The last section of The Way of Heaven, (天道, tian dao), the 13th chapter of the Zhuangzi, relates an exchange between duke Huan and Bian the wheelwright – I have used the translations from Schipper’s The Taoist Body and the Chinese Text Project.
Duke Huan sat in his hall, reading out loud. Downstairs [in the courtyard] stood Bian the wheelwright, making a wheel. Putting down his work, Bian went up the steps and asked the duke: “May I ask your Grace what are you reading?”
“The words of the sages,” answered the duke.
“Living sages?”
“No, these have died.”
“So, what you are reading is just the dregs and sediments of men of former times.”
“What! A wheelwright ventures to judge what his prince is reading? Explain yourself or I will have your life!”
Bian the wheelwright said: “Your servant looks at this from the point of view of his craft. In making a wheel, if I go at it too carefully, it won’t be round; if I go too fast, it won’t be the right size. Neither too carefully, nor too fast; my hand knows how to do it in harmony with my mind, but my mouth cannot put into words how this is done. There is an enormous distance between the word and the doing. I cannot even instruct my own son in my art, nor is he able to learn it from me. That is why at seventy, I am still making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, these men of former times, and what it was not possible for them to put into words, are dead and gone: so then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!”
The insights of Bian the wheelwright are profound, yet very familiar. One insight is that there is so much about doing that is unverbalizable, cannot be put into words (口不能言, kou bu neng yan). Another insight is about the enormous distance between the description of doing and doing itself. And these insights are familiar to us all from our daily lives, from describing how we, say, drive a car from one place to another, to how we prepare a meal. Verbal accounts of our activities amount to a superficial sliver of what we do.