A student asked how my account of the opening part of Zhuangzi, Chapter 2 is derived from the text. In particular, how did the pipes of the people, earth and Heaven lead to an account of the mind?

Basically, the interpretative hypothesis is that the various pipes (Readings 214) refer to the different mental faculties, and the various sounds they make the different sorts of emotions, thought, desires, etc., all the stuff that can happen in the mind. Two things that suggest the hypothesis—the fact that the discussion was supposed to be about the mind (i.e., xīn 心; “can the mind really be turned into dead ashes” top 214), and later, at the other end, the line “Happiness, anger, despair, joy, planning, sighing, bending, freezing, elegance, ease, candor, posturing. They are music out of emptiness, mist condensing into mushrooms… etc.” (Readings 215-216)

Alternatively, most of p. 214 is really about the different sounds that are thrown up by nature as the wind blows across various geological features (pipes of Earth), and other perturbations of nature (pipes of Heaven). But from the bottom of p. 214 until the top of p. 216, the focus switches to the mind. The implicit suggestion is that the things that happen in the mind are just like what came before with the pipes of Earth and pipes of Heaven—a cacophony of spontaneous happenings.

Either way, the descriptions on pp. 214-215 sets the stage for the argument on p. 216—there is no true master behind all the things that happen in the mind, etc.