The Genius of Learning
nautil.us
nautil.us
Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.
“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”
Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”
(translation by Burton Watson, my particular favorite)
“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
Exactly this. You can skin and cut a whole sheep to pieces with a small knife while others sweat profusely using a meat axe and a saw and you can do it faster. If something moves, it can be cut where it moves. Spaces between vertebrae and ribs. Articulations.
The bit about the state of the knife is also true: My father has French and German bayonets from WWI and WWII. You have to be very careful near those things.
If you have some variation in success watching your breath in meditation, you'll notice an astonishing range of detail that your breath might be represented with. When you are distracted, it might barely register as the symbol, "feeling of breath"; and if you have nothing else on your mind, you can have a super rich, fully continuous experience of it moving in and out, with all the gradations of temperature at different points etc.
Seems not very useful with breath watching, but if you carry this over to a sport or other skill, it's amazing how much more time it seems you have to act, and how many subtleties about the playing field that are otherwise totally filtered out.
I can imagine the butcher feeling every little difference in density of the meat as his knife moves along, anticipating where it will give or catch and always remaining on a smooth track.
https://github.com/jhadjar/Notes/blob/master/Cognitive%20Ski...
From problem solving to deliberate practice, meta-cognition. etc. Long-term potentiation is one of the concepts that blew my mind the most. Following the process down to the neural and ion level (as in how sodium, calcium and magnesium ions are involved), I learned amazing things.
Here's a sweet Long-Term Potentiation video describing what happens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vso9jgfpI_c
I recently put a few things in that repo and add to it from time to time instead of "wanting to do one big thing".
I love the story. There is much to learn; to me, it's about understanding where rather than how much.
But let's not forget it's a story. I'm sure some people are better or worse at butchering sheep, but a genericism does not add anything.
It's like if I say, "when you feel resistance, relax then work through it". It's meaningless. Not un-useful, not un-true, but definitely not "true" by the high standards of repeatable objective science.
"Not true but useful" is a phrase I frequently tell myself to improve my life without losing understanding of the spectrum of "true", and where I draw my line.
It can't be offensive. I might have been unclear but we actively use one of them. The other is a French stabbing sword-bayonet unsuited for cutting.
>But let's not forget it's a story. I'm sure some people are better or worse at butchering sheep, but a genericism does not add anything.
I don't know where you're seeing a genericism because it's rather precise: you feel, as in tactile feeling, where there is a gap and you cut. I understand what you mean though by "not true but useful" and the practice of a "folk taxonomy" of sorts to create a new class called "useful but not true" to avoid polluting your "true" branch.
I remember I had detected a pattern that helped me in high school chemistry where I made up a rule based on the Carbon count. It held perfectly for the low carbon count stuff we were studying at the time but I knew it couldn't be generalized. I guess the scope of something, folk taxonomy, mnemonic devices, etc. are also examples of "useful but not true".
Edit: wú wéi does have more too it though since it involves generalizing that mind state into an explicit philosophy of living. A big part of it is about being flexible and bending or moving around encountered external objects, as opposed to fighting them (or rigidly holding your stance against their approach). There's an interpretation of the above story where the knife blade is the soul, and staying along the smooth track is an expression of this philosophy of being flexible and non-confrontational in one's life.
This may just be an artifact of the presentation, or my misreading of it, but from then on it seems to be assumed that fast learning is a consequence of fast disengagement, rather than the other way around, yet no evidence is offered here that explicitly supports this interpretation over the alternative.