What are your thoughts on the Zhuangzi?

[Sol]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)

Bought this book a few months ago after wanting to develop a better understanding of Daoism and curious about the thoughts of the assembled forumites as I plan to read it.

[Adam_Trask]

Weird book. Consider the following parable:

"A butcher was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. Wherever his hand touched, wherever his shoulder leaned, wherever his foot stepped, wherever his knee pushed – with a zip! with a whoosh! – he handled his chopper with aplomb, and never skipped a beat. He moved in time to the Dance of the Mulberry Forest, and harmonized with the Head of Line Symphony. Lord Wendi said, "Ah, excellent, that technique can reach such heights." The buyer cheated his chopper and responded, "What your servant values is the Way, which goes beyond technique. When I first began cutting up oxen, I did not see anything but oxen. Three years later, I couldn't see the whole ox. And now, I encountered them with spirit and don't look with my eyes. Sensible knowledge stops and spiritual desires proceed. I rely on the Heavenly patterns, strike in the big gaps, am guided by the large fishures, and follow what is inherently so. I never touch a ligament or tendon, much less do any heavy wrenching! A good butcher changes his chopper every year because he chips it. An average butcher changes it every month because he breaks it. There are spaces between those joints, and the edge of the blade has no thickness. If you use that has no thickness to go where there is space – oh! there's plenty of extra room to play about in. That's why nineteen years the bade of my chopper is still as though fresh from the grindstone. Still when I get to a hard place, I see the difficulty and take breathless care. My gaze settles! My movements slow! I move the chopper slightly, and in a twinkling it's come apart, crumbling to the ground like a clod of earth! I stand holding my chopper and glance all around, dwelling on my accomplishments. Then I clean my chopper and put it away. Lord Wendi said, "Excellent! I have heard the words of a butcher and learned how to care for life!"

This is perhaps the works most iconic parable. It's certainly not totally representative of the work's philosophical depth or the all the works themes, but it's a good entry!

This parable immediately follows, and illustrates, these perplexing principles: "Life Is bounded. Knowledge is unbounded. Using the bounded to follow the unbounded is dangerous."

The thesis and the parable held up together form a kind of productive paradox. The butcher leads to imagine a knowledge beyond knowledge – perhaps a roadmap for avoiding the danger. 

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

Weird book. Consider the following parable:

"A butcher was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. Wherever his hand touched, wherever his shoulder leaned, wherever his foot stepped, wherever his knee pushed – with a zip! with a whoosh! – he handled his chopper with aplomb, and never skipped a beat. He moved in time to the Dance of the Mulberry Forest, and harmonized with the Head of Line Symphony. Lord Wendi said, "Ah, excellent, that technique can reach such heights." The buyer cheated his chopper and responded, "What your servant values is the Way, which goes beyond technique. When I first began cutting up oxen, I did not see anything but oxen. Three years later, I couldn't see the whole ox. And now, I encountered them with spirit and don't look with my eyes. Sensible knowledge stops and spiritual desires proceed. I rely on the Heavenly patterns, strike in the big gaps, am guided by the large fishures, and follow what is inherently so. I never touch a ligament or tendon, much less do any heavy wrenching! A good butcher changes his chopper every year because he chips it. An average butcher changes it every month because he breaks it. There are spaces between those joints, and the edge of the blade has no thickness. If you use that has no thickness to go where there is space – oh! there's plenty of extra room to play about in. That's why nineteen years the bade of my chopper is still as though fresh from the grindstone. Still when I get to a hard place, I see the difficulty and take breathless care. My gaze settles! My movements slow! I move the chopper slightly, and in a twinkling it's come apart, crumbling to the ground like a clod of earth! I stand holding my chopper and glance all around, dwelling on my accomplishments. Then I clean my chopper and put it away. Lord Wendi said, "Excellent! I have heard the words of a butcher and learned how to care for life!"

This is perhaps the works most iconic parable. It's certainly not totally representative of the work's philosophical depth or the all the works themes, but it's a good entry!

This parable immediately follows, and illustrates, these perplexing principles: "Life Is bounded. Knowledge is unbounded. Using the bounded to follow the unbounded is dangerous."

The thesis and the parable held up together form a kind of productive paradox. The butcher leads to imagine a knowledge beyond knowledge – perhaps a roadmap for avoiding the danger. 

I'm impressed you didn't go with the butterfly dream (although I actually love the butterfly dream; we DO fundamentally take it on faith that our experiences are broadly speaking "real", and there's a beauty to Zhuangzi's articulation of that that I often miss in more discursive Western epistemic-skeptical writing like, say, Hume).

As for my own opinion, I'm lying in bed right now, on my phone, and I was able to reach over to my bookcase to get my own copy to consult without even moving anything below my torso. I think that speaks to the high regard in which I hold this book.

[Kleine Scheiße]

huge ff book

[Statilius the Epicurean]

This parable immediately follows, and illustrates, these perplexing principles: "Life Is bounded. Knowledge is unbounded. Using the bounded to follow the unbounded is dangerous."

The butcher story is a great one, and I take it to be true in a very literal sense. The butcher is merely describing what modern psychologists call "flow".

Anyway, I'll echo the others above and say though I haven't studied as deeply as I would like, the Zhuangzi is a brilliant little book from what I've read from it. I mostly know the work through Arthur Waley's translations in his Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, although I do also have AC Graham's version of the Inner Chapters somewhere.

My favourite episode would have to be Zhuangzi after the death of his wife, which is so beautiful in wisdom and sentiment I would like it to be read by someone at my funeral some day:

When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi came to the house to join in the rites of mourning. To his surprise he found Zhuangzi sitting with an inverted bowl on his knees, drumming upon it and singing a song.

“After all,” said Huizi, “she lived with you, brought up your children, grew old with you. That you should not mourn for her is bad enough, but to let your friends find you drumming and singing–that is going too far!”

“You misjudge me,” said Zhuangzi. “When she died, I was in despair, as any man well might be. But soon, pondering on what had happened, I told myself that in death no strange new fate befalls us. In the beginning, we lack not life only, but form. Not form only, but spirit. We are blended in one great featureless indistinguishable mass. Then a time came when the mass evolved spirit, spirit evolved form, form evolved life. And now life in its turn has evolved death. For not nature only but man’s being has its seasons, its sequence of spring and autumn, summer and winter. If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the Great Inner Room. To break in upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I knew nothing of nature’s Sovereign Law. That is why I ceased to mourn.”

There are plenty of other great passages, like the Robber Zhi, which is thrilling in a Nietzschean way.

I would perhaps keep in mind that, as far as I'm aware, the current scholarly consensus is that Daoism didn't exist as its own separate school when the Zhuangzi was compiled, probably from various different authors with their own philosophical allegiances.