The Zhuangzi

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A cook lays down his knife and tells a duke how he carves an ox. For nineteen years the blade has not been ground, because it never touches bone or tendon; it slips into the gaps the body already provides, guided by something the cook calls following the natural grain rather than looking with the eyes. The story is short, a few hundred characters, and it is one of the most quoted passages in early Chinese prose. It is also a fair description of how the book that contains it works on a reader — entering through the openings, declining to cut against the structure, leaving no edge dulled. The book is the Zhuangzi, thirty-three chapters of fable, dialogue, and argument-that-undoes-argument, and it has been read for two thousand years less as a treatise than as a kind of weather a mind passes through.

The man and the book carry the same name, and untangling them is the first task. The figure Zhuangzi — Master Zhuang, personal name Zhuang Zhou, conventionally dated to roughly 369 to 286 BCE, a minor official from the town of Meng in the state of Song during the Warring States — is the person to whom tradition assigns the work. The Zhuangzi as an object is something else: a layered compilation that grew, was cut, and was arranged by hands working centuries after Zhuang Zhou was gone. To speak of the text is to speak of editors, lost recensions, and a commentator whose scissors fixed its shape for everyone who came after. The biographical sketch the historian Sima Qian later supplied — that Master Zhuang wrote a work of some hundred thousand words, mostly fable, and once turned down a minister’s post rather than be a sacrificial ox decked in embroidery — tells us how the early empire imagined the author, but it does not tell us which of the surviving words are his. The honest answer is that the book is anonymous in its mass and attributed only in its core.

A Larger Book, Cut Down

The version every later reader has known is not the version the early bibliographers describe. The catalog of the Han imperial library, compiled at the turn of the era, recorded a Zhuangzi in fifty-two chapters. That book no longer exists. What survives is a recension in thirty-three chapters prepared around the year 300 by Guo Xiang, a scholar of the Western Jin who died in 312. Guo’s edition did not merely transmit the older text; it selected from it. By his own account and that of later catalogers, he chose what seemed the soundest and most coherent material, rejected passages he judged spurious or corrupt — some of them, he thought, the work of fortune-tellers and fabulists who had attached themselves to the master’s name — and arranged the remainder into the thirty-three chapters that have stood ever since.

He was not the first to edit the work. Fragments preserved in Lu Deming’s Jingdian shiwen, a Tang-era guide to the pronunciation and meaning of the classics, record earlier recensions by Sima Biao and by Cui Zhuan; Cui’s commentary is reported to have covered twenty-seven chapters, seven inner and twenty outer. These rival texts are lost, surviving only as citations. Guo Xiang’s prevailed, and prevailed so completely that the discarded eighteen-odd chapters dissolved almost without trace. What modern scholarship can recover of the fifty-two-chapter book comes from quotation alone — phrases caught in the nets of later commentators.

“Zhuangzi Dreaming of a Butterfly,” Lu Zhi (1496–1576), Ming dynasty, ink on silk. The waking question that closes chapter 2 — whether the man dreamed the butterfly or the butterfly now dreams the man — became the book’s single most painted scene. — Lu Zhi, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Guo Xiang’s recension came wrapped in his commentary, and the two have been almost inseparable since. His reading belonged to the intellectual movement the Chinese tradition calls xuanxue, the “Dark Learning” or “Profound Learning” of the third and fourth centuries — a current that mined the Zhuangzi, the Tao Te Ching, and the Book of Changes for a metaphysics of spontaneity. The commentary’s authorship has its own controversy. The official History of the Jin accuses Guo of lifting nearly the whole of his interpretation from Xiang Xiu, an earlier xuanxue thinker who died around 300, leaving only two chapters his own. Modern scholars grant that Guo drew on Xiang Xiu and other predecessors, yet most credit him as the principal author, since the boldest moves in the commentary — above all the insistence that things arise of themselves, ziran, with no maker behind them — do not match what survives of Xiang Xiu’s thought. The case is unresolved; what is not in doubt is that the text and its first great reading reached posterity fused.

