Q0289

Zhuangzi

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

Relying on the heavenly pattern, I strike into the large gaps, guide through the large openings, and follow what is inherently so.
Thinker Zhuangzi
School Daoism
Source Zhuangzi, Yangshengzhu
Theme Life
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Zhuangzi, Yangshengzhu, within the tradition of Daoism. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of life, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Zhuangzi's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Zhuangzi. (n.d.). Relying on the heavenly pattern, I strike into the large gaps, guide through the large openings, and follow what is inherently so. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0289

MLA: Zhuangzi. “Relying on the heavenly pattern, I strike into….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0289.

Chicago: Zhuangzi. “Relying on the heavenly pattern, I strike into….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0289.

Same thinker

More from Zhuangzi

  1. Therefore it is said: The consummate person has no self; the spiritual person has no merit; the sage has no name.
  2. My life has a limit, but knowledge has none. To pursue the limitless with the limited is perilous!
  3. When the springs dry up and fish are stranded together on land, they moisten one another with dampness and wet one another with foam — but better to forget one another in the rivers and lakes.
  4. Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly…He did not know whether Zhou had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly was dreaming it was Zhou.
  5. Better to forget one another in the rivers and lakes than to moisten one another with foam when stranded.

All quotations by Zhuangzi

Same theme

More on life

  1. The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
  2. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.
  3. Leisure without study is death — a tomb for a living man.
  4. A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.
  5. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Browse the life theme