The great synthesizer of Daoism and the greatest literary philosopher in Chinese history. He inherited Laozi's ontology of the "Dao" and pushed it to its artistic and libertarian extreme, constructing a spiritual realm transcending worldly entanglements through unfettered parables, allegorical sayings, and improvisational words. His "Free and Easy Wandering" depicts the absolute spiritual freedom of "non-dependence"; his "Discussion on Making All Things Equal" dissolves all cognitive attachments to binary oppositions; and his story of "Cook Ding carving the ox" reveals the intuitive wisdom of "meeting with the spirit rather than seeing with the eyes." Zhuangzi's philosophy fuses poetry and speculative thought, profoundly influencing the formation of Chinese aesthetics, literature, and Chan Buddhism, standing as the supreme exemplar of Eastern spiritual libertarianism.
Personal name Zhou, a native of Meng in the state of Song (modern Shangqiu, Henan), approximately 369–286 BCE. He lived in poverty and once served as a minor official managing a lacquer garden before resigning to live in seclusion. He was so poor that he once had to borrow grain from the River Marshall, responding to the official's excuses with the parable of "the fish in the drying rut." When King Wei of Chu heard of his fame and sent envoys with a thousand pieces of gold to invite him to be prime minister, Zhuangzi laughed and said: "Go away quickly, and do not defile me. I would rather sport in a muddy ditch and amuse myself than be harnessed by a ruler. I will never serve, to gratify my own ambitions." His friendship with Hui Shi was one of the most legendary intellectual companionships in the history of Chinese philosophy—the "辩论 at Hao River," in which he asked "How do you know the fish are happy?" and Hui Shi replied "You are not a fish, how do you know?" has been transmitted through the ages. In his later years, upon his wife's death, he drummed on a basin and sang, facing life and death with transcendent equanimity. He wrote thirty-three chapters, of which the seven inner chapters are his own work; the outer and miscellaneous chapters are largely by his followers.
Ontologically, Zhuangzi inherits Laozi's "Dao" but emphasizes its immanent pervasiveness even more: "The Dao is in excrement and urine." The Dao pervades ants, weeds, tiles, and dung, breaking down its lofty mystique. Epistemologically, he proposes the doctrine of "equalizing things" (qi wu): life and death are one, beauty and ugliness are relative, right and wrong run parallel, dream and waking are indistinguishable. "Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things and I are one." Through the self-cultivation practices of "fasting of the mind" (xin zhai) and "sitting and forgetting" (zuo wang), he advocates dissolving the subject-object dichotomy and cognitive attachments to reach the state of "losing the self" (wu sang wo). In life philosophy, "free and unfettered wandering" (xiao yao you) pursues absolute freedom with nothing to depend on—unenslaved by things, untrapped by fame, unbonded by emotion—like the great roc soaring ninety thousand li, like Cook Ding gliding his blade through the joints, using "the usefulness of the useless" to transcend the shackles of the utilitarian world and achieve a poetic dwelling of life.
"Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things and I are one. — Zhuangzi, "Equalizing Things""
What consolation does Zhuangzi's "Butterfly Dream" and his doctrine of absolute spiritual freedom offer to modern people burdened by social constraints and perceptual distortion?
Zhuangzi's "free and unfettered wandering" and Nietzsche's "Übermensch" both call upon the individual to break through social norms and moral chains, using life-will to create self-value. But Zhuangzi overcomes the hard with the soft, making the useless his great use, while Nietzsche breaks the old with the hard, driven by the will to power.
Is absolute spiritual freedom Zhuangzi's leisurely non-action or Nietzsche's creative power-will? Facing the absurdity and constraints of life, should one overcome with softness or break through with hardness?
Zhuangzi's "the Dao is in excrement" and Spinoza's "God is Nature" both cancel transcendence, internalizing the divine into the cosmos itself, uniting with the whole through rational or intuitive union, pointing toward a divine yet godless cosmic worldview.
Does the divine pervade all things or transcend them? How do the pantheistic worldviews of Zhuangzi and Spinoza help us reconsider the ethical relationship between humans and nature?
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