Hui Shi

Based on Wikipedia: Hui Shi

The Philosopher Who Said He Arrived Yesterday

"I set off for Yue today and came there yesterday."

This isn't a typo or a translation error. It's one of the most famous paradoxes in Chinese philosophy, proposed by a man named Hui Shi over two thousand years ago. And if your first reaction is confusion, that was precisely the point.

Hui Shi lived during the Warring States period of ancient China, roughly 370 to 310 BCE—a time when seven kingdoms battled for supremacy and philosophers competed just as fiercely for intellectual dominance. He rose to become prime minister of the Wei state, wielding real political power. But his lasting legacy has nothing to do with governance. It's those brain-bending paradoxes that have kept scholars arguing for millennia.

A Philosopher Without a Book

Here's the frustrating thing about studying Hui Shi: we don't have any of his actual writings. Ancient records mention that he composed a philosophical work, but it vanished sometime before the Tang dynasty, likely over a thousand years ago. Everything we know about his ideas comes secondhand, filtered through other texts that reference him.

The most important of these sources is the Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of Daoist philosophy. Nine of its chapters mention Hui Shi by name, referring to him as "Huizi" (Master Hui) twenty-six times. Other ancient works like the Han Feizi and the Lüshi Chunqiu fill in additional details. But we're essentially trying to reconstruct a person's entire intellectual system from what their rivals and friends said about them—imagine trying to understand Socrates with even less direct evidence than Plato provides.

The School of Names

Hui Shi belonged to what later scholars called the School of Names, sometimes translated as the Logicians or the Dialecticians. This wasn't a formal institution with a campus and a curriculum. It was more like a shared intellectual project among philosophers who were fascinated by language, logic, and the relationship between words and reality.

Think of it as ancient China's equivalent of analytical philosophy. While other schools focused on ethics, governance, or spiritual cultivation, the School of Names asked more fundamental questions: What does it mean for two things to be "the same"? Can we trust our categories? Is there an objective way to carve up reality, or do our concepts impose artificial boundaries on a continuous world?

Hui Shi's particular obsession was relativity—not Einstein's kind, but the philosophical insight that concepts like "big" and "small," "same" and "different," "near" and "far" depend entirely on your perspective. Nothing is inherently large or small. It's only large or small compared to something else.

The Ten Paradoxes

The final chapter of the Zhuangzi, called "Under Heaven," preserves what it claims were Hui Shi's ten main philosophical positions. These have come to be known as "The Ten Theses" or "The Ten Paradoxes." Let me walk you through them, because they're genuinely strange and genuinely brilliant.

The first thesis states that the largest thing has nothing outside it, while the smallest thing has nothing inside it. This sounds almost trivially true until you start pushing on it. What exactly is the smallest possible thing? Is it a physical atom? A geometric point? And if a point has no dimensions—no length, no width, no depth—how can anything be made of points?

The second paradox picks up this thread: something with no thickness cannot be piled up, yet it can cover a thousand miles. Think about that. A geometric plane has no thickness whatsoever, yet it extends infinitely in two dimensions. How can nothing add up to something?

The third claims that heaven and earth are equally low, that mountains and marshes are equally flat. This seems obviously false—until you consider scale. From far enough away, the height difference between Mount Everest and the Dead Sea is negligible. The entire Earth, viewed from the Moon, looks like a smooth marble.

The fourth paradox is particularly disorienting: the sun at noon is the sun setting, and something alive at birth is also dying. This captures what we might now call the arbitrariness of temporal boundaries. The moment you're born, you begin your journey toward death. The moment the sun reaches its highest point, it has already begun to descend.

The fifth thesis states that great similarity differs from little similarity, which he called "similarity-and-difference of a lesser kind." Meanwhile, all things are similar and all things are different—this is "similarity-and-difference of a greater kind." In other words, any two things you compare will share some properties and differ in others. The question of whether they're "the same" or "different" depends entirely on which properties you choose to emphasize.

The sixth paradox: the south has no limit yet has a limit. And the seventh: I set off for Yue today and came there yesterday—the one I opened with.

