Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi the Chinese philosopher of the fourth century BC (c. 369-286 BC), the greatest writer of the Daoist tradition, whose book of parables, dialogues and fables teaches a playful and radical scepticism, a delight in the transformation of all things, and a vision of freedom that has fascinated readers for more than two thousand years.

Life and Character

Zhuangzi, whose personal name was Zhuang Zhou, was a native of the small state of Meng in what is now the province of Henan or Anhui. The historian Sima Qian records that he served for a time as a minor official in a lacquer garden and that he lived during the reign of the kings of the state of Wei, placing him in the fourth century BC, roughly a contemporary of Mencius.

The anecdotes in his book portray him as poor, independent and contemptuous of power. He is said to have worn patched clothes and to have borrowed grain from a neighbour, and when the king of Chu sent envoys to offer him the office of prime minister, he refused, asking whether they would rather be a sacred turtle honoured after death or a live turtle dragging its tail in the mud. He chose to drag his tail in the mud.

Another famous story tells how he dreamed he was a butterfly, fluttering about at ease and unaware of being Zhuang Zhou, and then woke to wonder whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man. This tale of the butterfly dream has become one of the most celebrated images in Chinese philosophy.

When his wife died, the book says, he sang and beat on a tub rather than mourning, explaining to a shocked friend that death was merely one phase in the endless transformation of things, like the changes of the seasons, and that to wail over it would be to misunderstand the nature of life.

The Book and Its Composition

The book known as the Zhuangzi is divided into inner, outer and miscellaneous chapters. The seven inner chapters are generally agreed to be the work of a single author of great genius, while the outer and miscellaneous chapters are the work of later followers and editors who preserved and extended his themes. The present text dates in part from the fourth century BC and in part from later centuries.

The style is unlike any other work of Chinese philosophy. Where the Analects and the Mencius record sober conversations, the Zhuangzi teems with talking animals, crippled sages, giant birds, imaginary dialogues and wild exaggeration. It uses fiction and humour to make philosophical points that could not be made in plain argument.

Its central characters are often outcasts, artisans, criminals and eccentrics, people who have found a kind of freedom beyond the judgments of society. Through such figures the book explores its themes of relativity, spontaneity and the uselessness of conventional distinctions between success and failure.

Scepticism and the Transformation of Things

Zhuangzi questions the confidence with which human beings claim to know what is good and bad, right and wrong. Each creature sees the world from its own perspective, and what is beauty to one is horror to another. The judgments of the schools are as partial as those of the small birds that mocked the great bird for flying too high.

From this relativity he draws sceptical conclusions about argument. When two parties disagree, who can judge between them? A third party will be on one side or the other, or on neither, and so cannot settle the matter. Disputes about right and wrong, he suggests, cannot be resolved by argument alone, and wisdom lies in seeing the limits of such debate.

Yet his scepticism is not despairing. Behind the shifting perspectives he points to the Dao, the one course in which all things participate and in which opposites are reconciled. The sage learns to see things from the vantage of the whole, in which life and death, waking and dreaming, are merely phases of a single transformation. This acceptance brings a freedom and tranquillity that the striving person cannot attain.

Freedom, Usefulness and the Sage

A recurring theme of the book is the contrast between the useful and the useless. The tree that is crooked and good for nothing escapes the carpenter's axe and lives out its natural span, while the straight tree is cut down. To be useless, in the world's terms, may be the surest way to preserve oneself and to live freely.

Zhuangzi describes the ideal person as one who wanders beyond the distinctions of society, following the natural course without contrivance. Such a person is not attached to reputation, wealth or even to life itself, and this detachment gives a lightness and power that ordinary people lack. The sage, he says, uses his mind as a mirror, responding to things as they come and retaining nothing.

This ideal of freedom inspired the later tradition of reclusive scholars and artists, who withdrew from office to cultivate poetry, music and painting in the mountains. It also contributed to the Daoist understanding of self-cultivation, in which the practitioner learns to still the mind and to move in accord with the natural flow of the world.

Influence and Legacy

The Zhuangzi became one of the foundational texts of Daoism and a permanent resource of Chinese literature and art. Its imagery of birds, trees, water and transformation shaped the way Chinese poets and painters represented nature and the inner life, and its humour gave later writers a mode of ironic comment on politics and society.

Its influence on philosophy was equally deep. Its scepticism about language and knowledge, its sense of the relativity of perspectives, and its vision of a freedom grounded in acceptance of the whole provided a counterweight to the moral earnestness of the Confucian tradition, and many Chinese thinkers drew on both.

In the modern period the Zhuangzi has been read as a precursor of the critique of language, as a philosophy of ecological attunement, and as a source of aesthetic and psychological insight. Its combination of metaphysical depth with playfulness gives it a unique place among the classics of world thought.

See also

• Daoism
• Laozi
• Wu wei
• Butterfly dream