Zhuangzi

⚖The case for it

Half the book was assembled by disciples and imitators, and the air goes out of it whenever they take over; skip those stretches and you lose nothing. The rest is a writer who thinks in stories about cooks, butterflies, and crooked trees nobody bothered to cut down, a writer who would rather shake a question loose than settle it. He takes apart the categories you live by, then declines to hand you replacements, and that refusal is both the honest move and the harder one. Pick Watson or Ziporyn; the jokes still land. Little else from the ancient world is this funny about being alive.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Only the seven Inner Chapters are reliably the master's; the other twenty-six are later hands of wildly uneven quality, and most editions don't warn you where the voltage drops. The wordplay dies in English, so translation choice decides whether you get wit or porridge. And the relativism that delights philosophers has a quietist underside: it works equally well as advice for serving any ruler.

— the honest librarian