The eighth claims that linked rings can be separated. This might be the most puzzling of all. How can interlocked rings be pulled apart without breaking them? One interpretation connects this to the paradox of dimensionless points: if the rings are ultimately composed of points that take up no space, what's actually preventing them from passing through each other?

The ninth observes that I know the center of the world—it is north of Yan and south of Yue. Yan was in the far north of the Chinese cultural sphere; Yue was in the far south. So Hui Shi is saying the center is both north of the southernmost place and south of the northernmost place. Which is true of literally every point in between. Every location is the center if you frame it correctly.

The tenth thesis delivers the ethical punch: love all things without exception, for heaven and earth are one body. If everything is interconnected, if boundaries between things are conventional rather than real, then our natural instinct to care only for ourselves and our immediate circle becomes arbitrary. Why privilege this particular arrangement of matter over that one?

The Trouble with Halving a Stick

Beyond these ten, the Zhuangzi attributes twenty-one additional paradoxes to Hui Shi and his philosophical allies. These were apparently the zingers they used in debates, designed to confound opponents and force them to question their assumptions.

Some seem designed purely to provoke: "An egg has feathers." "A chicken has three feet." "Fire is not hot." "A dog is not a hound."

Others are more obviously philosophical: "The shadow of a flying bird never moves." "There is a moment when a speeding arrow is neither flying nor at rest."

But the most famous is the last one: "If from a stick one foot long you every day take half of it, in ten thousand ages it will not be exhausted."

This is essentially Zeno's paradox, formulated independently in ancient China. Zeno of Elea, a Greek philosopher who lived perhaps a century before Hui Shi, posed similar puzzles about infinite divisibility. In his most famous version, a runner can never reach the finish line because they must first reach the halfway point, then the halfway point of the remaining distance, then the halfway point of that, and so on infinitely.

The mathematical resolution involves understanding infinite series and limits—concepts that wouldn't be rigorously developed for another two millennia. But the ancient Chinese Mohists, a school of philosophers concerned with logic and practical ethics, apparently proposed their own solution. They argued that when something moves across a distance, it doesn't actually traverse an infinite succession of fractional distances. It moves in one continuous stage. This anticipates some modern responses to Zeno that emphasize the difference between mathematical abstraction and physical motion.

A Philosopher Who Could Only Speak in Metaphor

An ancient text called the Shuo Yuan preserves a delightful story about Hui Shi's argumentative style. It seems his critics complained that he relied too heavily on analogies—that he couldn't make a point without comparing something to something else.

A courtier approached the King of Liang and said, essentially, "This Hui Shi character can't talk without using metaphors. Make him speak plainly for once."

The king agreed and summoned Hui Shi the next day. "I want you to explain things directly," the king instructed. "No more analogies."

Hui Shi's response was characteristically clever. "Suppose someone doesn't know what a dan is"—this was a type of crossbow with a pellet-shooting mechanism—"and they ask what it's like. If I say, 'A dan is like a dan,' will that help them understand?"

"Obviously not," admitted the king.

"But if I say, 'A dan is like a bow, but with a bamboo string that shoots pellets instead of arrows,' then would they understand?"

"Yes, that would work."

"Exactly," said Hui Shi. "Explanation is inherently a matter of using what someone already knows to communicate what they don't yet know. If you forbid analogies, communication becomes impossible."

The king conceded the point.

This isn't just a witty comeback. It's a genuine philosophical claim about the nature of language and learning. We can only grasp new concepts by relating them to existing ones. Pure definition is circular—you can only define a word using other words, which themselves need definitions. Somewhere, understanding has to be grounded in direct experience or intuitive recognition. Analogy is the bridge between the known and the unknown.

The Fish Debate

The most celebrated conversation in all of Daoist literature features Hui Shi and his friend and intellectual rival, Zhuangzi. These two appear repeatedly in the Zhuangzi text, arguing, joking, and needling each other about everything from the usefulness of large gourds to the nature of death.

The fish debate goes like this:

Zhuangzi and Hui Shi were strolling along a river dam when Zhuangzi remarked, "Look how the minnows dart around freely—that's genuine fish happiness!"

Hui Shi pounced immediately: "You're not a fish. How could you possibly know what makes fish happy?"

Zhuangzi countered: "You're not me. How could you possibly know that I don't know what makes fish happy?"

