I am very happy to have talked to a friend yesterday who brought up to me the “chà bù duō (CBD)” concept in Chinese. This is something I often think about as well. Though most of the time the word being mentioned is used to make fun of the Chinese nonchalance with a negative tone, this is one of the central concepts that make up of the Chinese spirit. It is one of the mental instruments that the Chinese use in either good or bad ways.
If you think about CBD, it shares some meanings with the Taoist philosophy of qí wù (齐物), the equality of things. Zhuangzi advocates the identicalness of all being, either material or spiritual. Much like the monism in western philosophy, but with a big difference that Zhuangzi doesn’t establish a hierarchy among beings despite that they are identical in nature, but promotes the essential equality on all fronts. This by no way means equality in a social distribution manner (social status, wealth – the superficial equality), but epistemologically. This means, for example, a corrupted environment can be identical to a paradisal one from a Taoist perspective, so that a Taoist is able to live in it without being currupted, and takes action in it. (Many interpretations believe Zhuangzi doesn’t promote action-taking, as in “wú wéi”, but I take on the school of thought that argues wú wéi doesn’t avoid action.)
Zhuangzi believes a truely free spirit is xiāo yáo – which doesn’t have a counterpart in English. It is a status of being, living with the disturbance of life but happy and carefree at the same time. As opposed to the buddhist carefree, which is achieved by reclusion and meditaion, xiāo yáo encourage the spirits to face the complexity of the social reality and take action, but remaining a wholesome mind at the same time. A person who achieves xiāo yáo can then live and act in any environment with a noble heart that is incorruptable.
But Taoism is also an ‘academic’ philosphy, which means its multilayered meaning is only taught at institutions, grabbed by even fewer who are interested in this school of thought and make their efforts. The classical written system is historically removed from the common people, leaving them unable to read with the knowledge of spoken language. The written system is not only ideographic, but also with different syntax and lexicon from the spoken one, which means one cannot understand classical texts at all without a formal education. But after the emergence of Taoist religion based on the philosophy, many of its concepts start to spread out of the elite circle and be adopted into the common spoken language but with lesser meanings.
Here I don’t mean CBD comes from Taoism, because I am in no way an expert in Chinese linguistics nor philosophy, nor have I done my research with historical evidence. But as a Chinese, the concept of qí wù, which I learned from school as a classical concept, and CBD, which is a prevalent mentality among the daily Chinese conversations, bear a lot of similarity. It is also possible that these two concepts cement each other bottem-up and top-down.
The common usage of CBD in daily Chinese has nothing ontological but almost always about practicality. The Chinese society, through out its history, has almost always been an authoritarian one with clear social hierarchy and structures. With a huge population, the typical pyramid shape of classes, and the argrarian economy, a large part of the society consists of common people with predictable income and career paths (this doesn not mean stablility in any sense, but they are mostly aware of what at best they can receive and achieve; it is not strict immobility either, but upward mobility through imperial exams is extremely chancy compared to the population). It means they have to be ecnomical with their resources and use them with priorities in mind. CBD is often used in situations where the events in discussion are not important enough in their priority list, such as the color of their wall, which is the example that my friend shared with me. White and pink can be CBD, because the family might have more problems on their plate, and too little time and resources to spend.
But CBD can also be about situations that seem very important to most people. The difference of life and death can also be said to be CBD, and in this case it is much more similar to qí wù in Taoism. The typical Chinese would take death as factual, and the emotion around it is more considered bēi (悲) than sadness. bēi is sadness in a much less performative manner but considered a human status that is throughout their course of lives. I often discuss death with my aging grandpa, who was not educated in his youth due to the revolutions. He would frequently tell me life and death are CBD.
Admittedly, CBD is also abused in many professional settings. With the rapid modernisation of the Chinese society, a lot of work require accuracy instead of flexibility. CBD could also be used as excuses for subpar performance, which is one of the reasons for CBD’s bad reputation.