Philosophy

Zhuangzi

c. 369 – c. 286 BC · Chinese (state of Song)

Daoism (Taoism); the Warring States period

Zhuangzi, personal name Zhuang Zhou, is the second great figure of classical Daoism and the supposed author of the book that bears his name. Where other Warring States thinkers argued about how to govern, he wrote fables, jokes and dream-parables suggesting that the categories we argue over are human inventions and that skill and freedom come from not forcing things. The seven "Inner Chapters" are usually taken to be his own; the remaining twenty-six are by later hands.

How to spot them

▸The butterfly dream; the happy fish; Cook Ding and the ox; the useless tree
▸The seven Inner Chapters (Neipian), including "Free and Easy Wandering" and "Discussion on Making All Things Equal"
▸Wu wei (non-action or effortless action); the sceptical, playful side of Daoism
▸Constant sparring with the logician Hui Shi (Huizi), who is also his one real friend
▸Burton Watson's and A. C. Graham's English translations; earlier spelling Chuang Tzu

Key works

A man wakes from dreaming he was a butterfly, and cannot say whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man (c. 300 BC)

The butterfly dream, which closes the second Inner Chapter, "Discussion on Making All Things Equal" (Qiwulun)

A cook explains that his cleaver has not been sharpened in nineteen years, because he cuts only where the ox is already hollow (c. 300 BC)

Cook Ding carving the ox, from "The Secret of Caring for Life" — the classic image of effortless action, wu wei

Two friends stand on a bridge over the Hao river arguing about whether one of them can possibly know that the fish below are enjoying themselves (c. 300 BC)

The "happy fish" debate with the logician Hui Shi, on the limits of knowing another mind

Envoys arrive to offer a fishing hermit the government of their state; he asks whether a sacred tortoise would rather be venerated in a temple or alive, dragging its tail in the mud (c. 300 BC)

The refusal of the premiership of Chu — a set-piece on declining high office

A vast, gnarled, stinking tree survives every woodcutter precisely because its timber is good for nothing (c. 300 BC)

The useless tree, and the paradoxical "usefulness of the useless"

A newly widowed man is found squatting and drumming on a tub, singing, because he has thought about where his wife came from (c. 300 BC)

From "Perfect Happiness" (chapter 18) — conventional mourning rejected once death is seen as a change of season

A fish so huge no one knows its length becomes a bird whose back spans who knows how many thousand li, while a cicada and a dove laugh at it (c. 300 BC)

Kun and Peng, the opening of the first Inner Chapter, "Free and Easy Wandering" (Xiaoyaoyou)

Key ideas

Perspectivism: judgements of right and wrong, big and small, useful and useless are relative to a point of view, and no point of view can step outside itself to judge the rest
Wu wei: the highest skill looks like doing nothing, because the expert follows the grain of things rather than imposing on them
The transformation of things (wu hua): birth and death are phases of a single process, so death is not to be feared or mourned
Useless things survive: what has no value to others is left alone, and that is its value to itself
Distrust of language: words are traps for meaning, to be forgotten once the meaning is caught

Quick-fire facts

•His personal name was Zhuang Zhou; the honorific means roughly "Master Zhuang", and older English books spell it Chuang Tzu
•The received text of 33 chapters was edited in the 3rd century AD by Guo Xiang, who cut a longer 52-chapter version
•Only the seven Inner Chapters are generally accepted as his own; the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters are later
•Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian places him in Meng, in the state of Song, and says he held a minor post at a lacquer garden
•In AD 742 the Tang emperor Xuanzong canonised the book as the Nanhua zhenjing, the "True Classic of Southern Florescence"
•His constant foil is the logician Hui Shi (Huizi), whose grave he later said left him with no one to talk to
•The text was a major influence on Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China and Japan

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Zhuangzi
Burton Watson (translator) — The Complete Works of Zhuangzi