Zhuangzi c. 370 BC – c. 287 BC

Zhuangzi was a Chinese Taoist philosopher of the fourth century BC, regarded with Lao Tzu as one of the two foundational figures of philosophical Taoism. The book that bears his name is one of the masterpieces of classical Chinese literature, combining philosophical argument with parable, paradox, dream sequences, and humour. He is best known for the butterfly dream, which questions the boundary between dream and waking and between self and other, and for his teaching that all distinctions, including life and death, are relative. He developed a vision of the sage as one who lives spontaneously in accord with the Tao, free from rigid social roles and conventional values. His thought has shaped Chinese aesthetics, religion, and political life for over two millennia, and has become an important interlocutor for modern Western philosophy.

Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 BC) is the second great foundational figure of philosophical Daoism, after Lao Tzu. The historical Zhuangzi served briefly as a minor official in the state of Song before retiring to private life; the eponymous Zhuangzi text — a sprawling, narrative, paradox-laden collection of philosophical fables — was traditionally attributed entirely to him but is now generally treated as a composite work, with the seven Inner Chapters most likely from his own hand.

The Zhuangzi differs strikingly from the Daodejing. Where Lao Tzu writes gnomic aphorisms addressed to sage-rulers, Zhuangzi writes parables and dialogues addressed to philosophical individuals. The text is famously skeptical about the relativity of human perspectives — the butterfly dream, the discourse on the equality of things, the cook's effortless skill — and treats the cultivation of philosophical agility as the proper response to a world without fixed categories.

Zhuangzi's influence on subsequent Chinese philosophy, art, and literature is enormous. The Buddhist-Daoist syntheses of medieval China drew heavily on Zhuangzi for the philosophical articulation of meditative experience; Chan (Zen) Buddhism inherited his suspicion of fixed conceptual frameworks; the Chinese literary tradition has continually returned to him. Outside China, Zhuangzi has been one of the most influential Asian philosophers in twentieth-century Western reception.