Zhuang Zhou 莊周, called Zhuangzi ("Master Zhuang")

The knowledge that matters is not the discursive knowing that defines and argues, but an embodied skill acquired through repeated dealings with things: the butcher, the wheelwright, the swimmer could not explain their art, and yet they possess it to their fingertips. This primacy of practical experience and direct contact over abstract reasoning leans to the empirical side, but it is an empiricism of the gesture rather than of the senses, with no theory of perception as a source of true propositions.

Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding) · Zhuangzi, ch. 13 (Wheelwright Bian)

Words do not picture things: they serve to catch them, as the fish trap serves to catch the fish, and "the fish caught, one forgets the trap." Their meaning lies in their use and in what they let one do, not in a fixed correspondence with a referent, so that the logicians' disputes about names spin idly. This instrumental, pragmatic conception of language, in which one may "forget the words" once their office is done, leans toward a use theory with a tint of intention.

The trap is for catching fish: once the fish is caught, the trap is forgotten. Words are for grasping the idea: once the idea is grasped, the words are forgotten.ch. 26

Zhuangzi, ch. 26 (the trap and the fish) · Zhuangzi, ch. 2

Zhuangzi's sovereign good is "free and easy wandering" (xiaoyao you): a life loosened from honors, offices and rankings, that delights in whatever comes and plays with the world's metamorphoses. Refusing the court that offers him a ministry, choosing to stay "a turtle dragging its tail in the mud," he aims neither at accumulated pleasure nor at the discharge of a function, but at a joy without object, the ease of one who clings to nothing. This felicity is not the Greek eudaimonism of a life made good by perfecting a nature, yet it shares the idea of a flourishing, tinged with a keen taste for the jubilation of the moment.

Zhuangzi, ch. 1 (Free and Easy Wandering) · Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (the turtle in the mud)

Zhuangzi does not preach the extinction of desire as a discipline, but the lightening of the craving soul that clutches at gains, ranks and duration. The sage "fasts the heart" (xinzhai), empties himself of his preferences so as to espouse whatever comes, without however mortifying the body or condemning the simple joys he gladly celebrates. The leaning is toward detachment, but a playful detachment that lets desires pass like clouds rather than tearing them out, which sets him apart from Stoic asceticism as much as from the affirmation of desire.

Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the fasting of the heart) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)

Each being has a "way of being so of itself," the ziran that is to be let unfold: the sea bird dies if treated like a man, and one cripples the duck by trying to lengthen its legs. To live well is therefore not to create oneself freely but to espouse one's own native cast. Yet this nature is no fixed essence defined once and for all: it is fluid, open to metamorphoses, which holds Zhuangzi back from a clear-cut essentialism and places him more moderately on the side of the given against self-invention.

Zhuangzi, ch. 18 (the sea bird) · Zhuangzi, ch. 8 (the duck's legs)

The butterfly dream undoes the assurance of a stable self: on waking, Zhuangzi no longer knows whether he is the man who dreamed the butterfly or the butterfly dreaming the man. The "self" is not a substance enduring beneath change, but a provisional knot in the flux of transformations, a boundary that one must "forget" (wuwo) so as to merge into the course of things. This dissolution of the substantial self, close to a bundle of states without a bearer, echoes Buddhist anatta even before any contact between the two traditions.

Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (the butterfly dream) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (sitting in forgetfulness)

Wisdom is won by a turn inward, the "fasting of the heart" and the "sitting in forgetfulness" that empty the mind of its calculations and preferences so as to make it clear as a mirror. The sage "uses his heart like a mirror": he receives without retaining, welcomes without pursuing. This contemplative quietude takes precedence over active engagement in public affairs, which Zhuangzi shuns; yet it is prolonged in an effortless action, so that the inward withdrawal is not pure inaction.

The perfect sage uses his heart like a mirror: he goes out to meet nothing and welcomes nothing, he responds and does not retain.ch. 7

Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the fasting of the heart) · Zhuangzi, ch. 7 (the mirror-heart)

Suffering is neither an evil to be abolished nor a redemptive trial that would forge character: it is a moment of the flux to be welcomed without dramatizing it, like the sickness that may turn the arm into a rooster. Zhuangzi lends it no moral fecundity in the manner of Pascal or Nietzsche, but neither does he campaign for its abolition: he dissolves its weight by ceasing to judge it a misfortune. The position leans slightly toward the median indifference, through release from the judgment that constitutes the hurt.

Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)

The sage dwells in what arises at the instant and "travels in the single breath" of the present, without projecting himself into designs for the future, which belong to the forced action he rejects. Unlike Laozi, more turned toward restoring an original state, Zhuangzi stresses the mobility of the flux and adherence to the metamorphosis under way: a thin ground of return to the Dao before distinctions remains, but the accent falls on the espousal of the present.

Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher) · Zhuangzi, ch. 2

The world is not ruled by a benevolent providence and has no meaning given in advance: it is an impersonal flux of transformations without design. Yet this course is in no way tragic for Zhuangzi: whoever accords with it finds in it a causeless joy and a freedom of play, for death itself is but a turn of the wheel. The tonality is serene and carefree rather than optimistic or tragic, which leans slightly toward a happy welcome of the real.

