This is going to be a bit round about, but bear with me…

Today in my East Asia Nationalism class we were discussing Benedict Anderson's classic text, Imagined Communities.  At one point, in considering the origins and rise of nationalism, Anderson notes that the decline of religious intellectual authority contributed to the creation of a historical moment, a clearing of intellectual and symbolic and linguistic space, that enabled the subsequent rise of nationalism.  He resists an oversimplified notion that the decline of religion caused nationalism, but he certainly suggests that it facilitated the articulation of national identity.  He further suggests that nationalism fulfills some of the functions that religion can, and still does, fulfill.  There may be a deeply held human need for assurance that life has meaning beyond individual experience, that death is not meaningless and lonely.  Here is Anderson on religion:

If the manner of man's dying usually seems arbitrary, his mortality is inescapable.  Human lives are full of such combinations of necessity and chance.  We are all aware of the contingency and ineluctability of our particular genetic heritage, our gender, our life-era, our physical capabilities, our mother-tongue, and so forth.  The great merit of traditional religious world-views (which naturally must be distinguished from their role in the legitimation of specific systems of domination and exploitation) has been their concern with man-in-the-cosmos, man as species being, and the contingency of life.  The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering – disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death….At the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.).  In this way, it concerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation.  Who experiences their child's conception and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of "continuity"? (10-11)

And here is what nationalism can do:

The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own moral darkness.  With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear.  Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary.  Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary.  What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning.  As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation. (11)

Nationalism transforms "fatality into continuity" by attaching the individual to the trans-historical national community.  It gives meaning to life by promising that the presence and work of each individual contributes to something larger than any one person.  Each adds to a vast collective that stretches back into the mists of history and forward into the infinite future.  Nationalism promises that you will not die alone.

And that is where Zhuangzi comes in.  He rejects the fear of death and meaninglessness that under-girds the human need for either (or both) religion and/or nationalism.

Of course in Zhuangzi's day there was no such thing as nationalism or national identity.  Collective identity of the scale and style of "the nation" is (as Anderson and Gellner argue) a modern phenomenon.  But we can extrapolate from his views on death to get at what his likely response to nationalism would be.  Take these two passages:

In all beneath heaven there's nothing bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and T'ai mountain is tiny.  No one lives longer than a child who dies young, and the seven-hundred-year-old P'eng Tsu died an infant. (26)

Birth and death, living and dead, failure and success, poverty and wealth, honor and dishonor, slander and praise, hunger and thirst, hot and cold – such are the transformations of this world, the movement of its inevitable nature.  They keep vanishing into one another before our very eyes, day in and day out, but we'll never calibrate what drives them. So how can they steal our serenity, how can they plunder the spirit's treasure house?  If you let them move together, at ease and serene, you'll never lose your joy.  And if you do this without pause, day in and day out, you'll invest all things with spring…(75)

He is telling us to simply accept mortality and fate.  Accept the inevitability of death.  If we embrace the "transformations of this world" without fear then we will find joy.  And what would happen if people actually did what Zhuangzi says?  There would be less cause for national identity and nationalism.  We would not need the cling to the notion of the nation to find continuity and meaning in our lives because we would understand that continuity and meaning can only come by giving up on fictitious distractions like the nation.  Meaning, for Zhuangzi, is not to be found in a transcendent or trans-historical conception.  It is right there in front of us, immanent in the immediate moment, here with us now. 

Indeed, I think Zhuangzi would scoff at nationalism and point to just how much death and destruction have been wrought in the name of securing us from our fears of a lonely death.  Zhuangzi is, positively, an anti-nationalist.

But what about religion?  Would Zhuangzi be against religion?  That's a harder question because, historically, his thought has been used by those who have made Daoism into a religion.  I think there are certain philosophical problems with doing that but I cannot deny that Zhuangzi's ideas have been drawn into religious practice.  Maybe, however, that is just not necessary.  Zhuangzi would seem not to need religion either.  Just let our fears and hopes "move together, serene and at ease" and we'll never lose our joy….