Why “There Is No Ox”

In the Zhuangzi there is a cook, Ding, who carves an ox for his lord. His knife moves through the carcass like music. When the lord praises his skill, Ding says it is not skill he cares about but the Way. When he began, all he could see was the ox. After three years he no longer saw the whole ox. Now he meets it with his spirit rather than his eyes: the knife follows the natural joints and slides through the hollow spaces, never hitting bone. That is why his blade, after nineteen years and thousands of oxen, is still as sharp as the day it left the whetstone.

The ox is still there, of course. What has gone is the ox as a single, solid obstacle. What Ding sees instead is structure - joints, spaces, the lines along which the thing comes apart.

The title also borrows from a boy in The Matrix, bending a spoon with his mind: “There is no spoon.” It is the same lesson in a different costume. Stop staring at the surface object, and you start to see what it is made of.

Three reasons the phrase fits this site:

  • Work. I am a doctor. A patient first arrives as one undivided problem. With practice I stop seeing it that way and start seeing its joints - the history, the symptoms, the examination, the tests - and somewhere along those lines, the one thing that does not belong.
  • Philosophy. Zhuangzi and Wittgenstein both suspected that our words carve the world badly, and that many problems dissolve once you stop seeing the “ox” our language hands us.
  • Practice. Ding’s knife stays sharp because it does not force its way through. That is the kind of thinking - and the kind of site - I would like to keep: patient, unhurried, working along the grain.

Finding your way

  • Notebooks - longer, ongoing explorations, revised over time.
  • Weblog - short dated notes and thoughts.
  • Guides - practical how-tos and reference notes.
  • Reading - books I am reading or have finished, with notes.
  • Archive - everything on one page, newest first.

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