Zhuangzi, ch. 18 (Perfect Happiness) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)

Zhuangzi neither mortifies the body as a prison of the soul nor erects pleasure into an end: he takes it for a moment of the flux to be welcomed with ease, without greed or disgust. "Caring for the vital principle" is neither asceticism nor debauchery but the care not to wear out one's life by exhausting it in desires or fears. The position is properly median, a playful temperance that follows the natural of the body without making it either an enemy or an idol.

Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (The Secret of Caring for Life)

To set the human at the summit of a ladder of beings is for Zhuangzi an illusion of perspective: from the standpoint of the Dao, the pillar and the stalk, the ugly and the beautiful, the human and the worm are equally modes of transformation, and none holds a privilege. This anthropological decentering strips the human of being the measure of all things and inscribes him as one being among myriads, brother to the butterfly he may have dreamed he was. The leaning is decidedly ecocentric, even though Zhuangzi does not formulate, as a modern ecologist would, a duty to protect a whole.

Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (On the Equality of Things) · Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (Autumn Floods)

No rule can anticipate the singularity of each situation: Wheelwright Bian cannot pass on his knack through precepts, and Cook Ding follows no method but the very contours of the real. Right action is a living, formulaless adjustment, lost the moment one fixes it into a code. Zhuangzi thus stands resolutely on the side of the spirit against the letter, and more than that: he refuses the very idea that rightness could ever be put into letter.

Zhuangzi, ch. 13 (Wheelwright Bian) · Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding)

Zhuangzi mocks the "benevolence" and "righteousness" of the Confucians as paraded virtues that maim the natural, like the duck whose legs are stretched. Good conduct is neither obedience to a rule nor a reckoning of consequences, but the expression of an inner state attuned to the Dao, a spontaneous excellence (de) that does not know itself virtuous. For want of any alternative, it is a virtue ethics, but of a virtue that denies itself as a code and holds every proclaimed morality to be a falling-off.

Zhuangzi, ch. 8 and 9

Zhuangzi's wisdom is that of an individual who loosens himself from roles, offices and social recognition to preserve his inner freedom: better a free turtle in the mud than a revered shell in the temple. Society and its institutions, far from constituting the human, deform him by imposing distinctions and ambitions foreign to his nature. Priority clearly goes to the singular individual against the social whole, but through withdrawal and flight rather than a claim of rights.

Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (the turtle in the mud) · Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the useless tree)

The Dao is neither a god nor a world-behind: it is everywhere, in the humblest things, even, Zhuangzi says to provoke, "in the piss and the dung." The sacred does not reside above the world but coincides with the immanent course of all transformations, accessible to whoever attunes to it rather than to whoever worships it. This radical immanence leaves only a thin residue of the inaccessible, the obscurity of the Dao before distinctions, which holds the score back from the utmost extreme.

Zhuangzi, ch. 22 (the Dao in the piss and dung) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)

The sage is not unfeeling but does not let himself be "wounded within" by his affects: emotions pass through him like the seasons, with no clinging and no feeding of them. Disturbance arises from the judgment that posits an event as a loss, and it dissolves when one stops sorting the real into gains and losses, as Zhuangzi stops weeping for his wife. The leaning is toward mastery of the passions, but by dissolving distinctions rather than by a rational government in the Stoic manner, which keeps it short of a clear-cut intellectualism.

Zhuangzi, ch. 5 (not to be wounded within) · Zhuangzi, ch. 18 (Perfect Happiness)

An old gardener refuses the water-drawing machine he is offered: "whoever uses machines acquires a machine heart," and loses the native purity of the spirit. Zhuangzi's distrust bears not on the tool itself, which he gladly wields in his artisan parables, but on the calculating mind and the cunning the instrument breeds at the expense of the natural. This critique of the "machine heart" ranks him, like Laozi, among the distant ancestors of techno-criticism, but from the inner self rather than the political order.

Whoever uses machines does all his work mechanically; whoever does his work mechanically grows a machine heart.ch. 12

Zhuangzi, ch. 12 (the gardener and the machine)

Zhuangzi's ideal is not moral duty but a light, played existence whose grace is akin to the artist's: the butcher whose blade dances "to the rhythm of the Mulberry Forest," the painter who strips naked to paint at his ease. The successful life is less a matter of rightness than of ease and beauty of gesture, which makes it an aestheticization of existence, even though the word art is anachronistic here and the aim remains a liberation rather than a cult of the beautiful.

Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding) · Zhuangzi, ch. 21 (the naked painter)

Evil lies not in a corrupt human nature but in what denatures it: affected knowledge, ambition, hierarchies and moral codes that turn each one away from his native cast. Left to his naturalness, the human is neither good nor wicked in the moral sense, but spontaneously attuned to the course of things; it is civilization that tears him apart. This trust in the pre-cultural natural sets Zhuangzi apart from anthropological pessimism, without making him the theorist of an original goodness as sharply drawn as in Rousseau.

Zhuangzi, ch. 9 (Horses' Hooves)

The figures of accomplished craftsmen, the butcher, the wheelwright, the bell-stand carver, suggest that well-made work can be a site of flourishing and even of communion with the Dao, when the gesture becomes effortless. But this accomplishment owes to recovered spontaneity, not to toil or useful production: the gnarled, "useless" tree is precisely the one that, serving no purpose, lives out its full life. The praise thus wavers between art as a way and the prizing of free leisure, against busy usefulness.

Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (Cook Ding) · Zhuangzi, ch. 4 (the useless tree)