When was zhuangzi written

It should be aware of its limitations, and accept the possibility of other points of view. Humans perpetuate the error made by the summer-born bug, and have been doing so for more than two thousand years. They say that a certain monarch once offered Zhuangzi the post of Prime Minister. He refused. Now that is an earnest renouncement of fame and fortune. His stories were certainly not idle chit-chat.

He practised what he preached. The most famous is about a dream he once dreamed. He dreams of a butterfly, then imagines himself as the butterfly; until he no longer knows whether he is Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of a man called Zhuangzi. It has to be the best dream in history. Since when did we stop having wonderful dreams like that?

Since when did our dreams become nothing more than objects for psychopathology? The opening story of the text, the tale of the Peng Bird, illustrates precisely the way that Zhuangzi makes his point through a mixture of nonsense, close reasoning, and alluring literary skill. We never know when to take him seriously. It is because there is right, that there is wrong; it is because there is wrong, there is right. Thereupon the self is also the other; the other is also the self.

The world as it is, the Dao, possesses no sort of boundaries, it is a unified whole. Most of the chapters are a series of brief but rambling essays, which mix together statements that may be true with others that are absurd, and tales about real or imaginary figures.

It is never a good idea to assume that when Zhuangzi states something as fact that he believes it to be true, or that he cares whether we believe it or not. He makes up facts all the time. It is also best to assume that every tale told in the Zhuangzi is fictional, that Zhuangzi knew that he had invented it, and that he did not expect anyone to believe his stories. From its opening passage, which tells us about a ten-thousand mile long bird and what a cicada and dove have to say about it, we enter a world filled with fabulous beasts, imaginary plants, and flying immortals.

Sometimes Confucius is pictured as a buffoon, a pompous fool despised by characters more in tune with Daoist ideas. For Zhuangzi, as for Laozi, all values that humans hold dear -- good and bad; beauty and ugliness -- are non-natural and do not really exist outside of our very arbitrary prejudices.

But Zhuangzi goes farther. He attacks our belief that there are any firm facts in the world. Once, in the distant past, human beings saw the world as a whole and themselves as a part of this whole, without any division between themselves and the surrounding context of Nature. But since the invention of words and language, human beings have come to use language to say things about the world, and this has had the effect of cutting up the world in our eyes.

When humans invent a name, suddenly the thing named appears to stand apart from the rest of the world, distinguished by the contours of its name definition. In time, our perception of the world has degenerate from a holistic grasping of it as a single system, to a perception of a space filled with individual items, each having a name.

Every time we use language and assert something about the world, we reinforce this erroneous picture of the world. The dynamic operation of the world-system as a whole is the Dao. The partition of the world into separate things is the outcome of non-natural, human language-based thinking. Like Laozi, Zhuangzi does not detail any single practical path that can lead us to achieve so dramatic a change in perspective.

But his book is filled with stories of people who seem to have made this shift, and some of these models offer interesting possibilities. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are.

Another artistic master who appears in the book is a hunchback who has perfected the fine art of catching cicadas on the end of a pole with sticky grease smeared on it, a skill he performs in a clearing deep in the woods. These exemplars seem to have found a way to re-perceive experience through the mastery of certain types of skill, and this may be one route that Zhuangzi is suggesting to guide us towards the new world perspective that escapes the prison that language has built for us.

Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but qi is empty and waits on all things. The Dao gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind. These portraits of ways towards wisdom suggest that while Zhuangzi believes that our ideas about facts in the world are fundamentally distorted forms of knowledge, he does not hold a completely relativistic view of knowledge.

There is no single Zhuangzi syllabus that can compare to the elaborate ritual syllabus that Confucius devised for his school. But Zhuangzi does seem different from Laozi in trying to give concrete hints about the path to his vision of perfected wisdom. As his book twists its way through bizarre anecdotes and oddly phrased ruminations, Zhuangzi employs his central interest in picturing our knowledge and values as relative to explore a variety of interesting and important themes.

Our location and trajectory makes us receptive to some and not other avenues of learning. The boy was unable to master the Handan way of walking because of the way he had already learned to walk. The monkey keeper could accommodate the monkeys, but still disagreed with them about the importance of the breakfast-dinner choice.

That someone understands and agrees with both of us does not make his judgment correct. The final skepticism concerns whether these paths of progress of perspectives must or will converge on a single outcome.

When we have an accommodation you and I come to a common agreement you and I may both rate it as progress. However, it does not imply we have moved to a higher state of overall insight along an absolute scale—or from any arbitrary third point of view.

We can advise and recommend our normative perspective on others, but their being able to appreciate and use it depends on their capacities, options and situation. At this point, Zhuangzi starts to draw an analogy of dreaming and waking up to the shift in gestalt that comes when we leap to a more comprehensive perspective. At awakening, we immediately appreciate the unreality of the dream, yet within the dream, we can have a similar gestalt shift and dream of having dreamed and interpreted that deeper dream.

