Not too long ago, I was reading an article that mentioned Tucker Zimmerman’s recent death, and several musicians I admire and listen to regularly said he was their favorite folk artist. Naturally, I had to check out his music on Apple Music and ended up buying Zimmerman’s I Wonder if I Will Ever Come True. My favorite song on the album is:
When I like a song I usually search online and download the lyrics:
Once upon a time, a farmer sent his son
With a horse to graze upon the mountainside.
He fell asleep; when he awoke, the horse was gone.
Came back without it; the neighbour said:
“Oh, what bad luck!”
The farmer said:
“How do you know?” (2x)The very next day, the farmer sent his son
Back into the mountains to seek the runaway.
He found the horse and seven other wild ones.
He brought them home and the neighbour said:
“Oh, what good luck!”
The farmer said:
“How do you know?” (2x)On the very next day, the farmer sent his son
To the wild horses that needed to be tamed.
First one he climbed on, it threw him down to the ground.
It broke his arm; the neighbour said:
“Oh, what bad luck!”
The farmer said:
“How do you know?” (2x)The very next day, a war was declared,
And the army men came through the countryside
Looking for soldiers, but they couldn’t take anyone
With a broken arm; the neighbour said:
“Oh, what good luck!”
The farmer said:
“How do you know?” (2x)
“Oh, what good luck!”
The farmer said:
“How do you know?”
I’d never heard this song before, but the story seemed very familiar. I searched for a similar story through my two Chuang Tzu books but couldn’t find it there. At 84, I certainly don’t have a good enough memory to remember where I had originally encountered it, so I turned, once again, to ChatGPT which dutifully returned:
Tucker Zimmerman’s “Taoist Tale” is a retelling of the famous Chinese parable usually called “The Farmer and the Horse,” “The Old Man Who Lost His Horse,” or “The Story of the Taoist Farmer.”
With that information I was able to find this,
Sai Weng Shi Ma refers to a famous story from the Huai Nan Zi about how difficult it is to foresee the twists and turns that result in misfortune turning into fortune, and fortune leading to misfortune.
There once was an old man skilled in divination, who lived by the border of a hostile country,
One of his horses strayed into the foreign lands and did not return. The neighbors consoled him for his loss. But the old man said, “Why should I assume this is not a good thing?”
After several months, the horse came back from the land of the Xiongnu, accompanied by another fine horse! Everyone congratulated the old man (it appears he is fortunate indeed!) His family had a wealth of fine horses, and his son loved riding them.
Yet the old man said, “How can we be hastily conclude this is fortunate?”
One day, the son fell off the horse, and broke his leg, and again, everyone consoled the old man. But the father said, “Why should I hastily assume that this is an unfortunate event?”
One year later, a war began, and all able-bodied men took up arms and went to war. Of the men from his town, nine out of ten died. It was only because of the son’s broken leg, that he did not fight. The father and son were spared the greatest tragedy.
Therefore, misfortune begets fortune, and fortune begets misfortune. This goes on without end, and its depths can not be measured.
The farmer’s refusal to make a judgment in the first place is very close to the Taoist distrust of rigid distinctions—fortunate/unfortunate, success/failure, gain/loss. Events continue changing, so our judgment of them is based on an arbitrarily chosen stopping point. Zimmerman actually preserves that idea unusually well. He does not end by saying, “See, the broken arm was really a blessing.” The neighbor again calls it good luck, and the farmer again asks, “How do you know?
Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought made me recall this song. The song seemed to offer a clear example of “opening the hand of thought.” The problem is less the event itself than the mind immediately attaching a label to it—good, bad, fortunate, disastrous. Taoism says, in effect, that reality is still unfolding. Too often we judge events rather than just seeing them as they are.
