Zhuangzi

A 33-chapter text, of an original 52, traditionally divided into 7 Inner Chapters generally accepted as substantially the work of the historical Zhuang Zhou (c. 369-286 BC), 15 Outer Chapters, and 11 Miscellaneous Chapters composed by a range of later hands over the following two centuries, some reflecting primitivist, syncretist, or Yangist strands quite different in tone and doctrine from the Inner Chapters' distinctive voice.

Its central argument is a radical perspectivism, developed at length in the chapter 'Qi Wu Lun' (Equalizing Things): what looks useful, beautiful, or true depends entirely on the vantage point from which it is judged, so the sage does not adjudicate between competing claims but learns to 'walk two roads' at once. Usefulness itself is relativized through parables like the gnarled tree spared the woodcutter's axe precisely because its unusable shape makes it useless for lumber, and the famous butterfly dream, in which Zhuang Zhou cannot determine whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he is a man, poses a doubt about the reliability of any single waking perspective that the text does not resolve.

Where the Daodejing addresses statecraft as much as self, Zhuangzi pushes the Dao and wu wei toward an individual, almost mystical practice, 'sitting and forgetting,' 'fasting of the mind', aimed less at governing well than at achieving personal freedom, xiaoyao you or carefree wandering, from social convention and the fear of death. Death itself Zhuangzi treats as merely one more transformation of qi, no more to be feared or mourned than the changing of the seasons, a position he dramatizes by having Zhuangzi drum on a basin and sing at his own wife's funeral.

Together with the Daodejing, Zhuangzi forms the core of philosophical Daoism, and its ideas were later fused productively with Chan Buddhist thought. Its literary brilliance, it is widely read as the greatest prose stylist among the classical Chinese philosophers, has made it, unusually among the philosophical classics, as influential for its art as for its argument.