So, is there an ultimate or final possible such shift in gestalt—some final state of knowing what to do? It seems to suggest that the gestalt sense of liberation from error may even be reciprocal. Perhaps our subsequent perspective is one from which most would move to our former perspective. Adolescent conversion can be to or from a religion. Utilitarianism is a natural constraint, an allegedly single naturally correct way for all of us to choose our course.

In effect, Zhuangzi is more of a natural pluralist, with the natural outcome of morality the product of ongoing individual and social construction.

We and our circumstances change as we each find, choose and walk different naturally evolving paths. This does not entail we should not advocate our own way. We express perspectives located in a real world of indexed points from which we choose behavioral paths. If the latter, then their views are both unintelligible and irrelevant to us.

What they would do in our situation does not constitute helpful advice to us. To advocate following the advice of these ideal observers is to speak practical nonsense to non-ideal, actual actors. Someone like that could ride on clouds and air, straddle the sun and moon, and wander beyond the four oceans. Death and life are not different for him, much less the inclinations of benefit and harm.

My kind sir what do you say of this? Furthermore, you have jumped to conclusions…. However, in later chapters, Zhuangzi himself seems to recommend to us examples of such spectacular capacities—the most beautifully and elaborately expressed of which is the passage celebrating Butcher Ding.

Butcher Ding carved an ox for Lord Wen Hui; his point of contact, the way he inclined his torso, his foot position, the angle of his knee … gliding, flowing! It was as if he were dancing the Faun Ballet or directing an opera. When I began to carve oxen, what I saw was nothing but the oxen. I rely on natural guiding structures, separate out the great chunks and steer through empty gaps depending on the anatomy.

I evade places where cords and filaments intertwine, much less the large bones. A good cook gets a new knife every year; he chops! Mediocre cooks change knives monthly; they hack. It even allows the edge wander in with ample room to play. The Zhuangzi plays several variations on this theme. Sometimes the virtuoso performer catches cicadas on a sticky rod, another crafts chariot wheels, there are musicians, debaters, and thieves. The tales often highlight the tranquil state that accompanies behavior that skillfully follows a natural path.

The performances look and feel effortless. These behaviors become second-nature. We move beyond anything like sub-vocalizing instructions, deliberating or reflecting—and yet we are concentrating intently on the behavior. The range of his examples reminds us that such satisfying states of performance can be experienced in even the most low caste and mundane of activities, including butchering, criminal skills, as well as in the finest of arts, and philosophy.

Another feature of this theme is the observation that such expertise in performance always comes with some kind of limitation—not least that each example is a different person with a different knack. The wheelwright could not teach his son the art; the musician cannot play all the notes and only reaches true perfection when he dwells in silence. The theme of this weak skeptical relativism plays out smoothly into the classical Chinese focus on paths as the model of normativity and the objects of knowledge.

Paths are everywhere, but guide natural kinds from particular space-time locations and can guide a wide range of behavior types, normative subject matters. Zhuangzi does not ground his skepticism in an account of specifically human epistemic deficiencies. We are one among many natural creatures with different capacities choosing paths from their indexed point in space and time. The skeptical theme is the wide range of our different perspectives. We are limited mainly in the sense that there is no behavior from the point of view of the whole—there is no omniscient perspective on the path structure.

And we may always wonder if our judgment about which is best now is about the best in the long run. All we can substitute for this global perspective is some local consensus. The weak skeptical conclusion is most strikingly expressed in the observation that introduces the chapter with the story of Cook Ding.

The wide range of alternative views and approaches can only be hinted at in this bibliography. Particularly helpful are a number of collections of work dedicated to the understanding of Zhuangzi. They include in order of publication :. Zhuangzi First published Wed Dec 17, Evolving Text Theory 3.

Competing Interpretive Narratives 4. A Modern Philosophical Interpretation 4. Modern text theory concerning the Zhuangzi grows from two recent discoveries. The reconstruction of the Later Mohist dialectical works and Archeological reconstructions of the text of the Daode Jing. The following section discusses their twin impact on our view of Zhuangzi.

The pipes of earth, these are the hollows everywhere; the pipes of men, these are rows of tubes. Tell me about the pipes of Heaven. It seems as if there is a natural authority, but we cannot find its authoritative source. Should I be pleased with them all? Among them, should we deem some as rulers and as servants? Are the rulers and servants incapable of governing each other? Are they not capable of taking turns as ruler and servants?

Is there a genuine ruler among them? That which it languages is decidedly not yet fixed. Is the eventual result that they have there is language? Or there has never been language? Deeming it as different from bird calls: does that mark a distinction? Or is there no distinction? The conventional is useful; the useful, communicable, and the communicable achievable. And yours? Are they partly right and partly wrong?

Or jointly right and jointly wrong? You and I cannot know between ourselves, so another human inherently inherits our obscurity and doubt. To whom can we go to correct us? Employing someone who agrees with you, given that they are like you, how can they correct the situation?

