Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou)

Zhuangzi, “Master Zhuang”, is the name given to Zhuang Zhou, a Chinese thinker of the fourth century BCE, and to the book associated with him. Together with the Daodejing attributed to Laozi, the Zhuangzi is one of the two founding classics of Daoist philosophy. It is also one of the greatest works of Chinese literature, famous for its humour, imagination and daring style.

Where other thinkers of his age argued about how to govern the state and how to be a good person, Zhuangzi asked more unsettling questions. How do we know that our way of seeing is the right one? Is what is good for a human good for a fish or a bird? Is death something to fear? What would it mean to wander freely, without being trapped by ambition, fame or rigid opinions?

He answered not with a system but with stories, jokes, paradoxes and conversations, often between surprising characters: talking trees, a butcher, a wheelwright, people with disabilities who are wiser than kings, and even Confucius, who sometimes speaks Zhuangzi’s own ideas.

Very little is known for certain about Zhuang Zhou’s life. The historian Sima Qian, writing around 100 BCE, gives only a few lines: Zhuang Zhou came from Meng, served as an official in charge of a “lacquer garden” (qiyuan), lived at the time of King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi, and wrote more than 100,000 words, mostly in the form of parables. Meng was in the state of Song, a small state in the central plain; its exact location is disputed, and several places in modern Henan, Anhui and Shandong claim him.

The traditional dates of about 369–286 BCE are later estimates. What seems clear is that he was roughly a contemporary of Mencius, although neither mentions the other.

Other information comes from stories in the Zhuangzi itself, which must be read with care because the book freely mixes fact and fantasy. They show him as poor, once visiting a king in patched clothes and shoes tied with string; as refusing high office; and as a close friend and debating partner of the logician Hui Shi. When his wife died, a friend found him drumming on a basin and singing. Zhuangzi explained that at first he grieved, but then he reflected that her life had come from the formless and had now returned to it, like the passing of the seasons, and that weeping would show he did not understand fate.

The book opens with a vast fish called Kun in the northern ocean that turns into a bird called Peng, whose wings are like clouds hanging from the sky; it rises ninety thousand li and flies to the southern ocean. A cicada and a little dove laugh at it: why go so high, when we can flutter up to the treetops? The story contrasts small and large perspectives, and raises the question of whether freedom lies in greatness or in being content with one’s own nature.

In the story of Cook Ding, a butcher carves an ox for Lord Wenhui with such rhythm that it looks like a dance. After nineteen years his blade is as sharp as new, because he no longer sees the whole ox but follows its natural structure, sliding the knife through the spaces between the joints. The lord exclaims that from this he has learned how to nourish life.

Hui Shi complains to Zhuangzi that he has a huge tree so gnarled that no carpenter will look at it; it is useless. Zhuangzi replies that because it is useless, no one will cut it down; why not rest in its shade? Elsewhere, a sacred oak appears in a carpenter’s dream to explain that its uselessness is exactly what let it grow so old. This “usefulness of the useless” is one of the book’s best-known ideas.

Zhuangzi and Hui Shi are strolling on a bridge over the river Hao. “See how the fish come out and swim about at their ease; that is the happiness of fish,” says Zhuangzi. “You are not a fish; how do you know what fish enjoy?” asks Hui Shi. “You are not me; how do you know I don’t know?” replies Zhuangzi. The debate goes on, and readers still argue about who wins.

Zhuangzi lived in the Warring States period, when the great states of China fought constant wars and rulers recruited advisers to strengthen their armies and administrations. The “Hundred Schools” competed to offer them programmes: Confucians promoted ritual and benevolence, Mohists impartial care and utility, and others law, strategy or agriculture.

The Zhuangzi responds to this world with deep scepticism about service to rulers. Its stories are full of people crippled or executed for their talents, trees cut down because their wood is good, and officials destroyed by the favour of kings. Its advice is often to stay out of harm’s way, to be “useless” to those in power, or at least to serve without being consumed.

