What this concept is saying
Qíwù (齊物, “equalizing things” or “seeing things without divisive fixation”) originally belongs to the *Qiwulun* (齊物論, “Discussion on Equalizing Things”) chapter of the *Zhuangzi*. In the Chan tradition—especially in Hongzhi Zhengjue’s *Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Hongzhi* (《宏智禪師廣錄》)—the term is taken into a Buddhist setting. It describes a mind so empty, clear, and free of contrivance that the habitual division between self and things, gain and loss, affirmation and denial, no longer governs its response to the world.
This does not mean forcing oneself to declare that everything is identical. It means no longer making conceptual distinctions into absolute barriers.
Ordinarily, the mind does not merely notice differences. It immediately recruits them into the service of a self: *this helps me; that threatens me; this proves I am right; that person must be wrong*. Qíwù is what becomes possible when this hidden center of appropriation relaxes. Mountains remain mountains, insults differ from compliments, medicine differs from poison, and kindness differs from cruelty—but these differences are no longer organized around an imagined, fortified owner standing apart from experience.
Hongzhi presents this through several inseparable facets rather than as a formal list of doctrinal divisions.
First is kōngjì (空寂, empty stillness). Hongzhi associates qíwù with being “empty and without trace” (空而無痕) and with “attaining without attainment” (無得而得). “Empty” does not mean blank, unconscious, or nonexistent. It means that experience cannot yield a fixed, independent self at its center. “Still” does not mean sensory shutdown. Hongzhi can therefore write of “hearing without hearing”: sounds are fully received, but the mind does not immediately turn them into possession, resistance, or self-confirmation.
This is why the operation of qíwù is described as traceless. If one thinks, “I shall now regard everyone equally,” a subtle manager is still at work, arranging reality according to a spiritual policy. Qíwù is not an ideology imposed on things. When clinging subsides, openness does not need to manufacture impartiality; it simply ceases to distort what appears.
Second is wángjī (亡機, the disappearance of scheming or calculating mentality). Here *jī* does not mean intelligence or practical competence. It is the concealed mechanism by which the mind continually calculates its position: How am I being perceived? What can I extract from this? How can I win without appearing to compete? To be without such “machinery” is not to become naïve or incapable of planning. One may still organize a journey, negotiate a contract, or protect a child. What disappears is the compulsive conversion of every encounter into material for defending and enlarging “me.”
Hongzhi joins this condition to images of the butterfly and the white gull:
「流夢似隨蝴蝶去，亡機蕩蕩清閒還與白鷗分。空而無痕存綿綿，無得而得不勤勤，不聞而聞愈存存。」
The butterfly suggests the loosened boundary between fixed identities; the gull suggests ease in a world no longer approached through predatory calculation. These are not merely decorative images. They show qíwù as a way of inhabiting experience without gripping it.
Third is the subtle relation between self and things. Hongzhi writes:
「胸腹空虛，靜應諸緣而無外，默容萬像而有餘。齊物而夢蝶，渠正是我兮我不是渠。」
With the “chest and belly empty,” one quietly responds to conditions without treating anything as absolutely outside, and silently accommodates the ten thousand appearances without being exhausted by them. Then comes the deliberately paradoxical line: “It is precisely I, yet I am not it” (渠正是我兮我不是渠).
This guards against two opposite errors. The first is alienation: “I am a sealed subject, and everything else is an external object.” The second is indiscriminate fusion: “There are no distinctions, so you and I are literally the same.” Qíwù supports neither. Self and world arise in intimate dependence; nevertheless, conventional distinctions continue to function. Your pain is not an alien fact unrelated to me, but neither may I appropriate it and claim to know it completely. The butterfly is not reduced to Zhuangzi, nor Zhuangzi to the butterfly. Their fixed opposition becomes questionable without their usable difference being destroyed.
Fourth is freedom from fixation on being and nonbeing. Hongzhi writes:
「智到無而有，理極有而無，齊物蝶翻晝夢，隨機蜂理華須。開口也著合也著。」
“Wisdom reaches nonbeing and there is being; principle reaches the extreme of being and there is nonbeing.” This is not a metaphysical formula claiming that existence and nonexistence are interchangeable. It points to freedom from clinging to either pole. Things appear and function, yet none possesses an isolated, unchanging essence. Their emptiness does not cancel their appearance; their appearance does not make them self-established.
Consequently, qíwù is active. Like a bee responding to a flower, the practitioner meets each condition appropriately. “Opening the mouth accords; closing it also accords” indicates that speech and silence can both be fitting. There is no universal rule that awakening must always look quiet. Sometimes compassion listens; sometimes it speaks plainly. Nonattachment is shown in the capacity to do either without building an identity out of either.
