{xxi} INTRODUCTION1
About Zhuangzi
Not much is known about Zhuang Zhou (ca. 369–286 BCE), who was also called Zhuangzi (“Master Zhuang”), the ostensible author of this work of the same name. What we do know is limited to the brief biography written by Sima Qian (145–86 BCE), telling us simply that Zhuangzi was a native of Meng in the state of Song (present-day Henan province) and served as a minor official in an otherwise unknown locale described as “the lacquer-tree park of Meng.” One brief anecdote about the man is appended: King Wei of the state of Chu, hearing of Zhuangzi’s talents, sent a messenger to offer him financial support and perhaps to invite him to serve as prime minister in his government. Zhuang Zhou is said to have laughed and replied to the messenger:
A thousand measures of gold is a substantial profit, and a prime ministership is an exalted position indeed. But haven’t you ever heard about the ox offered in the official sacrifice? He is generously fed for years and dressed in the finest embroidered fabrics, so that he may one day be led into the Great Temple for slaughter. When that day comes, though he may wish that he were just a little orphaned piglet instead, it is too late! So scram, you! Do not defile me! I’d rather enjoy myself wallowing in the filth than let myself be controlled by some head of state. I’d rather remain without official position to the end of my days, enjoying myself whichever way I wish.
It is probably safe to assume that this story is less factual than rhetorical. That is also true of the tales about the character named “Zhuangzi” that we find in the book that bears his name. Even in this brief sketch, however, we begin to see that convergence of apparently contradictory identities that make Zhuangzi so fascinating: acerbic mystic, subtle rustic, bottom-dweller and high-flyer, unassuming rebel, abstruse jester, frivolous sage. Funny philosophers have always been hard {xxii} to come by; profound comedians perhaps even more so. To enter into this work attributed to Zhuangzi is to find oneself roused and enraptured not only by its intellectual and spiritual depth, but also by its provocative humor and its sonorous beauty. But what is perhaps even more precious and unusual here is that these three heady torques seem to erupt in this work all at once: it is precisely Zhuangzi’s humor that is beautiful, his beauty that is profound, his profundity that is comical. This work defies the dreary but prevalent notion that the serious is the important, that the playful is the inconsequential, and above all that we are under some obligation to draw conclusions about ourselves and our world, and then stick to them. Zhuangzi refuses to let himself be completely known; indeed he seems to deny the possibility and even desirability of total understanding, of himself, or of anything else. But at the same time he shows himself to us, an unignorable and unforgettable presence that is all the more vivid and evocative for his staunch evasion of ultimate knowability or definitive identity. Encountering Zhuangzi opens a window into a world of enlivening confusions, taunting misdirections, surreal grotesqueries, cutting satire, virtuoso reasonings, insouciant despair, mischievous fallacies, morbid exuberances, impudent jokes, and jolting non-sequiturs, which nonetheless has the most profoundly consequential things to say about the gravest human problems of living, dying, and knowing. Who is this man? What is this book?
…
Historical and Philosophical Background
Zhuang Zhou was born into a time of great political and philosophical upheaval and ferment, known as the Warring States Period (575–221 BCE). To get a sense of that time, one must look back to the political situation emerging from the collapse of the Western Zhou empire (1122–770 BCE) and its aftermath.
The Western Zhou had unified the central area of what is now China under a single regime. When it fell apart, a number of de facto independent principalities cropped up, vying for supremacy, each attempting to unify the other states under its own aegis. This provided a kind of open marketplace of potential sponsors for a new class of intellectuals, as all of these rulers were looking for an ideology and set of policies that would both establish their legitimacy as heirs to the Zhou dynasty and allow them to accomplish political unification under their own hegemony.
