[1] This is similar to the conversation in 1:05. There, Shoulder-Self has been listening to Jie Yu, the madman of Chu who lectured Confucius in Analects 18.5. Here, Nervous Magpie has been talking with his teacher, identified as Confucius himself on the strength of the reference in the next paragraph, who shares with him some 孟浪之言 "wild talk." The fact that he describes it as "wild talk" suggests that he does not agree. Is he perhaps relating what he heard from Jie Yu? On the other hand, in the next paragraph Long Desk offers some 妄言 "crazy talk" of his own, implying that someone can mean something and regard it as deviant at the same time. This ambiguity is consistent with the idea that characters in Zhuangzi, particularly Confucius, do not necessarily stand for fixed positions but represent people learning and changing: what strikes them as wild and crazy at first later becomes their own view. See character development.
The description of wise people here, in particular as 'saying nothing while they say something' and vice versa, strikes me as precisely the ideal of disappearing that we saw Zhuangzi aspiring to in 1:02 and as an apt description of what get described as "goblet words" in 8:11, filling and emptying.
[2] I wonder if "getting ahead of yourself" is like leaving for Yue today and arriving there yesterday or making the made-up mind your teacher (2:04); that is, assuming we know what we are trying to find out. Long Desk's reply is that, when people are not ready for an idea, they may reject it out of hand or they may embrace it without understanding it. I fear I have fallen into the latter category. That said, I am disinclined to conjecture about Long Desk's crazy words except to note that, were one to travel alongside the sun, it would never set.
[3] Li Ji was a member of the
non-Chinese Rong people living to the north and west of China, hence a “barbarian.”
She was traded in a hostage-swap to Duke Xian of Jin (r. 676–651 B.C.). At first, still looking at
it from the point of view of a country girl away from home, the story seemed to her like a
tragedy. Later, having redefined herself as a queen, it was the best thing that ever
happened to her. The significance of the events depends on how she understands
her own identity. To Lady Li, the story has a happy
ending and she is the hero. Zhuangzi’s readers, however, would have known that once she became the
Duke’s concubine, she estranged him from his first wife and legitimate heirs,
put her own son on the throne, and wreaked havoc in the kingdom, initiating the
period of violence known as 戰國, the Warring States. For them,
the story is a catastrophe and she is a monster. For us, the story is a puzzle
because she is someone most of us have never heard of. Thus, not only for her
in the story, but also for us reading it, the significance of the events for us
depends on our self-understood identities.
How does this fit with what he was just saying in the previous paragraph? My tentative guess is that this self-questioning and subsequent confusion is the method for 'unifying things in complete simplicity.'
[4] The Chinese could be read as either "greater" or "greatest awakening." Many commentators have read it the latter way, as referring to an ultimate enlightenment that will finally put to rest the question of whether we are dreaming. As attractive as that reading might be, I find it incompatible with the logic of the argument since, even if such a state existed, how could we ever know if we had reached it? "Greater" leaves open the less satisfying but more realistic reading that we keep thinking that 'now we finally understand!' without ever being sure that we do.
"What we encounter every morning and evening" could mean that the ten-thousand years will pass like a single day--"in the blink of an eye"--or it could mean that the certainty of the millennial sage is indistinguishable from the certainty you and I feel on a daily basis.
[5] It may be worth comparing "heavenly relativity" to Royal Relativity" in the previous section. Are they the same or contrasts? As in 2:11, it is worth paying close attention to the argument here despite the comedy. Zhuangzi carefully rules out two possibilities that people normally think of as alternatives: saying either that everyone is right or that no one is. Though the original disputants disagreed about who was right, they agreed that one was right and the other wrong, so introducing these new positions now only makes it worse, not better. The connection to the preceding discussion is loose. It appears to be therapeutic argument designed not to prove that there is no right answer but to provoke despair at the possibility of finding it, thus 'unifying things in complete simplicity' by default.
[a] The sentences in this last paragraph are clearly out of order in the traditional text, with "What do I mean by 'harmonize them by means of heaven’s relativity'?" coming before the reference to heaven's relativity. I follow Graham's rearrangement (Roth 16, Graham 60).