Intellectually, the Zhuangzi engages closely with its rivals. It criticizes the endless disputes of Confucians and Mohists over “this is right, that is wrong” (shi–fei), and it knows the logical paradoxes of the “School of Names”, especially those of Hui Shi. Its famous second chapter, “On Making Things Equal” (Qiwulun), can be read as a philosophical reply to the debates of its time.

Perspective. Zhuangzi repeatedly shows that judgments depend on the point of view of the one who judges. Humans sleep in damp places and get ill, but eels do not; monkeys live in trees; people consider certain famous beauties lovely, but fish that see them dive deep and birds fly away. Which, he asks, knows the correct place to live or the true standard of beauty? The words “this” and “that”, “right” and “wrong”, shift as the speaker shifts.

Beyond fixed distinctions. From this, the Zhuangzi suggests that the wise person does not cling to one fixed perspective. It speaks of “the illumination of clarity” (ming) and of “walking two roads” (liangxing): seeing how things look from each side and letting distinctions be used lightly, as tools, rather than defended to the death. Whether this is relativism, scepticism, or a kind of mystical insight is debated.

Spontaneity and skill. Many stories celebrate craftspeople, such as Cook Ding, a wheelwright, a cicada catcher and a swimmer in a waterfall, whose long practice has become effortless. They act without forcing (wuwei), responding to things as they are. Their skill is a model of how to live: attentive, flexible, at ease.

Free wandering and the transformation of things. The first chapter is titled “Free and Easy Wandering” (Xiaoyao you). The ideal person is not bound by fame, merit or self; they “ride the changes” of the world. Life and death are presented as one continuous transformation, like the change from butterfly to Zhuangzi and back. The book includes moving passages on facing one’s own death, and on the “fasting of the heart” (xinzhai), emptying the mind of fixed opinions so that one can respond to things freshly.

The Zhuangzi we read today is the edition of the scholar Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE), with his commentary. It has 33 chapters in three groups: the seven Inner Chapters (neipian), fifteen Outer Chapters (waipian) and eleven Miscellaneous Chapters (zapian). The Han imperial catalogue had listed a Zhuangzi in 52 chapters; Guo Xiang removed material he considered superficial or spurious.

The seven Inner Chapters are “Free and Easy Wandering”, “On Making Things Equal”, “The Secret of Caring for Life”, “In the World of Men”, “The Sign of Virtue Complete”, “The Great and Venerable Teacher” and “Fit for Emperors and Kings”. They have a distinctive style and are traditionally regarded as closest to Zhuang Zhou himself. The last chapter of the book, “All Under Heaven” (Tianxia), is an early survey of the schools of thought, including a portrait of Zhuang Zhou himself, and was clearly written by someone else.

The Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters are varied. Some continue the themes of the Inner Chapters; others sharply attack Confucian morality and civilization, praise a primitive age of simple living, or combine Daoist ideas with government. Several of the best-known stories, including the happy fish, the drumming on the basin and the turtle in the mud, come from these later chapters.

The Han historians Sima Tan and Sima Qian grouped Zhuangzi under the “Daoist school” (daojia), and from the third century CE he was read together with Laozi as “Lao–Zhuang”. In that period, thinkers of the “Learning of the Mysterious” (xuanxue), including Guo Xiang, used the Zhuangzi to discuss being and non-being, naturalness and the role of the sage in society.

When Buddhism entered China, early translators and monks sometimes used Zhuangzian vocabulary to explain Buddhist ideas, and Chan (Zen) Buddhism later shared much of Zhuangzi’s spirit: suspicion of words, love of paradox, and admiration for spontaneous action. In religious Daoism, Zhuangzi was revered as an immortal; in 742 the Tang emperor Xuanzong gave him the title “True Person of Southern Florescence” (Nanhua zhenren), and his book became a scripture, the Nanhua zhenjing.

In literature and art, the Zhuangzi’s influence is immense. Poets such as Tao Yuanming, Li Bai and Su Shi drew on its imagery of free wandering, the butterfly dream and the useless tree, and many Chinese idioms come from it, such as “a frog at the bottom of a well” for a narrow-minded person. In Korea and Japan it was widely read by scholars and poets, even where Neo-Confucian orthodoxy regarded it as heterodox.

