The usefulness of uselessness

The Large Tree

Master Hui says to Master Chuang:

I have a large tree

that people call holy.

It’s trunk bulges and bends and doesn’t fit the plumb line.

Its branches twist and curl and don’t fur the square.

Though it stands by the road for all to see,

carpenters pass it by indifferently.

Now your words are large and useless,

Everyone alike ignores them.

Master Chuang says:

… Now you have this large tree and lament that it’s useless.

Why not plant it in the No Why’s Countryside, the Vast Nothing Wilderness,

and putter about in non-striving by its side,

and wonder, amiable and aloof, in sleep beneath its canopy?

It hasn’t died young, felled by axes.

No one cares to harm it.

Lacking anything that can be put to use,

why would it have tormentors?

Useful philosophies are chopped down, cut up, and built into perversions of the original tree by goal-oriented folk who want to control others. Look what …Christians have done with Jesus’ teachings… And what Hitler did with Nietzsche’s philosophy.

-- Christopher Tricker, The Cicada and the Bird (The Usefulness of a Useless Philosophy)

translation of Chuang Tzu