Hùndùn: The God of Chaos Who Was Killed by Kindness

Hùndùn has no face.

He is the God of Chaos — not chaos in the sense of disorder, not chaos in the sense of destruction, but chaos in the original sense: the undifferentiated plenum, the state before anything has been separated out from anything else, the condition of the universe before the first distinction. He is also, in Zhuāngzǐ’s telling, the emperor of the central territory, the one who sits at the hub between the Emperor of the South and the Emperor of the North, and he is good to them. He is hospitable. When they visit, he treats them with the particular warmth of someone who has no agenda.

They appreciate this. They confer about how to repay him.

The Emperor of the South is named Shu — Swift. The Emperor of the North is named Hu — Sudden. They come and go quickly and decisively and with purpose. Hùndùn does neither. He does not go anywhere. He does not have the tools of purpose, because purpose requires the distinction between here and there, and Hùndùn has no such distinctions. He does not eat because eating requires a mouth, and eating also requires the distinction between food and non-food, which requires judgment, which requires the ability to tell one thing from another.

He has no ability to tell one thing from another. He is Chaos. He is whole.

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The two emperors discuss his kindness. They look at him — shapeless, faceless, without the seven apertures that all living beings have: the two eyes, the two ears, the two nostrils, the mouth. They think: he cannot see, he cannot hear, he cannot smell, he cannot eat. He cannot experience the world through any sense. We can give him this.

They begin to drill.

On the first day, they drill one hole. The texts do not say what they use. The texts say that Hùndùn is still alive on the first day.

Second hole. Third. Fourth. Fifth. Sixth. Hùndùn is alive on all these days, though the texts do not say what he experiences as the holes appear — whether he experiences anything, whether experience is something that can happen to Chaos before and after the seventh hole, whether the question makes sense.

On the seventh day, they drill the seventh hole.

Hùndùn dies.

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This is the last story in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi — the final word of the most demanding section of Taoist philosophy. Zhuāngzǐ does not explain it. He sets it there at the end of the seven inner chapters — seven chapters, seven holes — and stops.

The interpretation is not hidden. The two emperors kill Chaos by giving it the equipment for a structured existence. The holes that allow perception also create division — inside and outside, self and world, I who perceive and the things perceived. The face, once created, creates a perspective, and a perspective creates separation. Hùndùn, given the means to experience the world, can no longer be the whole world. He becomes part of it. And the part cannot survive what the whole was.

Zhuāngzǐ is not saying that all distinctions should be abolished — he works in distinctions, writes in distinctions, thinks in distinctions. He is saying that behind every distinction, enabling every distinction, is the undifferentiated state that the distinctions cannot survive. Every moment of structured consciousness is a small death of chaos. Every categorization is a kind hole drilled in the central emperor who was whole before we tried to help him.

The two emperors return to their respective directions. The center is empty. The Tao cannot be described because describing it is the seventh hole. The world that exists after the holes are all drilled is the world we live in, and it is not wrong, but it is not the whole of what there is. Hùndùn died on the seventh day. He is still at the center, dead, which is to say: still there, undivided, beneath the world that came after.