{xviii} ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people have contributed to the work that went into producing this book that it is hard to know where to start in offering thanks. But first and foremost I must offer my heartfelt gratitude to my students in the many courses and reading groups focused on the Zhuangzi (and other key texts in early Chinese thought) over the past two decades at Northwestern University, National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, and, presently, at the University of Chicago. Reading the Zhuangzi with these students, both graduate and undergraduate, both before and after my own first partial translation became available, has been one of the great joys of my life and one of the most fruitful of my professional experiences. As I started to produce drafts of the translation for this volume over the past few years, I have often proffered them to the students as materials for class, in spite of whatever confusing state of disarray they were in—sometimes overwritten with seven or eight contradictory versions of a single line of text coded in various colors and burdened with elaborate half-completed footnotes. The discussions and questions that emerged in the process, from all the varying perspectives and in light of all the varying degrees of familiarity brought to the table by this great diversity of students, was invaluable in improving not only the precision and grace of the language but my own understanding of the text. I apologize to these students if I was abdicating my proper pedagogical responsibility by throwing such a tangled mess of possibilities and ambiguities under their noses. I suppose the hope is that this uncut blob of chaos and the shared slow process of navigating through it might have been at least one way to get a taste of the boundless horizons within the Zhuangzi, as well as those it can open up outside it.

The acuity of these students bears eloquent witness to the excellence of their other mentors and instructors, among whom I must especially single out my very eminent current sinological colleagues at the University of Chicago—above all Edward Shaughnessy, Donald Harper, Paul Copp, and Huan Suassy—for special thanks. My own sensitivity to many crucial philological and cultural issues informing this text has been greatly enhanced by their superlative work in the field and the scholarly environment it has fostered.

I would also like to thank the participants in the two “Zhuangzi: Beyond the Inner Chapters” conferences that were held, with uncanny good timing, just in the midst of my heaviest work on this translation: in 2017 (at the University of Hawaii at Manao) and 2018 (at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago). {xix} My thanks also to the participants in the “Global Reception of the Classic Zhuangzi: Han to Tang” at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 2019. The detailed, intensive, insightful, and masterful presentations at these three events, and the erudite and provocative conversations that followed, have left all sorts of subtle traces throughout this volume, bringing to light overlooked dimensions of nuance, whether through tentative speculation or through passionate advocacy, of various interpretative suggestions, often spurring me to pursue new directions of experimentation down to the level of sentence structure and word choice in the translation, which have improved it immensely. Among these participants were not only pillars of the field and intimate longtime interlocutors like Franklin Perkins, erstwhile coworkers and brilliant exegetes of classical Chinese like So Jeong Park, remote friends and exemplars of the Daoist and philosophical counter-virtues like Hans-Georg Moeller, but also some rising stars with whom I’ve had the opportunity to work over a period of years—Sonya Ozbey, Asia Guzowska, John Williams—as well as a murderers’ row of eminent scholars, including Richard John Lynn, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Esther Klein, Erica Fox Brindley, Hagop Sarkissian, Steven Coutinho Wim De Reu, David Chai, Mercedes Valmisa, Wendy Swartz, Jesse Chapman, Friederike Assandri, Jiang Limei, Tobias Zürn, Michael Dufresne, Jing Liu, and David McCraw, all of whom are owed my gratitude.

I would also like to single out another participant at the two Beyond the Inner Chapters meetings: my erstwhile student Dr. Stephen Walker, who was working with me on what turned out to be his very fine dissertation on the Zhuangzi at the University of Chicago during this period. Stephen made time not only to organize the Chicago conference in 2018 but also to closely read early drafts of several chapters of this translation, leading to hours of sometimes raucous but always highly enjoyable conversation and close analysis of textual intricacies, and making many valuable observations and suggestions, some of which I wound up adopting. But even when I ended up going another way, the demanding standards of justification required to push back against Stephen’s perspicacious observations greatly augmented the coherence and the precision of the final work. Tyler Neenan, another very gifted and promising student but now only at the very beginning of his doctoral studies, has also provided indispensable help in the final stages of preparing the manuscript for publication.

Also I must mention my great fortune to have had the opportunity, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, to invite four Visiting Scholars to the University of Chicago in 2018–2019: Richard J. Sage, Professor Lai Shi-San (Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan), Professor Lin Su-Chuan (Cheng’gung University, Taiwan), and Professor Cheng Kai-yuan (Yangming University, Taiwan). All four of these new friends, fine scholars, and lively interlocutors participated in my Zhuangzi seminar and reading groups during that time, and all made spectacularly insightful and useful contributions, opening up new dimensions to my thinking about the Zhuangzi text, about early Chinese thought more broadly, and about the wider post- comparative contexts in modern philosophy that bear most urgently upon its current reception and interpretation. The detailed and highly observant notes to {xx} some of the draft translations of chapters provided by Richard Sage, long intensely engaged with the closely related text of the Liezi, intensified my attention to many subtle textual issues, greatly improving the translation. Over the same period, learning to speak and write in new ways about the Zhuangzi during the nascent collaborative project begun with the inimitable Professor Lai, my brother from another mother, has been a great boon on every level, sparking fresh insights and inroads into the text and beyond, for all of which I am deeply grateful.

I would also like to offer my heartfelt thanks to Deborah Wilkes and the entire staff at Hackett for their sympathetic support and assistance, without which this work would not have been possible.