Fifth is the difficult phrase “hard to divide right and wrong” (難分是非). Hongzhi says:
「性成而不立玄微，智詣而難分是非。蝴蝶夢魂兮，春晝飛而齊物；白鷗盟事兮，夕陽臥而亡機。」
This does not abolish ethical discernment. It does not mean that deception and honesty, abuse and care, or liberation and bondage are equivalent. The point is that awakened wisdom does not establish a private realm of mysterious superiority and then use it to pronounce upon the world. It sees how rigid judgments arise through partial standpoints, emotional investment, and attachment to self. It can still recognize harm, but it does not need hatred in order to oppose harm or self-righteousness in order to tell the truth.
Qíwù therefore has a recognizable place on the path of liberation, although it is not a standard pan-Buddhist doctrinal category such as the Four Noble Truths. It names the lived expression of insight when emptiness has begun to transform perception and conduct. Ignorance constructs a self opposed to a world; craving selects what will enlarge that self; aversion attacks what frustrates it; conceptual proliferation produces endless litigation on the self’s behalf. Qíwù describes the loosening of that entire structure. Its measure is not an exotic experience but freer responsiveness: “quietly responding to conditions” and “silently accommodating the ten thousand appearances.”
A walkthrough in everyday life
Imagine an evening commute after a long day of work.
You are standing in a crowded train. Someone pushes past you, takes the last seat, and begins watching short videos without headphones. At once, several distinctions appear: self and other, considerate and inconsiderate, victim and offender, right and wrong.
Qíwù does not ask you to pretend that nothing happened. The noise is real as a conventional event; the person’s conduct may indeed be inconsiderate. The first step is simply to notice how quickly an event becomes a fortified story: “People like this ruin everything. I am always surrounded by idiots. My needs never matter.” The mind has moved from discerning a behavior to manufacturing an absolute kind of person—and an equally absolute “me” who has been wronged.
Now consider empty stillness. The sound is heard. Irritation is felt. Tightness appears in the chest. But none of these needs to be converted immediately into “my permanent anger” or “proof of what the world is like.” This is closer to Hongzhi’s “hearing without hearing”: not failure to hear, but hearing without the extra labor of possession and prosecution.
Next, notice the calculating mechanism. Perhaps the mind rehearses a devastating remark, imagines the approval of other passengers, or calculates whether confrontation will make you look brave. This is *jī*, the machinery of self-positioning. For it to fall silent does not mean passivity. It means that whatever you do is less contaminated by the need to stage yourself as hero, victim, or judge.
Then examine the boundary between self and other. The passenger is not literally you. “Equalizing things” must not be mapped as “his preferences and mine are identical” or “his behavior cannot affect me.” That would be the mistaken flattening Hongzhi’s “It is precisely I, yet I am not it” prevents. Yet the passenger is also not a sealed object called “inconsiderate person.” Like you, he is a shifting conjunction of fatigue, habit, sensation, history, and conditions—much of it unknown to you. Seeing this does not excuse the noise. It prevents one behavior from becoming the person’s supposed essence.
Now being and nonbeing cease to be rigid alternatives. The disturbance exists and should not be denied; yet it has no fixed, independent core. It arose through a phone, a speaker, a tired passenger, a crowded carriage, your depleted nervous system, and social expectations. Because it is conditioned, it can change.
Finally comes responsive functioning. You might move away, use earplugs, politely ask the person to lower the volume, or decide that speaking would inflame the situation. Qíwù supplies no mechanical answer. “Opening the mouth accords; closing it also accords.” The relevant question is whether speech or silence emerges from clear responsiveness, or from fear, vanity, and hostility.
The same walkthrough applies in a close relationship. Your partner forgets something important. Conventional discernment says: a promise was not kept, and the matter should be addressed. Divisive fixation adds: “You never care about me; this proves what kind of person you are.” Qíwù removes neither the memory nor the boundary. It removes the imagined essence. One can say, “This hurt me, and we need a different arrangement,” without turning a painful event into an ultimate verdict on either person.
It also applies while scrolling through algorithmically selected content. The feed continually sorts the world into material for attachment and aversion: people to envy, ridicule, desire, fear, or join. Qíwù is not the claim that every post is equally truthful or valuable. It is the capacity to see that the algorithm’s categories and one’s emotional reactions are conditioned constructions, not an infallible map of reality. AI and recommendation systems offer a useful comparison here: both human attention and algorithms classify according to patterns and prior conditioning. But the comparison has limits. An algorithmic model is not thereby equivalent to Buddhist consciousness, and current science has not settled the nature of consciousness or demonstrated Buddhist liberation. The analogy merely helps us notice how sorting can become invisible while governing what seems real.
Why contemporary people need it
Contemporary life rewards distinction but quietly turns distinction into identity. Platforms measure approval, workplaces rank performance, political media divides populations into camps, and consumer systems invite us to construct a self through preferences. The problem is not that distinctions exist. The problem is that every distinction is pressured into becoming a verdict: superior or inferior, ally or enemy, success or failure, visible or irrelevant.
