Chuang Tzu

Chuang Tzu was a Taoist philosopher who probably lived in China around 350 B.C. Unlike Lao Tze, the mythical founder of Taoism, there is evidence that Chuang was a real person.

He authored a work of about 100000 words. Though seriously fragmented and modified by its passage through the centuries, what survives today as the "Chuang Tzu" has sections that are probably very close to the original. Other sections are probably from later writers and commentators -- by 1000 A.D. this was already an ancient work that had been studied by Chinese scholars for centuries.

Unfortunately Chuang Tzu is notoriously difficult to translate. A good, careful, edition is "The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu," translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press. From the introduction (p. 5):

"...Chuang Tzu employs every resource of rhetoric in his efforts to awaken the reader to the essential meaninglessness of conventional values and to free him from their bondage. One device he uses to great effect is the pointed or paradoxical anectdote, the non sequitur or apparently nonsensical remark that jolts the mind into awareness of a truth outside the pale of ordinary logic -- a device familiar to Western readers of Chinese and Japanese Zen literature. The other device most common in his writings is the pseudological discussion or debate that starts out sounding completely rational and sober, and ends by reducing language to a gibbering inanity. These two devices will be found in their purest form in the first two sections of the Chuang Tzu, which together constitute one of the fiercest and most dazzling assaults ever made not only upon man's conventional system of values, but upon his conventional concepts of time, space, reality, and causation as well."

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