Hui Shi pressed his advantage: "I'm not you, so I certainly don't know what you know. But you're certainly not a fish—which proves my point that you can't know what fish enjoy."

Zhuangzi delivered the punchline: "Let's go back to your original question. You asked how I know what fish enjoy. The word 'how' implies that you already accepted that I do know—you were only asking about my method. And my method is simply standing here beside this river."

Scholars have argued about this exchange for centuries. Is Zhuangzi making a serious epistemological point about immediate intuitive knowledge? Is he playfully exposing a flaw in Hui Shi's phrasing? Is he demonstrating that logical argumentation can always be turned back on itself? Probably all three.

The debate illustrates the fundamental difference between these two thinkers. Hui Shi was a rigorous analyst who believed careful reasoning could expose hidden contradictions and refine our understanding. Zhuangzi was more interested in escaping the entire framework of logical argument—in accessing a kind of direct, wordless understanding that conventional language could only distort.

The Plasterer and the Carpenter

Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, Zhuangzi and Hui Shi remained close until death. The Zhuangzi text records a moving tribute that Zhuangzi paid at his friend's grave.

Walking past Hui Shi's tomb, Zhuangzi told his companions a story: "There was once a plasterer who would ask his friend Carpenter Shih to slice off any speck of mud that landed on his nose. The carpenter would whirl his hatchet through the air and remove the mud perfectly, leaving the nose untouched. The plasterer would stand there completely calm throughout the procedure."

"The Lord of Song heard about this feat and summoned the carpenter. 'Could you perform this for me?' he asked. But the carpenter refused: 'I used to be able to do that, but the material I worked on has been dead for years.'"

Zhuangzi's point was devastating in its simplicity: "Since you died, Master Hui, I have had no material to work on. There's no one I can talk to anymore."

The plasterer and carpenter needed each other. Neither skill made sense alone—the carpenter's blade was only remarkable because the plasterer trusted him absolutely, and the plasterer's composure was only meaningful because the blade was genuinely dangerous. Remove either party and the whole performance collapsed.

Philosophy, Zhuangzi seems to be saying, works the same way. You need a worthy opponent, someone who will push back on your ideas with precision and force. Agreement is comfortable but sterile. Real thinking happens in the friction between genuinely different perspectives, each sharpening the other.

Heaven, Earth, and I Were Born Together

Some scholars argue that Hui Shi's central insight can be summarized in a single statement: "Heaven and earth were born together with me; the myriad things and I are one."

This might sound mystical, even religious. But Hui Shi likely meant it as the logical conclusion of his relativism. If there's no objective boundary between "big" and "small," if sameness and difference are matters of perspective, if even spatial and temporal locations shift depending on where you stand—then maybe all boundaries are conventional. Maybe the apparent multiplicity of distinct things is an artifact of how we choose to categorize reality, not a feature of reality itself.

Pushed far enough, this relativism dissolves the boundary between self and world. If nothing is inherently separate, then I am not ultimately separate from anything else. The whole universe is one body, and my sense of being a distinct individual is just another useful but ultimately arbitrary way of carving up the whole.

The ethical implication follows directly: love all things without exception. If you and the world are not really separate, then caring only for yourself is as arbitrary as caring only for your left hand while neglecting your right.

Lost Texts and Lingering Questions

We will probably never know exactly what Hui Shi argued in his own words. The loss of his writings means we're forever dependent on secondhand accounts, many from rivals who may have distorted his views. Some paradoxes remain genuinely mysterious—what did he mean by "linked rings can be separated"? Why did he say "fire is not hot"?

But perhaps this incompleteness is fitting. Hui Shi's whole project was about demonstrating that our neat categories fail to capture reality's full complexity. Language, he seemed to believe, could never quite say what needed to be said. Every definition leaked. Every boundary was arbitrary. Every apparent truth dissolved into paradox when examined closely enough.

What remains is the provocation: the insistence that we question our assumptions, notice the contradictions hiding in our everyday concepts, and wonder whether the world is really organized the way we habitually believe.

That, and the image of two old friends walking along a river, arguing about whether fish are happy, still talking after all these years even though one of them is no longer there to reply.