Qíwù interrupts this movement before it hardens.
It is especially valuable because it joins spaciousness to responsibility. A merely calming practice might help us endure an unhealthy situation without changing it. A merely critical stance might identify every injustice while leaving the mind consumed by hatred. Qíwù points toward another possibility: perceive differences accurately, respond to conditions concretely, yet do not imprison oneself or others inside those differences.
This changes compassion. If self and other are treated as utterly separate, helping another becomes an optional moral achievement performed by “me” for “them.” When the boundary is understood as relational rather than absolute, another person’s suffering is neither wholly external nor something one can possess. Compassion becomes less theatrical and more exact. One helps without needing to become the savior.
It also changes conflict. Much conflict survives because being right has fused with being somebody. To revise an opinion then feels like a small death. Qíwù loosens that fusion. One can defend a position vigorously while recognizing that the position is conditioned, partial, and revisable. “Hard to divide right and wrong” means that wisdom sees more than the courtroom created by the ego; it does not mean that wisdom becomes unable to recognize falsehood.
Most importantly, qíwù exposes the structure of bondage. We commonly imagine that freedom means arranging the world so that it consistently confirms our preferences. Buddhism diagnoses this as an endless project: because conditions change, a self dependent upon confirmation must remain anxious. Qíwù gestures toward freedom of a different kind. The ten thousand things need not agree with us before they can be allowed to appear. Once they are no longer forced to stabilize “me,” response becomes lighter, more intimate, and more appropriate.
This is why Hongzhi’s imagery is so unforced: butterfly, spring daylight, white gull, evening sun. Liberation is not represented as a self conquering the world. It is the fading of the machinery that required conquest.
Common misunderstandings and clarifications
“Qíwù means all things are identical.” No. Equality here is not sameness of properties, consequences, or moral value. A child and an adult have different capacities; medicine and poison have different effects; compassionate and cruel actions bear different consequences. What is “equalized” is the absolutizing mind that turns relational differences into self-existing essences and instruments of attachment.
“It means there is no right or wrong.” No. Hongzhi’s “hard to divide right and wrong” concerns freedom from rigid, self-authorizing discrimination. Chan does not require indifference to suffering. A practitioner may intervene decisively against harm. The test is whether discernment is clear and compassionate, rather than an extension of hatred or self-display.
“It is emotional numbness.” No. “Empty and still” does not mean dissociation. Numbness reduces one’s ability to receive and respond; Hongzhi’s emptiness can “accommodate the ten thousand appearances” and “respond to all conditions.” Genuine nonattachment increases availability to experience. If a supposed equanimity makes someone chronically unreachable, it should not automatically be dignified as qíwù.
“Wángjī means never planning or thinking strategically.” No. It means the disappearance of covert self-serving calculation, not the loss of practical intelligence. A caregiver must plan; a physician must discriminate; a community must anticipate danger. What falls away is the compulsive use of every plan to secure a fixed self.
“Self and world become one substance.” Hongzhi’s “It is precisely I, yet I am not it” blocks this conclusion. Qíwù does not replace dualism with a crude monism. It reveals intimacy without erasing conventional difference. Another person is not absolutely outside the network of conditions that constitutes your life, but neither are they your possession or projection.
“Because everything is empty, nothing matters.” This reverses the meaning of emptiness. Because things arise dependently, actions matter profoundly: conditions shape what follows. Emptiness removes fixed essence, not causality or consequence. It makes transformation possible.
“Qíwù is a complete synonym for Buddhist emptiness.” Not exactly. It is a term inherited from the *Zhuangzi* and used poetically in a particular Chan environment. In Hongzhi’s record it expresses what empty, noncalculating wisdom looks like in relation to things, identities, and judgments. It should not be treated as though it were a universally standardized Buddhist technical category with one definition across all scriptures and schools.
“The butterfly dream proves that reality is only an illusion.” That is too crude. The dream-butterfly imagery destabilizes certainty about fixed identity and standpoint. It does not by itself establish that nothing exists or that waking life has no practical order. Hongzhi’s use of it is balanced by responsive activity: the butterfly flies, the bee attends the flower, speech and silence meet their occasions.
The heart of qíwù is therefore neither “everything is the same” nor “nothing is true.” It is the ending of the inward machinery that must turn every difference into a defense of self. When that machinery grows quiet, differences can be seen more accurately, because they are no longer exaggerated into walls. One is empty without becoming absent, still without becoming inert, discerning without becoming condemning, and responsive without leaving a trace of spiritual performance.
That is qíwù’s place in liberation: not a theory placed above the ten thousand things, but a freedom discovered in meeting each one without first making it serve the fiction of a separate, permanent “me.”