I don’t know much about Giordano Bruno, a heretic in the Age of Renaissance, but as far as I understand, he posed a theory similar to that of no motion by Hui Shi. Bruno can be said to be one of the successors of Copernicus. Copernicus thought that the universe is surrounded by the fixed stars. But according to Bruno, these so-called fixed stars are flying like an arrow through infinite space, and they are too distant for their motion to be observed by us. In other words, seen from the quasi-infinite distance, a moving object is hard to observe. True you can see it from afar, but you can scarcely perceive it move. The closer you come to the infinite, the less able you are to notice an object move. And if the fixed stars are infinitely distant from the Earth, we can never know their movement. In short, there’s no motion from the infinite viewpoint.

Gongsun Long told us two stories showing that an arrow in flight is not in motion. The first one is the following:

A good archer, when shooting, shoots one after another, the preceding arrow notches being hit by the following arrowheads, the first one hitting the target and never falling down, and the last still touching the bow string being pulled up, all of which make up a line of arrows.

The idea that each of the arrows is hit by the following one, that the first one hits the target and never falls down, and that the last one still touches the string, means that each and every arrow in the line is at rest, occupying a space equal to itself. Which clearly illustrates a world with no motion. As if he were familiar with Zeno’s thesis of no motion, Gongsun Long, be it a success or not, tried to show us a clear picture of what happens when an arrow flies in a standstill.

The second story goes like this:

An archery master once surprised his wife by a shot. He shot an arrow at one of her eyes, and the arrow came into her sight too soon for her eyes to be closed, and was about to hit when it fell onto the ground without dust rising.

Motion means the process of an object moving from one place to another, filling every inch of the track while moving. In the second story, the arrow kind of teleported to her eyes, without being on any track, which is why she didn’t have time to shut her eyes. Why teleported? From the viewpoint of infinity, there’s no such thing as space between things. An object is at one time in a place, at another in another, never covering the distance between them. The movement of the arrow is discrete, not continuous, in a sense. And the reason why the dust didn’t rise is because the arrow again sort of teleported onto the ground, so that there was no wind pressure, no need for the dust to go up, no nothing. A world the logician created was motionless. I think Gongsun Long managed to have a description of whatever happens in a world without motion. He didn’t reason or prove but concluded and depicted what it is that an arrow you see in motion in our world might look like in his logically imagined motionless world.

Ideas in texts in different regions and times often overlap without apparent cultural exchange. An arrow shot by Zeno in ancient Greece reached Gongsun Long in ancient China 100 years or so later. Maybe human beings in the modern world are also shot an arrow by the ancients and the medieval; we just haven’t been able to catch it yet.

Zeno of Elea negated motion in the following way: If you want to reach P, you’re got to reach the half-point, P1, between you and P; if you want to reach P1, you’re got to reach the half-point, P2, between you and P1, and so on and on. Kind of infinite regression. You might call it infinite regression, because to reach P, you have to reach P1; to reach P1, you need to reach P2. From P to P1 to P2. You’re farther and farther away from P in a sense. You might think it’s negation of motion. On the contrary, you are in motion ever. It’s because you’re running and running and running on and on and on so as to reach where you want to be. Motion is the act or process of moving. Now that you’re in the act of moving, it’s quite certain that you’re in motion. You can never be not in motion when you rush to anyplace, even if you cannot get anywhere.

Then why Zeno thought it impossible to move in spite of the fact that you’re running on and on? It’s because Zeno was anthropocentric. A stone will roll down a hill without any purpose; a human being usually has a destination in mind when she walks or runs. For instance, you go out of your house to school every day because you’re a teacher. You come back home every evening because you love your home your family. Most of the moves you make serves a certain purpose. You don’t usually move without a purpose. Zeno seemed to have been of the opinion that all the motion of a thing must have a purpose like that of a human being. If movement in general doesn’t attain some goal, it means that motion is incomplete and so in vain, that is, motion is impossible. Motion is possible only if its purpose is fulfilled. Just as the theory that the sun and the planets go around the earth (because we human beings are at the center of the universe) is anthropomorphic, so is Zeno’s idea that all motion has a purpose. Both of which you might call teleology. It’s not my intention here to show a complete denial of the significance of teleology; rather, I’d like to suggest that teleology, in a sense, especially in its primitive form, is oftentimes deceptive and misleading. It is likely to force us to go astray into an anthropomorphic discussion, which is usually nowhere near what nature really is.

Nagarjuna, a Buddhism thinker in ancient India, had a queer attempt at denying motion. He goes like this:

A man finished running is not running. A man yet to run is not running. A man running now is not running.

A man finished running is not running. Of course, because he is finished with running. A man yet to run may run in a second, but not running right now. Then how about a man running now? He cannot be running, either. Why? You cannot do two things at the same time. If you are having a piece of pizza, then you cannot be singing a song. If you are singing, you cannot be having a bite of pizza. You cannot eat and sing at a time. Again, you cannot have two bites at an instant. You’re only got one mouth, which deserves not more than one bite. If you’re biting pizza, you’re only having one piece, not two or more. A man having a bite of pizza cannot be having another bite simultaneously. One subject, one action. One subject can only engage in one action, not two. If you say “A man running now,” then a man, a subject, already has an action of running, so he cannot run or do other things any more. That’s why it is said that a man running now is not running. Hence the negation of motion.

Well, I think his true intention is not to negate motion but to not have any fixed ideas and to be flexible and adaptable. Some may have the imprudence to think that a man finished with running, or yet to run, has the action of running, either of which Nagarjuna repudiates. Others may be sensible enough to say that a man running now has the action of running, which argument he confutes as well. It is not perversity that makes him say no, but his great wish for the emancipation of himself. If I say S is P, then he will argue that is not the case. If I say S is not P, again he will refute me by claiming that S is not not P. If I say S is both P1 and P2, he will likely object that S is not both P1 and P2. If I say S is neither P1 nor P2, he is sure to refute and say S is not neither P1 nor P2. Which means he doesn’t stick to anything. He did his best to free himself in the truest sense of the word. Hence becoming more and more adaptable: Evolution.