When Forgetfulness Becomes Freedom: A Daoist Lesson from the Liezi
6 min read
You've built the life you were supposed to want — and yet, some mornings, you wake up feeling like a stranger wearing your own name. What if the weight you're carrying isn't failure, but memory itself?
Drawing on a strange and overlooked story from the Daoist classic Liezi, this post explores why identity can become a trap — and how the ancient art of forgetting might be the most underrated skill of our time.
Modern life places enormous weight on achievement and identity. We're encouraged to build a coherent life story: a career trajectory, a personal brand, a narrative of progress and success.
Yet classical Daoist texts often ask whether this constant self-definition actually traps us.
We spend our lives trying to 'find' ourselves. But what if the secret to real peace is learning, occasionally, to lose ourselves?
A fascinating passage from the Liezi illustrates this tension through the strange case of Huazi of Yang-li, in the state of Song.
His story is a surprisingly modern reflection on the burden of memory, identity, and the exhausting project of being somebody.
Huazi's Forgetfulness — and His 'Cure'
In the Liezi, Huazi is a man lost in the fog of amnesia. He forgets gifts, forgets to sit, forgets his own history.
His family panic and try everything: a diviner reads the omens, a shaman performs ritual prayers, a doctor attempts medical treatment. Nothing works.
Finally, a Confucian scholar steps in, claiming he can cure Huazi. As narrated in the Liezi (Chapter 3, Section 7):
The Confucian tried stripping Hua-tzu, and he looked for his clothes; tried starving him, and he looked for food; tried shutting him up in the dark, and he looked for light. The Confucian was delighted.
When the cure succeeds, Huazi responds not with gratitude, but with a spear:
In one morning, Huazi's long-standing illness vanished completely. When Hua-tzu awoke, he became furious. He drove away his wife, punished his sons, and chased the Confucian out with a spear.
The authorities of Song arrested him and demanded to know why he acted so.
Huazi said, 'Before, when I could not remember, I felt boundless and free; I did not even notice whether Heaven or Earth existed.
But now that memory has returned, the disasters and successes, the gains and losses, the joys and sorrows, the loves and hatreds of the past thirty years crowd together in my mind like a thousand tangled threads. I fear that the same storms of feeling will fill the years to come and trouble my heart again.
Will I never regain even a moment of forgetfulness?'
This is a classic Daoist subversion of what we usually call 'health' or 'wisdom.'
While the family sees Huazi's amnesia as a tragedy, the text presents his forgetfulness as a form of spiritual liberation.
The Confucian Self — and Why It Exhausts Us
The heart of the story is a clash of perspectives. To the world, Huazi is broken. The Confucian represents the conventional desire for order, social duty, and intellectual clarity.
He uses discipline — hunger, cold, darkness — to force Hua-tzu back into his ego. To the Confucian, a man without memory can't fulfil his social roles.
By 'reforming his mind,' the Confucian restores Huazi to the world of distinctions, making him care again about clothes, food, and status.
To restore memory is to restore the social self: burdened by history, defined by relationships, divided by moral categories.
Today, this looks like your LinkedIn profile. It's a curated performance of a continuous, coherent 'you' — a highlight reel of achievements and affiliations that must remain on-brand at all times.
The Confucian in this story is essentially your inbox.
A Thousand Tangled Threads — The Problem of Narrative Identity
Once 'cured,' Huazi is overwhelmed. He realises that memory is the anchor of all human suffering.
By remembering, he's forced to relive decades of 'a thousand tangled threads' — gains, losses, and emotional turbulence he had previously transcended.
In the modern world, social media platforms now archive our 'thousand tangled threads': old photos, past opinions, previous achievements. This permanent memory intensifies identity pressure. Every post adds a thread to a personal brand that must stay coherent.
Think of the professional in mid-career who once thrived on achievement, but now feels hollow, burdened by milestones that no longer nourish them.
Their mind, like Huazi's, swirls with 'disasters and recoveries, gains and losses.' They can't enjoy a week off because they're mentally tracking a competitor's promotion or replaying a failed pitch from six months ago.
Huazi's final cry — 'Will I never regain even a moment of forgetfulness?' — is the lament of someone forced back into the illusion of control. In regaining his mind, he loses his peace.
Wuwei, Ziran, and the Mind That Stops Grasping
The Liezi, much like the Zhuangzi, celebrates wuxin ('no-mind') and wuwei (effortless action). Huazi's forgetting was ziran (self-so-ness): it arose without deliberate cultivation, without technique.
It was, in the Daoist sense, perfectly wuwei: the mind simply ceased its habitual grasping at the past. This is not illness. It's a complete return to naturalness, moving spontaneously with the dao (Way), untroubled by distinctions.
