Lady Li: Death and the maiden

I haven't written in a while due to various health complications. Then, when I do feel I can, I feel what I write isn't good enough, especially after the pause, so I make drawings instead. I'm illustrating the inner chapters of Zhuangzi, the 4th century text, in colored pencil (see below). It's been a while I've made non-digital art so it's exciting to do this. Lady Li is also a worthy topic to write briefly about.

The text in Zhuangzi goes like this:

Lady Li was a daughter of the border guard of Ai. When she was first captured and brought to Qin, she wept until tears drenched her collar. But when she got to the palace, sharing the king’s luxurious bed and feasting on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead don’t regret the way they used to cling to life? ‘If you dream of drinking wine, in the morning you will weep. If you dream of weeping, in the morning you will go out hunting. While dreaming you don’t know it’s a dream. You might even interpret a dream in your dream—and then you wake up and realize it was all a dream.—Zhuangzi, book 2, translation by Brooke Ziporyn

The text sits in the same chapter as the much more famous butterfly passage, and passages on Huizi asking about usefulness/uselessness. Like that more famous passage, it ends on dream skepticism, plus that you can have dreams in dreams.

I interpret it as follows: in Zhuangzi's culture, as in most cultures, death is bad. Even Christians, Mormons and other religious folk with an attractive afterlife, try to preserve life (here's a paper by Scott Hill that tries to explain why this would not be irrational). To me, the hesitance of people with strong positive afterlife beliefs to go there is the best evidence of Neil Van Leeuwen's theory that religious beliefs are a kind of pretend attitudes.

But Zhuangzi thinks you can't be sure of anything—skepticism is a major strand in the work (next to perspectivalism and viewpoint epistemology). So you can't be sure about the badness of death—one of the few certainties we think we have in life—either. Lady Li becomes happy (I found it so fun to think of all the delightful dishes she can sample).

When I read the Lady Li passage, as a cancer patient with poor prognosis, I felt very taken by it. I have read the Zhuangzi of course several times, in several translations. But somehow this story slipped by in previous readings. Now I feel the story gives a bit of hope.

I'm thinking of a further parallel: Lady Li may have been weeping for many reasons. For instance, she might fear the man who took her would not make her happy (very reasonable assumption), or that her life would take a turn for the worse. For me, the problem of death is loss of agency, loss of opportunity, loss of ability to be with people I care about. Maybe there's an afterlife where you have these things, which would mitigate the badness of death significantly. But as it stands it seems like your agency peters out slowly. If you are, say, a famous author or a beloved matriarch, it may do so slowly as people still remember your words. Eventually, your finitude meshes with the finitude of everything.

A final thought I had on this story: you cannot take it with you, but you can leave things behind. I do not care about taking things with me, but I care about having agency and to interact in some way with people I care about. This is perhaps why I wrote Friendship with the ancients, which envisages the possibility of doing this naturalistically (no ouija boards required). One has to be careful, though, not to try to “rule from beyond the grave.” I'm hesitant about, say, letters your loved ones can open at set times in their lives, e.g., when they turn twenty-one. I'm not saying it's bad to do this, but I'm saying it's not me.

I do like Lady Li as a story to illustrate our lack of knowledge about death, because she is being coerced. She was captured, not voluntarily married. But she then moved on nonetheless and had a great time. The Zhuangzi urges us to at least consider this for a moment as a real possibility, not some pretend belief we don't really act on. And that makes it really radical.