Regular readers (both of you!) will know that I routinely use David Hinton's translations of the Chinese classics. I like the way they read in English. And I realized that, while I have posted Lin Yu-tang's translation of one of the useless tree stories from Chuang Tzu, I have never posted Hinton's. I remedy that below. This is my favorite of the several uses of the useless tree image in Chuang Tzu, from chapter 4:

On his way to Ch'i a master carpenter named Riprap (Shih) came to Bentshaft Village (Ch'u-yuan). At the village shrine, he saw a chestnut oak so huge thousands of oxen could gather in its shade. It measured a hundred spans around, and in height it rivaled mountains. It rose eighty feet before the branches began, and dozens of them were so large you could make them into boats. People came in droves to gaze at this tree. It was like a fair.

The carpenter didn't stop; he just walked past with hardly a glance at the great oak. But his apprentice gazed and gazed. Once he'd caught up with Riprap, he said: "Since I first took up the axe in your service, master, I've never seen timber so marvelous, so full of potential. But you didn't even bother to look at it: you just walked right past without even pausing. Why?"

"No more!" shouted Riprap. "Not another word about that tree! It's worthless wood. If you made a boat from it, the boat would sink. If you made a coffin from it, the coffin would rot in not time. If you made tools from it, the tools would break in no time. If you made doors and gates from it, they'd sweat sticky sap. If you made pillars from it, they'd soon be full of termites. That tree has no potential whatsoever. It's useless: you can't make anything with it. How do you think it's lived so long?"

Eventually, carpenter Riprap returned home. There the shrine oak appeared to him in a dream, saying: "What were you comparing me to? Trees with beautiful, fine-grained wood? Fruit trees – hawthorn, pear, orange, citron? Once their fruit is ripe, they're picked clean, ransacked and plundered. Their large branches are broken down; their small limbs are scattered. It makes their lives miserable. And instead of living out the years heaven gave them, they die half way along their journey. All that abuse of the world – they bring it upon themselves. It's like this for all things.

"I've been perfecting uselessness for a long time. Now, close to death, I've finally mastered it. And it's of great use to me. If they'd ever found a use for me, would I be this grand? Look – the two of us, we're just things. So how is it things go around denouncing things? And you, a worthless man so close to death – what do you know about worthless wood?"

When Riprap awoke and began to interpret his dream, the apprentice asked, "If it's so determined to be useless, why is it the village shrine?"

"Hush! Not a word!," replied Riprap. "It's only pretending to be a shrine. If people don't have a way to understand such a great oak, they'll rail against it. So if it weren't a shrine, don't you think someone would have cut it down long ago? Look, it isn't like the rest of us: it's harboring something utterly different. If we praise its practicality, we'll miss the point altogether, won't we?"