To the Daoist sage, Huazi had accidentally stumbled into a state of 'oneness' — where the ego no longer clings to the past or fears the future.
By forgetting 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow,' Huazi escaped the binary of gain and loss. He didn't notice whether 'heaven and earth existed' because he was no longer standing apart from the world as an observer.
He was simply part of the flow.
Zuowang — Sitting in Oblivion
Huazi's anger at his 'cure' points to a concept in Daoist philosophy known as zuowang ('sitting in oblivion'): a meditative state where the self dissolves.
This 'sitting in forgetfulness' means dropping fixed distinctions — self and other, success and failure, reputation and shame. When these mental constructions dissolve, one becomes aligned with the dao.
In Daoist terms, the 'self' is often seen as a collection of baggage: our titles, our grudges, our desires. Our achievement threadmill.
In 2026, this looks like an Identity Audit. Try introducing yourself not by your job title, but by what you value or how you actually feel. Notice the discomfort. That discomfort is the 'thousand tangled threads' tightening their grip.
Identity Trap — Why This Matters Now
We're living in an era of Identity Hyper-inflation. We're told to 'brand' ourselves, curate our histories on social media, and measure our worth by a CV that never stops growing.
Like the 'cured' Huazi, many of us wake up every morning to a thousand tangled threads of past failures and future anxieties.
Consider Productivity Guilt: that persistent sense that you should be doing more, remembering more, building more.
A missed promotion doesn't stay a single event. It becomes a storyline: 'I'm falling behind.'
Daoist thought suggests this narrative is partly constructed by memory and attachment. Without constantly replaying the story, the emotional weight would shrink dramatically.
Then there's what we might call Narrative Obligation: the feeling that we must be 'someone.' But the more 'somebody' we are, the more we have to defend.
Huazi's amnesia was a holiday from the exhausting project of being Huazi. When we forget who we're 'supposed to be,' we might, for a fleeting moment, touch who we actually are — something prior to status, memory, and name.
Ancient Wisdom, Applied
We can't all wander around forgetting where we live. But we can adopt the spirit of Huazi to protect our mental well-being.
Here are five ways to apply this ancient wisdom to your modern life.
- 1. Perform an 'Identity Audit'
Identify one 'tangled thread' — a past mistake or a prestigious title — that you're clinging to.
Ask yourself: 'If I forgot this today, would I be freer?' This is the practice of zuowang in miniature: releasing the mental constructions that masquerade as 'you.'
Try letting that specific narrative go for just one hour a day.
- 2. Practise 'Selective Forgetting'
Not every event deserves permanent mental storage. When something minor goes wrong — a cutting remark, an embarrassing moment — experiment with letting it disappear rather than replaying it.
In Daoist terms, you're releasing attachment to gain and loss, returning to ziran: the natural, ungrasping state. Set the thought down like a stone. Breathe. Remain unmarked by yesterday.
- 3. Try the 'Morning Oblivion' Ritual
Before checking your phone — the ultimate source of yesterday's threads — sit for five minutes in silence.
Don't plan. Don't remember. Simply exist in the 'boundless' state before the world demands you become a 'professional,' a 'parent,' or a 'success.'
This is wuwei in practice: letting the mind rest in its natural, undivided state before distinctions crowd in.
- 4. Prioritise Process over Outcome
When you're working on a project, consciously shift your focus away from the reward. If the work itself becomes your 'Heaven and Earth,' the anxiety about whether it'll succeed begins to dissolve.
Engage in walking in nature, creative flow states, or physical exercise. During these moments, past and future recede, and experience becomes immediate. These states resemble Huazi's temporary 'boundlessness.'
- 5. Set Boundaries with 'Confucian' Voices
Huazi chased away the person who forced him back into a stressful reality. In modern life, this means setting limits with the apps, platforms, and people that insist you should be achieving more, doing more, and remembering your 'status' at all times.
The tragedy of Hua-tzu isn't that he lost his memory; it's that he was forced to find it again. Give yourself permission to forget — just a little — and find the boundless peace that lies beneath the noise.
Final Thoughts
Huazi's story doesn't claim that ignorance is better than knowledge. It highlights a paradox central to Daoist thought.
To live wisely, we must remember enough to function in the world — but forget enough to remain free from it.
Modern culture emphasises accumulation: of knowledge, of achievements, of identity markers. Daoist texts like the Liezi suggest that freedom sometimes lies in the opposite direction.
Not in remembering more. But in learning, occasionally, how to forget.
The next time you feel crushed by your own story — by the weight of who you've been, or who you're supposed to become — ask yourself what Huazi asked.
Not 'What do I remember?' but 'What would I feel if, just for a moment, I forgot?'