Modern readers around the world have found in Zhuangzi a philosopher of perspective, freedom and play. English translations include those by James Legge (1891), Burton Watson (1968), A. C. Graham (1981) and Brook Ziporyn (2009 and 2020), and his stories are often cited in discussions of scepticism, environmental ethics and the philosophy of skill.

Who wrote what? It is widely agreed that the Zhuangzi is a composite anthology. The traditional view, going back at least to Guo Xiang’s arrangement, holds that the Inner Chapters are by Zhuang Zhou and the rest by followers or imitators. A. C. Graham, in Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (1981) and related studies, proposed that the later chapters contain distinct groups: writings by a “School of Zhuangzi”, a “Primitivist” author close to the Laozi, “Yangist” chapters valuing the preservation of life, and “Syncretist” chapters that combine Daoist, Confucian and Legalist ideas, possibly from the early Han.

Liu Xiaogan, in Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters (1994), argued on linguistic grounds that the Inner Chapters are earlier: compound terms such as daode (“the Way and its virtue”), xingming (“nature and destiny”) and jingshen (“spirit”) occur in the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters but not in the Inner ones. Harold Roth and others refined these classifications.

Some scholars have gone further. Esther Klein, for example, has argued that the very distinction of “Inner Chapters” may be the result of later editing, and that early Han references to Zhuangzi, including Sima Qian’s, tend to cite passages now in the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters. On this view, even the Inner Chapters cannot simply be assumed to be Zhuang Zhou’s own words.

Guo Xiang and Xiang Xiu. Already in the fifth century, the anecdote collection Shishuo xinyu claimed that Guo Xiang had taken over much of an earlier commentary by Xiang Xiu. How much of “Guo Xiang’s” commentary is his own remains uncertain.

Philosophers disagree about what the Zhuangzi’s arguments amount to. Some read it as relativist: there is no perspective-independent standard of right and wrong, since what is “this” and “right” depends on the speaker’s position. Others read it as sceptical: we cannot know whether our judgments are correct, and the butterfly dream and the happy fish dramatize the limits of knowledge. Still others see it as mystical: the aim is a direct experience of the Dao beyond all distinctions.

Many recent scholars favour mixed or “therapeutic” readings. The volume Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, edited by Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe (1996), collected influential arguments on these questions. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry presents Zhuangzi as a perspectival relativist whose scepticism is “positive”: it frees us from dogmatism without paralysing action, and it values the practical know-how shown by skilled craftspeople.

Another debate concerns the Zhuangzi’s relation to the Daodejing. Traditionally Laozi is placed first and Zhuangzi seen as his follower. But the Inner Chapters rarely echo the Daodejing, and the Guodian manuscripts (c. 300 BCE) show the Laozi text still taking shape around Zhuangzi’s time. Many scholars therefore treat the two as largely independent sources that were only later combined into one “Daoist” tradition.

Translation is itself interpretation. The book’s puns, invented names and deliberately paradoxical language make every translation a choice among possible meanings. Chapter titles such as Qiwulun can be read as “On Making Things Equal” or as “Discussion on the Equality of Things”, which suggest different philosophical claims.

Biographical evidence is extremely thin: Sima Qian’s short notice in the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji, chapter 63, shared with Laozi, Shen Buhai and Han Fei), stories within the Zhuangzi, and the portrait in its last chapter. None of this is contemporary, and the stories are shaped by the book’s literary purposes.

The received text descends from Guo Xiang’s edition. The Tang scholar Lu Deming, in his Jingdian shiwen, recorded variant readings and noted other early editions, including ones with 52 and 27 chapters, which gives some idea of the text’s earlier diversity. Fragments of the Zhuangzi in Tang-period manuscripts from Dunhuang and in a Japanese temple copy preserve further variants.

Archaeology has added a little. Bamboo-slip fragments corresponding to passages of the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters have been reported from early Han tombs, which suggests that at least some of that material was circulating by the second century BCE. No manuscript of the Inner Chapters from before the Han has been found. Careful comparison of language, rhymes and ideas therefore remains the main method for dating the layers.