Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi, "Master Zhuang", whose personal name was Zhuang Zhou, was a Chinese thinker of the late fourth century BCE and the namesake of the Zhuangzi, one of the two founding texts of Daoism alongside the Daodejing attributed to Laozi. Through stories, jokes and dazzling arguments, the book questions whether any single point of view can claim to be the right one, and recommends a free, spontaneous way of moving through a changing world. It is often counted among the finest works of literature, as well as philosophy, in the Chinese language.

Very little is known about Zhuang Zhou. The only early biography, a few lines in the Records of the Grand Historian of Sima Qian, written about two centuries later, seems to draw mostly on anecdotes from the Zhuangzi itself. It says he came from Meng, in the small state of Song, in the region where the modern provinces of Henan, Shandong and Anhui meet, and that he once held a minor post in charge of a lacquer garden. He lived during the reigns of King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi, which places him in the second half of the fourth century BCE, in the middle of the Warring States period, when the old order of the Zhou dynasty had broken into rival kingdoms and teachers of many schools competed for the attention of rulers. The dates usually given, about 369 to 286 BCE, are estimates.

The best-known story about his life has the king of Chu sending envoys to offer him the post of chief minister. Zhuangzi, fishing by a river, asks them whether a sacred tortoise, kept dead and honoured in a box in the royal temple, would rather be there or alive, dragging its tail in the mud. Like the tortoise, he says, he prefers the mud. Another tells how, when his wife died, a friend found him drumming on a pot and singing. Zhuangzi explained that he had grieved at first, then reflected that her life and death were part of a transformation like the passing of the seasons. Whether such stories are biography or illustration is impossible to say, and some scholars doubt that reliable facts about him survive at all.

The Zhuangzi as it exists today has 33 chapters, the arrangement made by the commentator Guo Xiang, who died in 312 CE and cut down a longer version of 52 chapters. They are divided into seven "Inner Chapters", fifteen "Outer Chapters" and eleven "Miscellaneous Chapters". Scholars generally regard the Inner Chapters as closest to Zhuang Zhou himself, while the rest come from several later hands, including writers close to the primitivist ideas of the Daodejing, followers of the hedonist Yang Zhu, and syncretists who blended Daoism with other schools. The book is therefore best read as an anthology from a tradition rather than as one man's argument.

Its style is unlike anything else in early Chinese thought. It is full of talking animals, giant birds, cripples, criminals and craftsmen who outdo kings and sages; Confucius himself often appears, sometimes mocked and sometimes voicing Daoist ideas. Arguments are mixed with fables, paradox and humour, and the text repeatedly warns against taking any of its own words too seriously.

The second chapter, usually called "On Making Things Equal", is the philosophical heart of the book. Zhuangzi observes that the Confucians and the followers of Mozi each call right what the other calls wrong, and that every judgement depends on the standpoint of the person making it. A human sleeping in a damp place gets ill; an eel does not. People, deer and hawks disagree about what tastes good. Rather than claim one perspective is correct, he suggests the sage "walks two roads", seeing the limits of each view and responding to things as they actually are. This has been read as scepticism, relativism or perspectivism; scholars still argue about which label fits.

The chapter ends with the most famous passage in the book. Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, happily fluttering about, unaware of being Zhou. He wakes and cannot tell whether he is Zhou who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it is Zhou. The point is less a puzzle about knowledge than an image of how one self passes into another in the endless "transformation of things".

The first chapter, "Free and Easy Wandering", celebrates a mind that is not tied down by conventional values of usefulness, success or fame. A gnarled tree is spared by the carpenter's axe because its wood is worthless, and so lives out its years. Elsewhere, Cook Ding carves an ox so skilfully that his blade never dulls in nineteen years, because he follows the natural spaces between joints instead of hacking. Such stories of skill illustrate the Daoist ideal of acting spontaneously, in tune with the way things are, rather than by rules and calculation.

Zhuangzi treats death as one more change, to be accepted rather than feared. He also distrusts government: unlike the Daodejing, which gives advice to rulers, the Inner Chapters mostly suggest keeping clear of politics altogether.

Zhuangzi's favourite sparring partner was the logician Hui Shi, a minister in the state of Wei. In a well-known exchange on a bridge over the river Hao, Zhuangzi remarks on how happy the fish are; Hui Shi asks how he can know what fish enjoy, since he is not a fish, and the two trade clever replies. When Hui Shi died, Zhuangzi is said to have lamented that he had no one left to talk with. The Zhuangzi also engages, often critically, with Confucian teachers of the kind represented by his contemporary Mencius, with the Mohists and with the logicians of the School of Names.

After a period of neglect under the Han dynasty, the Zhuangzi became central in the third and fourth centuries CE, when scholars of the "Profound Learning" movement used it, together with the Daodejing and the Book of Changes, to rethink metaphysics. It shaped the reception of Buddhism in China and deeply influenced Chan Buddhism, whose irreverent anecdotes owe much to its style. In 742 the Tang dynasty emperor Xuanzong honoured it with the title True Scripture of Southern Florescence, and religious Daoism treated Zhuangzi as an immortal.

Its imagery runs through Chinese poetry and landscape painting, and it offered generations of officials a model of withdrawal from public life, a private counterpart to the public world of Confucianism. Read today in many translations, it remains one of the most widely admired works of Chinese philosophy and a cornerstone of the cultural history of China.