Employing someone who agrees with me, given that they are like me, how can they correct it? Employ someone different from both me and you to correct it, given that they are different from us both, how can they correct it?

Employ someone who is like both of us to correct it, given that they are like us both, how can they correct it? So you and I and others cannot know, and in these condition on what other can we rely? Harmonize them with glances at nature and make them dependent on eventual consensus and with that exhaust the years. Zhuangzi and Hui Shi wandered over the Hao River bridge. I knew it here above the Hao. Thing kinds have unlimited measurement ways of measuring ; Time has no end; distinctions have no constancy, beginning and ending no inherent cause.

Because of this great knowing is viewed within a range of distant and close. And have you alone not heard tell of those from Shou-ling who studied walking with those in Handan? So with no substantive loss, he could change their anger to happiness. And we can call this walking as pairs.

How do I know that loving life is not a form of ignorance? How do I know the dead do not regret their former clinging to life, We dream of eating and drinking and on awaking cry bitterly, we dream of weeping and wailing and awake in a good mood to go off hunting.

On awakening, we know it was a dream, and there could be another greater awakening in which we know a greater dream, and under these the conditions the ignorant think they are as enlightened as if they had learned it by an investigation. Gentlemen to shepherds inherently do this! Once before, Zhuangzi dreamt of being a butterfly, gaily butterflying and himself embodied in this sense of purpose!

He knew nothing of Zhuangzi. Suddenly awakening, he then is rooted in Zhuangzi. Splendidly done! Can talent extend even to this?. Substantively, in the end, is there success and defect? Substantively, in the end, is there neither success nor defect? If we can call these successful, then even I am also successful. If they cannot be called successful, then neither I nor any other thing may be called successful. For this reason, illumination of slippery doubt is that which sages target.

For this reason, we do not use it and let things rest in the conventional. My life is limited and know-how is unlimited. To pursue the unlimited with the limited is dangerous.

Translations include: Graham, Angus C. Watson, Burton trans. Ziporyn, Brook, They include in order of publication : Mair, Victor. Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu. Ivanhoe, eds.

Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi. Despite the title, the writers share concerns about understanding Zhuangzi in skeptical or relativist terms. Each has a different alternative characterization. Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi. Ames ed. Callahan, William A. Chong, Kim Chong, et al. Connolly, Tim, Coutinho, Steve, Fox, Alan, Fraser, Chris, Giles, H.

Murray; reprint, London: J. Quaritch; 2nd rev. During the Han period the book Zhuangzi was not yet regarded with high esteem. The Zhuangzi is also very important for its information on the proponents of other philosophical schools regularly cited. Zhuangzi expresses his philosophical thoughts by anecdotes which makes the book very amusing and readable, besides of the high literary quality.

Some critics also say that Zhuangzi in some chapters exerted hypnomancy interpretation of dreams. The book Zhuangzi was at all times very attractive because of its metaphorical language. It is an appealing counterpart and completion of the mysterious and obscure statements in the Daodejing. Zhuangzi's high literary standards made it furthermore a favoured reading of the educated class, even the Confucians. Zhuangzi's philosophy The Way dao of nature and the life of non-activity.

Furthermore, situation and status change permanently, which makes it all the more difficult to establish comparisons or clear boundaries. The smallness of a sparrow and the monstrous dimension of the leviathan are only perceivable in comparison to each other, but not in an objective sense.

The philosopher who is able to make himself free of such scales and relative comparisons, will be happy to wander around in a "free and easy" manner. For him, even the difference between life and death or its alleged happiness and tristesse, respectively, is of no importance. It can be transmitted but is not touchable, it can be obtained but not be seen. It has root and branches, but is not implanted in Heaven and Earth, and it exists since countless ages.

If the Dao can be seen or heard of touched, this is not the true Dao. The one Dao , as the origin of all things, is simultaneously covering everything. Relativism and constant change. Both come to the conclusion that size, value, life and death, and right and wrong are relative characteristics, but seen from the absolute side of the Dao, there is nothing like small and great "the largest thing is an autumn hair, and Mt.

Living — or, as a ruler, reigning — in a natural way means to give reins to all events without actively changing anything. From the economic side, "non-acting" wuwei is liberalism, and it was also interpreted in this sense during the early Han period, before the state monopolies on salt and iron were introduced. The most famous parable demonstrating the vanishing of any level of reality behind a flux of identities is Zhuang Zhou's dream of being a butterfly who dreams that he is Zhuangzi.

The chapter "Under Heaven" can be called the first history of Chinese philosophy. The author of this chapters holds that Daoism was the most ancient philosophy, from which the various interpretations of the Dao resulted in the emergence of various schools, like the Confucians, the legalists, sophists, etc.

Yet he also stressed that all these schools function like the organs of one body, with their specific strengths and functions.