Zhuangzi

Name: Zhuangzi
Author: Zhuangzi

— 300 BCE —

“

Where the Tao Te Ching reads like scripture, the Zhuangzi reads like jazz.

The record

Time
An eveningA season
336 pages, about 7 hours: about the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climb
The giant fish Kun transforms into the bird Peng, which needs a vast wind to fly south.
What it gives
Plot and actionIdeas to live by
In 11 reviews from critics and book blogs, 2 credit the plot and 9 credit the ideas or a change in how they live.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else does
One reviewer finds it more approachable than the Tao Te Ching, and another traces Borges’s The Circular Ruins to its butterfly dream.

on Confucius and Robber Che
“As a story-teller he is charming. The account of the visit of the respectable Confucius to the great Robber Che is most vivid and brilliant, and it is impossible not to laugh over the ultimate discomfiture of the sage, the barrenness of whose moral platitudes is ruthlessly exposed by the successful brigand.”
Oscar Wilde · ‘A Chinese Sage,’ The Speaker, 8 February 1890
on cook Ting
“the story of Lord Wen-hui’s cook Ting, who taught him the natural way of things”
a book blog
on the butterfly dream
“contains more philosophy than most books manage across three hundred pages”
a book blog
on the first two chapters
“the giant bird below appears in Chapter 1 and those two chapters are the best”
a book blog

on the later chapters
“unlikely to be written by Zhuangzi, as its prose and content offer little”
a book blog
on Ziporyn’s translation
“this new one is not as well written as Watson’s”
Anthony Madrid · RHINO Reviews, 2021
on Giles’s translation
“it also entrenched certain misunderstandings that then carried over into translations in other European languages”
a Substack review
on the ambiguous tone
“we simply have to resort to what amounts to interpretive guesswork to decide one way”
a book blog