In this climate, advocates of many contending philosophical schools eventually emerged. The earliest of these private reformers and educators, putting forth a doctrine independent of any particular political power but marketed to various contenders, was Confucius (孔丘 Kong Qiu, ca. 551–479 BCE). Confucius, as represented in the Lunyu (Analects), advocated the cultivation of certain personal qualities—“virtues”—that would allow those who mastered them to form an educated class capable of presiding wisely, benevolently, and effectively over their subjects, inspiring the people to emulate these virtues without having to be commanded to do so, ideally bringing about both social order and personal harmony {xxiii} without recourse to coercion. The virtues in question involved a return to an idealized version of the earlier Zhou ritual forms of social organization, rooted in the relations of the family that were hierarchical but also cemented by bonds of spontaneous affection. The trademark virtues of the Confucians were Humankindness (仁 ren), Responsibility (義 yi), Ritual Propriety (禮 li), and Filial Piety (孝 xiao).2
The work of Confucius was opposed by Mozi, (墨翟 Mo Di) (ca. 450–390 BCE?). Mozi rejected the primacy of the family, and the spontaneous but biased affections that come with it, as a model for social organization. Instead, he proposed a more abstract notion of moral obligation rooted in a utilitarian calculation of maximized material benefits for all, justified not by human fellow-feeling but by the will of an anthropomorphic deity, Heaven, to benefit all equally, and the punishments and rewards enforced by this deity and many lesser ghosts and spirits. In place of filial piety, which prescribed special duties toward one’s family, Mozi put “all-inclusive love” (兼愛 jian ai), meaning the concern for the benefit (construed almost exclusively as enjoyment of material resources) of all equally, kin and non-kin. Rituals such as lavish funeral services and musical ceremonies, which Confucians saw as important expressions of family sentiment and methods for harmonious social consolidation, were seen by Mozi as a useless waste of resources.
The development of Confucian thought was continued by Mencius (孟軻 Meng Ke, ca. 372–289 BCE), a contemporary of Zhuangzi’s (although neither explicitly mentions the other). Mencius defends the Confucian virtues against the Mohist attack by asserting that their seeds are in some sense built into the human person at birth, such that their cultivation and development are at the same time the maximal satisfaction of the natural “Heaven-conferred” dispositions of human beings, which motivates Mencius’s famous slogan, “Human nature is good.” The exact sense in which this was meant continues to be the subject of much scholarly disagreement.
The Mohists and the Confucians each have their own “Course” (道 dao). The term dao is cognate with the term for “to lead or guide” (導) and can also mean “to speak.” Hence its prescriptive force is particularly pronounced. When used in Confucian and Mohist texts of this period, it could perhaps be translated, following Chad Hansen, as “guiding (dis)course.” The term originally meant a set of practices designed to guide one’s behavior in some specific way so as to promote the attainment of some predetermined value or objective: social harmony, personal contentment, material benefit. The term dao (“course,” “way,” “method,” “path,”) is thus initially used by both the Confucians and Mohists to denote their “way” of doing things, their particular tradition of values and behaviors, including the exemplary deeds of a teacher and the guiding discourse prescribing a course of study and emulation, and the resulting set of practices (e.g., the system of traditional ritual), which lead to the attainment of the preconceived {xxiv} value. When these practices are mastered and internalized, one has “attained (i.e., mastered) the Course” or “the Way” in question, and this “attainment” (得 de) is what is known as “Virtuosity” or “Virtue” (德 de).
Thus, there are many daos, many courses: the course of the ancient kings, the course of Heaven, the course of charioteering, the course of swordsmanship, the course of all-inclusive love, the course of filial piety, the course of Confucius, the course of Mozi. One studies and practices one of these courses, thereby mastering a predetermined skill, a virtuosity that involves both dividing the world up in the way prescribed by the system of terms employed in the guidance provided by that course, and in turn valuing and disvaluing things and acting accordingly. The courses advocated by the Confucians and Mohists in some ways contradicted each other: some of what one affirmed as right (e.g., filial piety, lavish funerals; or, conversely, all-inclusive love and frugality in funerals) the other negated as wrong.
