The life

Zhuang Zhou lived during the Warring States period, when rival Chinese kingdoms fought constantly and wandering philosophers competed to advise their rulers. He came from Meng, a town in the small state of Song, and is said to have worked as a minor official in charge of a lacquer garden.

Where other thinkers offered rulers systems for order, he offered stories: a butcher whose knife never dulls because he cuts along the natural joints, a gnarled tree that survives because no carpenter wants it, a debate with his friend, the logician Hui Shi, about whether anyone can know that fish are happy.

In one story, the king of Chu sends messengers to offer him the post of prime minister. Zhuangzi, who is fishing, asks whether a sacred tortoise would rather be dead and honored in a temple or alive and dragging its tail in the mud, and sends the messengers away.

When his wife died, his friend found him drumming on a tub and singing. Zhuangzi explained that he had grieved, then came to see her death as part of a change as natural as the turning of the seasons.

The book that carries his name became one of the founding texts of Daoism, and for more than two thousand years it has shaped Chan and Zen Buddhism, Chinese poetry and Chinese painting.

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzŭ, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. … Suddenly, I awaked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

Zhuangzi, chapter 2. Translated by Herbert A. Giles, 1889.

Questions to talk about

1. Why might a philosopher choose stories and jokes instead of rules?
2. What is the point of the butterfly dream if Zhuangzi never answers his own question?
3. Is the “useless” tree really useless? What is Zhuangzi saying about usefulness?

More lives

All the mystics →