The useless tree is Zhuangzi's reply to a friend who called his ideas big and good for nothing. He answers that uselessness is what keeps the tree alive — no carpenter cuts it — and that his friend is troubled only because he keeps looking for a use.
The frame that retellings drop
Search for the useless tree and you will find it told as a fable: there was a tree, it was crooked, nobody cut it down, it grew old. True as far as it goes, and it removes the part that makes the story sharp.
In Zhuangzi the tree arrives at the end of a conversation with Hui-tze, a logician and a friend, and the conversation is about Zhuangzi. Hui-tze has been complaining for two exchanges, and his complaint is not about trees.
I have a large tree, which men call the Ailantus. Its trunk swells out to a large size, but is not fit for a carpenter to apply his line to it; its smaller branches are knotted and crooked, so that the disk and square cannot be used on them. Though planted on the wayside, a builder would not turn his head to look at it. Now your words, Sir, are great, but of no use; — all unite in putting them away from them.
Now your words, Sir, are great, but of no use. That is the sentence the fable versions leave out, and it is the sentence the story answers. The tree is a figure for Zhuangzi's own philosophy, offered by a friend who finds it impressive and pointless.
What comes first: the gourd
The tree is Hui-tze's second attempt. The first was a gourd — the king of Wei sent him seeds, the fruit grew big enough to hold five piculs, and he could find nothing to do with it.
I used it to contain water, I cut it in two to make the parts into drinking vessels; but the dried shells were too wide and unstable and would not hold (the liquor); nothing but large useless things! Because of their uselessness I knocked them to pieces.
He smashed it. Zhuangzi answers that Hui-tze was stupid in the use of what was large — he could have made it into a float and drifted on a river. The failure was not in the gourd. It was in a mind that could only ask what container it made.
The salve, and what use actually depends on
Between the gourd and the tree, Zhuangzi tells a story that carries the argument better than either. A family in Sung had a salve that kept hands from chapping, and had used it for generations while bleaching silk. A stranger bought the recipe for a hundred ounces of silver.
The stranger took it to the king of Wu, who was at war with Yueh. Given command of a fleet in winter, he used the salve on his men's hands, won the battle, and was given a fiefdom. Legge's sentence about it is the point of the whole passage.
The keeping the hands from getting chapped was the same in both cases; but in the one case it led to the investiture
The same in both cases. The salve did not change; the family bleached silk for generations and the stranger won a territory. Use is not a property of the thing — it is a relation between the thing and a situation, and Hui-tze keeps looking for it inside the object.
This is why calling the tree useless is a category error rather than an insult. Uselessness is not a quality the tree has. It is a report on what Hui-tze happened to want at the moment he looked.
The reply: usefulness is what gets you killed
Before the tree, Zhuangzi offers two animals, and they are the argument in miniature.
Have you never seen a wild cat or a weasel? There it lies, crouching and low, till the wanderer approaches; east and west it leaps about, avoiding neither what is high nor what is low, till it is caught in a trap, or dies in a net.
The wild cat is agile, quick, capable — and it dies in a net, because its capability is exactly what brings it within reach of one. The yak that follows is enormous and cannot catch mice: useless by the standard the cat is measured against, and unhunted.
Only then does the tree get its answer, and the answer ends in a question.
There you might saunter idly by its side, or in the enjoyment of untroubled ease sleep beneath it. Neither bill nor axe would shorten its existence; there would be nothing to injure it. What is there in its uselessness to cause you distress?’
Neither bill nor axe would shorten its existence. The tree is not secretly useful, and Zhuangzi never claims it is. It survives because there is nothing in it anyone wants — and the closing line puts the problem back where it started: what is there in its uselessness to cause you distress?
The second tree, in chapter 20
The image was not a one-off. Zhuangzi returns to it far enough into the book that a whole chapter carries the name — chapter 20 is titled Shan Mu, or The Tree on the Mountain.
A wood-cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it, and, when asked the reason, said, that it was of no use for anything.
A woodcutter resting in the shade of a tree he will not cut, because it is of no use for anything. The joke is in the staging: he is using it — the shade is the use — while declaring it useless, and the declaration is what keeps it standing to give him shade.
That is the argument from chapter 1 told in one image instead of three. And the recurrence matters for anyone reading the story as a stray fable: it is not a stray fable. Zhuangzi keeps coming back to it, and by chapter 26 the phrase has become shorthand he can drop into a conversation — asked what is useful, the answer given is of what is of no use.
What the story is not saying
It is not saying everything has a hidden purpose. That reading is more comfortable and it inverts the argument — it smuggles usefulness back in as the final measure, which is precisely what Zhuangzi is refusing.
Nor is it advice to be unproductive. Hui-tze is not scolded for working; he is scolded for having one question. The distress is in the asking, not in the tree, and Zhuangzi's suggestion — plant it in a wide and barren wild and sleep beneath it — is an invitation to stop appraising and use the shade.
With the frame restored it is also a joke at Zhuangzi's own expense, and a good-natured one. His friend has called his life's work a crooked tree. He agrees, and says that is why it is still standing.
The whole of Zhuangzi is in Taoist Diary, in James Legge's translation, narrated chapter by chapter.