Dugu Ji(独孤及): The Philosopher Who Divided the Truth into Three
Paul Peng
He was a governor, an essayist, and one of the sharpest philosophical minds of the Tang dynasty. His friends compared his prose to a legal code—precise, binding, impossible to evade. And in his most concentrated philosophical work, the Reply to the Policy on Understanding the Mysterious Classics, he did something no Taoist thinker had done before: he divided the truth into three levels.
Dugu Ji (独孤及, 725–777 CE) was not a hermit. He was not a priest. He was a working official who governed prefectures and compiled literary collections. But his philosophical writings represent one of the most original attempts in Chinese history to reconcile the radical freedom of Zhuangzi with the demands of a life lived in society. He argued that cutting a duck’s legs to make them match a crane’s is not justice—it is mutilation.
The Tao Has Husks
Dugu Ji’s philosophical starting point is a recognition that the Laozi itself invites: “The Tao, as a thing, is nameless and formless.” But he makes a crucial distinction. The Tao has both essence and husk—jing (精) and cu (粗). The essence is pure, subtle, interior, the stuff of self-cultivation. The husk is coarse, manifest, exterior, the stuff of practical engagement with the world. And the sage uses both:
“One should take its essence for self-cultivation and use its husk to help things.”
This is a remarkably practical resolution of the ancient tension between Taoist withdrawal and Confucian engagement. You do not have to choose between the pure Tao of the mountain hermit and the compromised Tao of the marketplace. The Tao itself has levels, and each level has its proper use. From this foundation, he derives the core spirit of Taoism: “Taking tranquillity and stillness as the ancestor, and emptiness as the substance.”
The Three Levels of Being True
Then Dugu Ji makes the move that marks him as an original thinker. He proposes that “preserving one’s true nature”—the central goal of Taoist self-cultivation—is not a single state. It has three levels.
The foundation: concentrating vital energy to achieve softness. This is the disciplined cultivation of qi, the vital breath, until the body and mind become supple, responsive, and free of obstruction—inherited from Laozi’s “concentrate your qi and achieve softness.”
The middle: being quiet and pure. This is the state of stillness that is not merely the absence of noise but a positive clarity—what Laozi calls “the still and the unmoved,” what Zhuangzi calls “the fasting of the mind.”
The surface: each affirming what it affirms, each approving what it approves. This is the state of spontaneous self-expression, where each person follows their own nature without attempting to conform to an external standard. It can look like recklessness. But Dugu Ji insists that even this surface level belongs to the natural order. It should not be corrected:
“If one corrects the nature of indulgence to comply with the norms of punishment and politics, it is like lengthening the legs of a duck or shortening the legs of a crane, which impairs its completeness.”
The image comes from the Zhuangzi, chapter eight, “Webbed Toes”: “The duck’s legs are short, but to lengthen them would cause pain. The crane’s legs are long, but to shorten them would cause grief.” Dugu Ji applies this to human society. Law, ritual, punishment, politics—all the machinery of social order—should not be used to make people into something they are not. To do so is not to civilise them. It is to maim them.
The Body as a Burden
In the Ode to Dreaming of a Distant Journey, Dugu Ji turns from systematic philosophy to personal confession. He begins with Laozi, chapter thirteen, and unfolds it into a lament:
“My body grows along with all kinds of worries. My life arises along with delusions. Evil qi takes advantage of it, and all kinds of karmic conditions come together, bringing worries, troubles, losses, and gains.”
“Gain has not yet ended, but loss has already followed. Before the sun sets, prosperity and decline change in a myriad of ways.”
This is not the despair of Lu Sidao, who concluded that it would be better never to have been born. From the depths of this meditation on suffering, Dugu Ji arrives at the Taoist answer:
“My true self exists forever, like still water without waves, like floating clouds without roots. It waxes and wanes with time, entrusting itself to heaven and earth. Fortune and misfortune alternate, good and bad share the same source, and all things are as they are. I have nothing to say to the world. How carefree I am, just to pass the years.”
An acceptance so complete that it becomes a form of freedom.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
From a Zhengyi perspective, Dugu Ji’s three levels offer a remarkable framework for understanding Taoist practice in its full range. The foundation—concentrating qi to achieve softness—corresponds to the inner cultivation practices of the Zhengyi tradition. The middle—quiet and pure—corresponds to the liturgical state of the priest who has stilled the mind before approaching the altar. And the surface—each affirming what it affirms—corresponds to the lived freedom of the lay practitioner who follows the Tao in daily life without withdrawing from the world. Dugu Ji’s genius was to see that these are not three different paths. They are three levels of the same path.
What the Governor Left Behind
Dugu Ji died in 777 CE, at the age of fifty-two. His Collected Works of Pilin survives across ten volumes in the Complete Prose of the Tang. He was not a hermit. He governed cities, judged cases, wrote policy, compiled literature. But he thought about the world with a clarity that few men of the world have achieved, and he left behind a philosophy that makes space for everyone—the quiet, the wild, the disciplined, the free—to be what they are without being cut or stretched into someone else’s shape. The duck’s legs are short. The crane’s legs are long. Both are the Tao.
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