There is no evidence of an organised school of Chuang-tzŭ surviving his death, and indeed very little of disciples receiving formal instruction in his lifetime.1 However, the last six of the Outer chapters (chapters 17–22) are pervaded by the thought and phrasing of the Inner chapters, as is a great deal of material in the more miscellaneous parts of the collection. Certainly there was a tradition of thinking and writing in the manner of Chuang-tzŭ in the third and probably the second century BC, whether through personal or merely written influences.
How do we know that these documents were not written by Chuang-tzŭ himself? Both in thought and in style there is much in them which would not disgrace Chuang-tzŭ, and they often illuminate him by putting his thought more lucidly and directly. However, although it may be better not to draw too sharp a line, there is no mistaking the impression that something has changed – moderated – when one passes from the Inner to the Outer chapters, and that Chuang-tzŭ’s own voice is never heard clearly again except in bits of the ‘ragbag’ parts of the Mixed chapters. The bolder, the outrageous side of Chuang-tzŭ has disappeared – the cripples, freaks and mutilated criminals, the ravings of Chieh Yü the madman of Ch’u, the extravagant praise of uselessness, the identification of waking and dreaming, the iconoclastic confrontations with death (although we do have the last in some stories about Chuang-tzŭ himself). So has the intellectual dimension of Chuang-tzŭ, the side of him which delights in playing with and challenging reason – although there is one beautiful example of it in the Outer chapters, the argument with Hui Shih about whether the fish are happy.2 There is also a change in the attitude to Confucius; Chuang-tzŭ never betrayed his fundamental respect for the great moralist, but in the Outer chapters Old Tan (still only a minor figure for Chuang-tzŭ) has risen to such eminence that he can condescend to Confucius. Lao-tzŭ, the book ascribed to Old Tan, begins to be echoed in the Outer chapters, although Chuang-tzŭ never showed acquaintance with it. We meet too with philosophical terms or combinations of terms important in later Taoism but not yet found in the Inner chapters, such as man’s ‘nature’ (hsing), the freeing of the Taoist from the world’s ‘ties’ (lei), the ‘Way and the Power’ as concepts granted equal status and paired, and a new word for the sage’s ‘stillness’, ching. On the other hand we no longer have the universe conjured up before us as ‘that hugest of clumps of soil’, nor do we hear again of the ‘maker of things’ until the account of Chuang-tzŭ himself in ‘Below in the empire’ at the very end of the book.
In the last six Outer chapters which are the heart of the ‘School of Chuang-tzŭ’ material one has a vague impression, widely shared by scholars, that the editor must have been trying to group his documents around the themes which he had chosen for the Inner chapters. Thus ‘Utmost joy’ (chapter 18) shares the theme of death with ‘The ultimate ancestor as teacher’, while ‘Fathoming nature (chapter 19) suggests ‘What matters in the nurture of life’. This regrouping of passages by different writers would explain why none of the chapters shows clear evidence of coming from a single hand, and why we find material which clearly belongs together scattered over these and other chapters. (See for example the dispersal of the ‘Great Man’ passages, discussed on p. 143 below). We shall not attempt a complete or consecutive translation of the ‘School of Chuang-tzŭ’ documents. In a book where the translator is always in danger of losing his bearings and letting himself float on a stream of verbiage, it will be safer to select only passages which we can put in coherent settings, and juxtapose them so that they throw light on each other.