Sometime after Mozi, another position, later known as “Daoist,” came to be articulated in a probably gradually compiled, multiauthored text known as the Daodejing, later associated with the mythical figure Laozi (or Lao Dan, as he is usually called in the Zhuangzi). This text marks a major break, indeed a deliberate 180-degree turnaround, from the understanding of dao found in the Confucian and Mohist schools, developing a new and profoundly different, ironic meaning of the term dao.3 In this context, Dao is precisely what is free of purpose and specific guidelines, the exact opposite of the traditional meaning of dao. Yet it is still called a dao. Why? Because it does in fact do what the traditional daos promised to do: generate the things we see, know, and want. Most daos were seen as generating these things through deliberate human action, and initially even the Course of Heaven was seen as involving Heaven’s intention. But as the concept of Heaven came to be increasingly naturalized in this period, among Confucians if not among Mohists, Heaven’s Course came to be seen as producing what we see, know, and want without any deliberate intentions, explicit commands, or purposeful actions.4 The Course of Heaven is thus closely associated with the shift in the meaning of dao effected by the early Daoists, and the term “Heaven” occurs frequently in Daoist works, though now Heaven, formerly a commanding and controlling deity, is also explicitly divested of conscious knowing and moral desiderata. Indeed, central to the Daoist idea is a critique of conscious knowledge and moral ideals as such. Our attention is directed away from the foreground purposes of human activity and toward the background, that is, what normally escapes our awareness. This move reorients our focus toward the spontaneous and purposeless processes in nature and man that undergird and produce things, begin things, end things, compose the stuff of things, and guide things along their courses by not deliberately guiding them at all. This can be viewed as a new stress on Nature as opposed to Man, but only if “nature” is understood precisely as {xxv} “spontaneity,” that is, what is so without conscious planning or purpose, not nature understood as a product of a purposeful creator that abides by the laws He imposes upon it and reveals thereby the glory of His intelligence and goodness.
The Daodejing is never quoted or directly alluded to in the Inner Chapters (though it is often quoted verbatim in the rest of the Zhuangzi), but some similar ideas concerning daos and dao are found there. For example, we find Zhuangzi saying that when the Course becomes explicit, it ceases to be the Course (Chapter 2, p. 18), which could stand almost as an exact paraphrase of the first line of the received version of the Daodejing. It is impossible to know whether these considerations are arrived at independently, or if the tradition that produced the Daodejing also had some influence on Zhuangzi. But in any case, it is to these philosophical controversies over alternate daos that we find Zhuangzi responding in the Inner Chapters.
There is another development in Chinese thought that has a deep impact on Zhuangzi, setting the stage quite directly for his work and marking it off sharply from other Daoist texts. This is the emergence of a form of logical disputation represented here by Zhuangzi’s great buddy, sparring partner, straight man, and arch-foil, Huizi (Hui Shi, ca. 370–310 BCE). Huizi figures prominently throughout the Inner Chapters, even when he is not explicitly named.5 The standard thirty-three-chapter version of the Zhuangzi, furthermore, concludes with a long description of Huizi’s work and a heartfelt but biting lament over his shortcomings (see Chapter 33). On the basis of these descriptions, it seems that Huizi developed a method of overturning all common-sense assertions by showing that the distinctions on which they are based depend on the particular perspectives from which they are drawn, making them inherently negotiable. Thus all our usual distinctions about units of time and space, and even of “sameness” and “difference” in general, are relative and malleable. It would seem that part of Huizi’s object in pressing this point was to show the contradiction entailed in making any distinctions at all, for the sole positive ethical pronouncement attributed to him {xxvi} in Chapter 33, at the end of a long string of paradoxes, is “Love all things without exception, for Heaven and Earth are one body.” As A. C. Graham has suggested, just as Zeno’s paradoxes are generally interpreted as intended to support the Parmenidean thesis of absolute oneness of Being, Huizi would seem to be using a similar sort of reductio ad absurdum as a support for a crypto-Mohist injunction to love all things equally. Zhuangzi has much in common with Huizi: the method of revealing the presuppositions underlying seemingly unproblematic claims, the mastery of dialectic, the thesis of relativity to perspective, the penchant for paradox, the suspicion of distinctions, and the interest in the oneness of all things. Indeed, it seems possible, if not likely, that Zhuangzi directly adopted all this from Huizi, taking them over from him wholesale. And yet Zhuangzi objects strenuously to his friend’s position, the ridicule of which is one of the most vital motifs running through this entire work. For it appears to Zhuangzi that Huizi wants to win arguments by proving that all things are really one, and therefore that one really should choose the path of loving all equally. Huizi provides an answer to the questions: what is the case (all things are one body), how can I know it (through reasoning and dialectic, which relativize all distinctions), and therefore how should I live my life (love all things equally). In doing so, he asserts the unique ascendancy of his own position and practices, as the one who can victoriously demonstrate and proclaim this. It is to this that Zhuangzi lovingly and laughingly objects, undermining it by means of a further extension of Huizi’s own premises. Zhuangzi seems to adopt everything from Huizi except his answers—and his concomitant status as “the one with the answers.”
