, perhaps we can retain a voice of our own without mistaking it for the whole wind.