The Three Words

The book divides into three unequal blocks, a division the manuscript tradition preserves and that scholars treat as a guide to its strata. The seven Inner Chapters (1 through 7) are held, by long convention and by most of the modern field, to come closest to Zhuang Zhou himself, or at least to a single early hand; they are the most tightly composed and bear the titles by which the book is best loved — “Free and Easy Wandering,” “On the Equality of Things,” “The Secret of Caring for Life.” The fifteen Outer Chapters (8 through 22) and the eleven Mixed or Miscellaneous Chapters (23 through 33) gather material from several later hands and schools, some of it expanding the Inner Chapters’ insights, some of it pulling in other directions entirely — primitivist, syncretic, even hostile to the playfulness of the core.

What unites the whole is a way of speaking that the book, with rare self-awareness, names and theorizes about itself. Chapter 27, titled with the first of the three terms, sets out a typology of its own language. The first kind is yuyan, “lodged words” — speech put into the mouths of others, historical figures or invented ones, so that the point arrives borrowed and indirect rather than asserted in the author’s own voice. The text claims that nine-tenths of its discourse is of this kind. Confucius appears constantly, sometimes mouthing Daoist wisdom, sometimes made the butt of it; robbers, cripples, talking trees, and the personified Yellow River all deliver lines. Nothing is said straight when it can be lodged elsewhere.

The second is zhongyan, “weighty words” — sayings given the authority of revered elders and sages of the past, quoted to carry weight the speaker’s own person could not. The reading is debated: the same characters can be taken as chongyan, “repeated words,” the ancestral utterances worn smooth by retelling. Either way the device leans on borrowed gravity even as the book elsewhere mocks the cult of antiquity.

The third is the strangest and the most discussed: zhiyan, rendered “goblet words” or “spillover words.” The image is a ritual vessel, a zhi, weighted so that it tips and empties when full and rights itself when drained, never holding a fixed level. Language of this kind, the chapter says, pours out fresh each day and finds its harmony in the “Heavenly Equality” — it takes no permanent position, adapts to each context, contradicts what it said before, and rights itself again. It is speech that refuses to settle into doctrine. Burton Watson glosses such words as ones that “adapt to and follow along with the fluctuating nature of the world and thus achieve a state of harmony.” The goblet is the book’s portrait of its own method: a text designed not to deposit conclusions but to keep tipping the reader off balance, so that no single sentence can be lifted out as the doctrine of the Zhuangzi.

The butterfly-dream motif carried into Japan, where the text was read alongside Zen: a brush-and-ink treatment attributed to Ike no Taiga (1723–1776). — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What the Goblet Pours

The doctrine these devices carry — to the degree the book permits the word “doctrine” — turns on the equality of perspectives and the freedom that follows from refusing to rank them. The pivotal Inner Chapter, “On the Equality of Things,” argues that judgments of right and wrong, big and small, useful and useless, beautiful and ugly, are not features of the world but positions taken within it. The great roc whose wings darken the sky and the cicada who laughs at it for flying so far are each correct from where they stand; a beauty who makes men swoon sends fish diving and birds scattering in terror. There is no view from nowhere from which the dispute could be settled, and the sage, recognizing this, declines to climb onto any of the contending platforms. Instead the sage “lodges in the ordinary,” lets opposites turn into each other, and moves through the world by what the text calls wu-wei — not inaction but action that adds no friction, like the cook’s knife in the gap.

From this comes the book’s most counterintuitive value: the praise of uselessness — the gnarled tree spared the axe because its wood is good for nothing, the human life best preserved by slipping free of the schemes that would put it to work. Usefulness, in the Zhuangzi, is a leash; the thing no one can find a use for is the thing left whole. The same logic governs the book’s most famous refusal of office, recorded by the historian Sima Qian in the first century BCE: invited to take charge of the state of Chu, Master Zhuang asks whether the envoys have seen the sacrificial ox, fattened and draped in embroidery for years before it is led to the altar — and refuses, preferring his freedom to that garlanded captivity. To be useful to power is to be groomed for the knife.