The questions Zhuangzi faces are indeed among the most fundamental human problems: How should I live my life? Which of the alternate courses should I take as my guide? And how is it that I come to choose one course over another? Given that there are alternate ways of seeing things, why do I, and why should I, see things the way I do rather than another way, and thus follow one path rather than another? Zhuangzi’s response to this problem, simply stated, is this: this question can never be answered in the terms in which it has been put, because our understanding consciousness can never know why it sees things one way rather than another, can never ultimately ground its own judgments, and is actually in no position to serve as a guide for living. To consciously weigh alternatives, apply your understanding to making a decision about what is best and then deliberately follow the course you have decided on—this is the fundamental structure of all purposive activity and conscious knowledge, the basis of all ethics, all philosophy, all politics, all human endeavors at improvement, and this is precisely what Zhuangzi seems to consider ridiculous and impossible. Knowledge is unreliable; Will is unreliable; Tradition is unreliable; Society is unreliable; Intuition is unreliable; Logic is unreliable; Faith is unreliable. But what else is there?
Multiple Perspectives of the Inner Chapters
There has been considerable diversity of opinion in understanding Zhuangzi as a philosopher, somewhat exacerbated by recent attempts by Western readers to fit {xxvii} him into a familiar Occidental philosophical category. Is Zhuangzi, even merely in the Inner Chapters, a mystic? A skeptic? A metaphysical monist? A spirit-body dualist? An intuitionist? A theist? A deist? An agnostic? A relativist? A fatalist? A nihilist? A linguistic philosopher? An existentialist? Or perhaps a poet uncommitted to any particular philosophical position? All of these have been suggested and aggressively argued for, and indeed none of these interpretations is without support in the text. There are places where Zhuangzi speaks as if he were a mystic in the traditional sense, or a skeptic, or a monist, a dualist, an intuitionist, a theist, a deist, an agnostic, a relativist, and so on. The reader would do well to note as she proceeds through the text the passages that, taken on their own, might lead to these conclusions. Like a mystic, Zhuangzi often seems to speak of a state that transports one beyond ordinary reason and sensation and puts one in touch with an alternate, life-changing realm of experience. Like a skeptic, he has many cutting observations to make about the limits of all possible forms of knowledge and ridicules the dogmatism of anyone who claims to know anything conclusively. Like a monist, we find in his work the repeated assertion that “all things are one.” Like a spirit-matter dualist, we find him telling stories of the negligibility of the physical body, however deformed it may be, in favor of “what moves the body.” Like an intuitionist, his dismissal of rational knowledge sometimes seems to point to some alternate type of knowing which can escape the skeptical objections he presents. Like a theist, we find him presenting characters who speak piously of submitting to the will of an anthropomorphized “Creator of Things.” Like a deist, we find a softer version of this trope that severely limits what can be known of this creator, even its personal character and relationship to human beings. Like an agnostic, we finally find him questioning even his ability to know what the Heavenly is, whether the Heavenly is not really the Human or vice versa. Like a relativist, he asserts that all words are acceptable, all courses right, in relation to the perspective from which they are pronounced. Like a fatalist, he speaks of Fate as something about which nothing can be done, which is simply to be accepted as unavoidable. Like a nihilist, he denies the distinction between right and wrong, and even whether we can know whether knowing is knowing or not-knowing. Like a philosopher of language, he presents devastating insights into the character of discourse and its effect on our beliefs about the world and about values. Like an existentialist, he seems to conceive the range of human transformation to be unbounded, and the values that guide it to lie in the hands of each individual and to be renewed moment by moment.
