Pei Bomao(裴伯茅): The Official Who Found Zhuangzi Too Late
Paul Peng
He spent his early years climbing the ladder of the Northern Wei bureaucracy. He drafted military dispatches. He compiled state histories. He served the emperor and earned the respect of his colleagues.
And then, late in life, he discovered Zhuangzi—and everything changed.
Pei Bomao (裴伯茅, c. 497–535 CE) was not a hermit. He was not a priest. He was a working official of the Northern Wei dynasty, a man who spent his days in government offices and his evenings reading the classics. But in his final years, he wrote a text that reads like a liberation manifesto: the Fu on Unlocking the Feelings (《豁情赋》). In it, he declared that he had found a teacher. Not Confucius. Not the ritual masters. Zhuangzi—the sage of freedom, the poet of relativism, the philosopher who said that life and death, big and small, right and wrong, are all part of a single transforming whole.
The Orphan Who Climbed
Pei Bomao was born in Hedong Commandery, near present-day Yongji in Shanxi province. The Book of Wei records the essential facts of his early life in a single, compressed sentence:
“Pei Bomao lost his father in youth and was poor. He was known for filial piety in supporting his mother. He broadly studied texts and histories, and in his later years became deeply devoted to metaphysical studies, thoroughly mastering the Dao of Laozi and Zhuangzi.”
He was orphaned early. He was poor. He supported his mother and earned a reputation for filial devotion—the highest Confucian virtue. And he studied: first the standard texts and histories, the curriculum of any aspiring official; then, late in life, something else: xuanxue (玄学), the “Dark Learning” of Laozi and Zhuangzi that had swept through the educated elite of the early medieval period.
The Career of a Northern Wei Scholar
Pei rose through the ranks in the typical fashion of a Northern Wei literatus. He served in military-secretarial posts, drafted documents, managed correspondence, and earned promotions. He was eventually entrusted with a significant scholarly commission: the compilation of the Book of Jin (《晋书》), the official history of the fallen Jin dynasty—one of the highest honours a scholar could receive.
Pei Bomao did not finish the Book of Jin. He died, probably around 535 CE, with the manuscript incomplete. The history that might have been his monument was left for others to assemble. But he left something else—something more personal, and perhaps more lasting.
The Manifesto of Unlocking
The Fu on Unlocking the Feelings survives only because the Book of Wei chose to quote its most important passage in his biography. Here is what Pei Bomao wrote:
“I further studied and reviewed Zhuangzi, embodying the idea of equalizing all things, forgetting both objects and the self, and discarding both right and wrong. The enlightenment of such a person is what I take as my teacher.”
Let us take this apart, because every phrase carries weight.
“Equalizing all things” (齐物, qi wu) is the central idea of the second chapter of the Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi argues there that all distinctions—big and small, beautiful and ugly, life and death—are relative to the perspective from which they are judged. From the standpoint of the Tao, a mountain and an anthill are the same size. To “equalize all things” is to stop privileging one side of the distinction over the other. It is to see the whole.
“Forgetting both objects and the self” (忘物我, wang wu wo) is the practice that makes equalizing possible. The self is the engine of distinction—the “I” that wants this and fears that, that calls this good and that bad. If you can forget the self—not destroy it, but cease to be ruled by it—the world stops being a battlefield of preferences and becomes simply what it is.
“Discarding both right and wrong” (弃是非, qi shifei) does not mean abandoning ethics. It means releasing the compulsive need to judge, to rank, to condemn. The sage, Zhuangzi says, “does not quarrel over right and wrong but entrusts them to the balance of the Tao.”
Pei Bomao took these three principles and called them his teacher. Not a master in a monastery. Not a priest in a temple. A set of ideas, found in a book, that reorganized his understanding of what it means to live.
The Official Who Stayed at His Desk
And then—this is the remarkable thing—Pei Bomao did not quit his job. He did not become a hermit. He continued to serve the Northern Wei state, to compile official documents, to manage the daily business of a working bureaucracy. He died in harness, with the unfinished Book of Jin on his desk.
This is not a failure of Taoist conviction. It is one of the most authentic expressions of it. The Zhuangzi does not demand that you leave the world. It demands that you see through the world—through its categories, its anxieties, its desperate competitions for status and recognition—and in seeing through them, become free of them. 你可以在任何地方做到这一点—at a desk, in a court, in an archive.
Pei Bomao practised what the later Zhengyi tradition would call inner cultivation alongside outer engagement—the spiritual discipline of a person who lives in society but is not consumed by it. His “unlocking of the feelings” was not an escape from his official duties. It was a release from the inner turmoil that those duties might otherwise have caused.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
From a Zhengyi perspective, Pei Bomao represents something essential: the lay Taoist life. Not everyone is called to the monastery. Not everyone can become a mountain hermit. The vast majority of Taoist practitioners, across two millennia, have been people like Pei Bomao—ordinary men and women with jobs, families, and responsibilities, who found in Laozi and Zhuangzi a way to hold those responsibilities without being crushed by them.
The Zhengyi tradition has always made room for this. Its priests serve communities. Its rituals bless households. Its teachings on wu-wei and naturalness are not reserved for specialists. They are available to anyone willing to “equalize all things, forget objects and the self, and discard right and wrong.” Pei Bomao did not found a school. He did not write a classic. But his few surviving lines are a window into a world—the world of the scholar-official who read Zhuangzi late at night, after the day’s work was done, and found in its pages a freedom no promotion could offer.
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