Zhuangzi

The book works by story rather than by doctrine. Its arguments arrive as anecdotes, and the anecdotes are told well enough that they have circulated in Chinese for two thousand years independent of any philosophical use made of them.

The butterfly dream closes the second chapter: Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, wakes, and cannot establish which of the two is dreaming the other. Cook Ding carves an ox for a duke and his blade has needed no sharpening in nineteen years, because he no longer looks but works along the natural seams and gaps. The debate on the bridge over the Hao, in the Outer Chapters, has Zhuangzi remark that the fish below are happy and his friend Huizi demand to know how he could possibly know, which turns into a dispute about whether anyone can know anything of another mind. The useless tree is too gnarled for timber and therefore lives out its full span, a point the book makes repeatedly about the survival value of being of no use to power.

Underneath these lies a consistent position. Distinctions such as useful and useless, large and small, life and death are made by the perspective that draws them, not found in things; the sage does not abolish perspectives but stops mistaking his own for the view from nowhere. The word often used for the result is you, wandering or free roaming, an ease that comes from having no fixed position to defend.

The stance towards death follows. Told that Zhuangzi was found drumming on a tub and singing after his wife died, a visitor is scandalised; the answer is that she has changed as the seasons change, and that wailing would show he had not understood.

The Han imperial bibliography records a Zhuangzi in fifty-two sections, the shape given it by the librarian Liu Xiang. That version is lost. What survives is the edition of Guo Xiang, who died in 312 CE, and who cut the text to thirty-three chapters, discarding material he judged fantastic or philosophically worthless, and attached a commentary that became as influential as the text. Within a few centuries his recension was the only one in circulation, so everything modern readers have passed through the judgement of one fourth-century editor.

The thirty-three fall into three groups: Inner Chapters one to seven, Outer Chapters eight to twenty-two, and Miscellaneous Chapters twenty-three to thirty-three. The division is old and it tracks something real. The Inner Chapters share a vocabulary, a style and a set of preoccupations, and scholarly consensus assigns them to Zhuang Zhou, a minor official from Meng conventionally placed around 369 to 286 BCE, though the dates are inferences rather than records.

The Outer and Miscellaneous chapters are demonstrably not by one hand. Analysis of their language and argument, most influentially by A. C. Graham, separates out several strands: writers who idealise a primitive society before rulers and ritual, writers close to the individualist Yang Zhu, and later syncretists who fold in cosmology and statecraft and are trying to fit the book into a Han imperial worldview. Some chapters attack Confucius; others put respectful words in his mouth.

The practical result is that quoting the Zhuangzi requires knowing which chapter. A position in chapter twenty-nine may contradict chapter two flatly, and often does.

The Zhuangzi was never scripture in the sense of a rule of life, and Confucian scholars were mostly wary of it. Its authority came from being read, endlessly, by everyone educated. In 742 the Tang emperor Xuanzong gave it the honorific title True Scripture of Southern Florescence and its author the title Perfected Man of Nanhua, formally installing it in the Taoist canon, but its influence had never depended on that.

Its first great period was the third and fourth centuries CE, when the Xuanxue or Dark Learning movement made it, with the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, one of the three texts through which educated men discussed reality. That coincided with the arrival of Buddhism, and the Zhuangzi supplied much of the Chinese vocabulary in which Buddhist ideas were first rendered and misrendered. When Chan Buddhism took shape, its characteristic moves were already familiar from this book: distrust of discursive argument, teaching by paradox and anecdote, the master who answers a metaphysical question with something absurd, skill acquired until it becomes spontaneous. Chan's debt is to Indian Buddhist doctrine and Chinese literature together, and the literary half is largely Zhuangzi.

In poetry and painting the effect is at least as large. Tao Yuanming's retirement to his fields, Li Bai's flights, Su Shi's essays on the relativity of large and small all draw on it. The landscape painters took from it the conviction that technique should disappear into the act, Cook Ding with a brush. The recurring figure of the recluse who declines office, which shaped a thousand years of Chinese self-presentation, has its sharpest source here in the story of Zhuangzi refusing a ministry, preferring to drag his tail in the mud like a living turtle.