This list could be extended. But it is obvious that many of these positions seem to be starkly opposed or at least incompatible. Does Zhuangzi somehow really combine them all? Can the contradiction be alleviated by judging some of these impressions to be plain misreadings, not really intended in the text? Or are some additions by later editors who didn’t understand its philosophy? Is there some hierarchy of provisional and more ultimate formulations that would allow us to order them, so that some are to be taken as rhetorical, therapeutic, or jocular formulations while others express Zhuangzi’s real position? Are all these positions {xxviii} just thrown together incoherently? Or is there some coherent way to integrate all these different strands into one vision?
Like any translator, I have my own opinions about what I think Zhuangzi is getting at here, and how his text has been arranged to express that vision. Readers interested in understanding the philosophical interpretation that informs this translation are invited to consult “Zhuangzi as Philosopher” on this volume’s title support page at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangzisup, where an extended analysis of the philosophical arguments and implications of the Inner Chapters, and their manner of solving the apparent contradictions between relativism and absolutism, between skepticism and mysticism, is offered. (In addition, the reader will find there an account of recent scholarly analysis of the grouping and dating of chapters of the text, a more detailed discussion of the notion of Dao as developed in the Daodejing, and notes on the method of translation and conventions used in this volume.) But conclusions are perhaps the least important thing to be gained from reading the Zhuangzi, and it is hoped that the delicious experience of grappling with and being jostled about by this text will allow readers to come to their own conclusions about it—and then perhaps to question those conclusions, and try out some others.
1. Reprinted, with abridgements, from the “Introduction” to Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, translated by Brook Ziporyn (Hackett, 2009).
2. See the Glossary for a further discussion of the notion of “virtue” (or “Virtuosity”) in general, and of the Confucian virtues of humankindness and responsible conduct.
3. See “The Dao of the Daodejing” at https://www.hackettpublishing.com/zhuangzisup for a fuller exposition of the meaning of dao in the Daodejing.
4. see Glossary for a fuller discussion of the term “Heaven.”
5. He appears explicitly in Chapters 1, 2, 5, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27 and 33, but implicit references to and critiques of his thought are found much more frequently. Indeed, the rhetorical framing of Zhuangzi’s first chapter (its opening trope and its final two dialogues) might suggest the hypothesis that the Inner Chapters were written by Zhuang Zhou precisely as a response to Huizi, perhaps intended for the latter’s eyes in particular, almost as a private joke. We are told, after all, that Zhuangzi considered Huizi the only one who really understood his words, the only one for whom he spoke or wrote (see Chapter 24). The chapter begins with a vast fish that transforms into a vast bird and is then ridiculed for his high flying by smaller birds gazing up at him from the ground. It ends with two dialogues between Zhuangzi and Huizi, which closely parallel the structure of the relationship between Peer Phoenix and the little birds. Another story of a confrontation between Zhuangzi and Huizi (Chapter 17) supports the view that the large-and-small-bird trope symbolizes Zhuangzi’s view of their relationship. There, Zhuangzi, after hearing that Huizi believes him to be after his official position, tells the story of a tiny creature who screeches at a vast one uncomprehendingly. The rhetorical trope there (“In the southern region there is a bird, and its name is …” and so on) closely parallels the opening tale of Peer Phoenix and the little birds, with Huizi compared to the latter and Zhuangzi to the former.