The book pushes this skepticism of fixed positions to its limit in its treatment of language and knowledge. Names carve the seamless world into things; distinctions, once made, harden into the rights and wrongs over which the rival schools of the age — the Confucians, the Mohists, the logicians — endlessly fought. The Zhuangzi watches these disputes with amused detachment and asks who could possibly judge between them: an umpire who agrees with one side is partial, one who agrees with neither is no umpire at all. Its response is not to argue better but to loosen the grip of argument itself, to let the “this” and the “that” revolve on what it calls the axis or hinge of the Way, the still point from which all positions can be seen turning. Death receives the same treatment: the book’s scene of Master Zhuang drumming on a tub at his wife’s death turns mourning into the recognition that the vital breath, the qi, gathers into a living form and disperses again, so that to grieve the dispersal as a catastrophe is to misread the process one is part of.

And then the dream. At the close of “On the Equality of Things,” Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, fluttering and content, knowing nothing of Zhuang Zhou. He wakes and is solidly himself — and cannot tell whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or is now a butterfly dreaming he is a man. Between the two, the text says, there must be some distinction; this is what is meant by the transformation of things. The passage refuses to resolve into mysticism or into skepticism. It holds the membrane between self and other, waking and dream, exactly where it is thinnest, and leaves it there. No image has done more to fix the book in the imagination of East Asia, and it has been painted, across China, Korea, and Japan, more often than any other scene in early Chinese letters.

Canon, Commentary, Afterlife

For a book so suspicious of authority, the Zhuangzi climbed steadily into authority’s keeping. As Daoism organized into a religion with monasteries, ordination ranks, and an imperial patronage, its early philosophical texts were absorbed as scripture. In 742, the Tang emperor Xuanzong — a ruler deeply invested in Daoist legitimation of his dynasty, which claimed descent from Laozi — conferred on the Zhuangzi the honorific title Nanhua zhenjing, the “True Classic of Southern Florescence,” and on its putative author the corresponding title of a realized being. The book was now a jing, a canonical scripture, set beside the Tao Te Ching at the heart of the Daoist textual order, and its language of spontaneity and the conservation of vital force fed into the later disciplines of inner alchemy, the neidan tradition that sought immortality through the refinement of breath and qi.

The commentarial tradition that grew around it is enormous, and it begins with the paradox already noted: the standard text is inseparable from Guo Xiang’s editorial hand, so that to read the Zhuangzi is, in part, always to read Guo. After him came Buddhist readers — the fourth-century monk Zhi Dun wrote a celebrated gloss on the opening chapter — and the text became a meeting-ground where incoming Buddhist ideas were rendered into a native vocabulary of emptiness and spontaneity. In the Tang and Song the figure of Cheng Xuanying produced a vast sub-commentary; later Neo-Confucian thinkers, even while attacking Daoist quietism, could not stop reading it. In Japan the book traveled with Chan into the Zen schools and shaped the aesthetics of poetry and the brush; the dreaming butterfly became a Japanese motif as readily as a Chinese one. Across the whole tradition the book was used less as a system to be expounded than as a solvent to be applied to systems — including, with characteristic mischief, to itself.

It reached the modern West in pieces and then whole. Herbert Giles published the first complete English version, Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, in 1889, a fluent and free rendering that did much to fix the book’s reputation as literature. Two years later James Legge gave it a more scholarly treatment as The Writings of Kwang-ze, occupying the bulk of volumes 39 and 40 of the Sacred Books of the East, alongside his rendering of the Tao Te Ching — the version that carried the Zhuangzi into Victorian comparative religion and remains in print and online. Twentieth-century translators, Burton Watson and A. C. Graham foremost among them, refined the scholarship and recovered something of the book’s wildness; Graham’s reconstruction of the textual strata, sorting the Inner Chapters from the later schools, reshaped how the field reads the whole. Brook Ziporyn’s complete translation, issued in 2020 with selections from the traditional commentaries, brought Guo Xiang’s voice back into the English text where the book had spent most of its life: glossed, contested, and never quite pinned down. The goblet, two thousand years on, keeps tipping and righting itself.

→ In the library: The Texts of Tâoism (Legge, SBE 39 & 40) — includes The Writings of Kwang-ze · Chuang Tzŭ: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer (Giles, 1889)

→ Related: Zhuangzi · Tao Te Ching · Taoism · Qi · Confucianism · Daoist Neidan · Immortality · Meditation · Neo Confucianism Song Lixue · Corpus Hermeticum · Gnosticism · Lotus Sutra · Bardo Thodol · Dependent Origination