Free The Complete Works Of Chuang Tzu Edited By Zhuangzi Text

be questioned about the Tao and to give an answer means that you dont know the Tao.
One who asks about the Tao has never understood anything about the Tao, ” No Beginning aka, Zhuangzi

“When it comes to comprehending the Tao I am about as significant as a fly in vinegar!” Confucius Zhuangzi claims

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Walking a frayed and weathered tightrope between transcendental enlightenment and radical idealistic fancy, many will find the works of Zhuangzi in The Book of Chuang Tzu to be unrealistic and impractical in our modern times perhaps in Zhuangzis timeBCEBCE as well, and in many ways I would agree, however, if youve an open mind and a good sense of humour, there is a lot to love about this particular Chinese Philosopher and his ideas.


Zhuangzi Chuang Tzu Ill mainly use Zhuangzi but its the same guy FYI is the most significant of Daoisms interpreters to have followed the enigmatic, and likely fictional, Lao Tzu.
Lao Tzus Tao Te Ching and The Book of Chuang Tzu are themost important works in the Daoist canon and couldnt be further separated by their stylistic approach.


Where the Tao Te Ching is organised into brief chapters/passages containing short, poetic and often paradoxical statements that encourage contradictory interpretations, The Chuang Tzu is a hilariously eccentric anthology of anecdotes and allegory, filled with vibrant personalities both fictional and non including but not limited to Emperors, Sages and “uptight Confucians”.
Zhuangzi yoyos backandforth between a tongueincheek, mocking tone and endearing sincerity, but an iron wit and undeniable wisdom is evident regardless of the mood you find him in.
This seems an odd thing to say about Zhuangzi, but he also offers lucidity to many of the ambiguous metaphysical concepts found in Lao Tzus work.


Zhuangzi is a dreamer, who baulks at convention and rejects the overgovernance, ritual propriety, materialism and selfindulgent nature of the people so prevalent during his lifetime.
He appeals, overwhelmingly, to my meek, but nevertheless existent, antiauthoritarian side, but more importantly, this work regularly gave me pause and corralled my feeble mind into a state of humbling introspection.
Its like being taken out of your body and examining yourself, and society, from an alien perspective, and realising the true absurdity of our current state of being.



Zhuangzi believed that in order to live by the Tao extremely rough and hesitant translation: The Way of Heaven/True Virtue, we humans must only follow our innate nature which I take to mean our basic instincts or intuition.
We should not seek knowledge, skill, fame, wealth, admiration or any other such external things and we should not strive to be good or bad, kindhearted or righteous to meet standards of propriety and ritual set by the state or our peers.
One should only act as ones innate nature compels them to, taking the path of least resistance,

Against the State Cult of Confucianism and rejecting the, almost fascist, teachings of the Legalists and the Mohists, Zhuangzis teachings are directly opposed to the overgovernance of the state and the pushing of moral standards and ritual practices on the people.
His belief is that people, as a whole, are inherently good but when strict laws are put in place, to determine how one should behave, proper ritual protocols, what is good/bad, right/wrong etc.
then, certainly, people will be righteous and kind, and display agreeable traits because that is the law, however, whether consciously or subconsciously, they will resent doing so because their behaviour is being, if not enforced then at least, heavily scrutinised under the eye of the law.
Over governance replaces virtue and unity with righteousness and compliance, “Ruling by decrees and grand plans pollutes the purity of nature and destroys simplicity”,

”take a monkey and dress it up to look like the Duke of Chou and the poor monkey will struggle and bite until he has got rid of the clothes.
”

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The “perfect sage” has destroyed Zhuangzis Utopia with their, often wellmeaning but, clumsy attempts to improve and/or reform society.
Hes had enough! And nobodys safe, Least of all Confucius, I should mention that youll probably want to have read both the Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius before leaping into this one.
The Tao, because youll want to know the Primary source material that Chuang Tzu is interpreting and The Analects, because youll want to know exactly what Chuang Tzu is rebuking so very often.
And boy does he rebuke, Chuang Tzu burns Confucius so hard on so many occasions, the hardest part was picking which example to give you, but this one pretty much sums up how he feels:

“You, Sir, try to distinguish the spheres of benevolence and righteousness, to explore the boundaries between agreement and disagreement, to study changes between rest and movement, to pontificate on giving and receiving, to order what is to be approved of and what disapproved of, to unify the limits of joy and anger, and yet you have barely escaped calamity Twice exiled from the State of Lu.
If you were to be serious in your cultivation of your own self, careful to guard the truth and willing to allow others to be as they are, then you could have avoided such problems.
However, here you are, unable to cultivate yourself yet determined to improve others, Are you not obsessed with external things”

To add further insult, Confucius is regularly portrayed as a curious but inferior thinker than the cast of simple Taoists throughout the book.
Often found to be in awe of them, realising the error of his ways and requesting to become a student of these wise eccentrics.
At other times, he is the one to offer up the wisdoms of the Tao to his disciples.
Lionel Giles interestingly suggests, in Musings of a Chinese Mystic, that Chuang Tzu was likely using Confucius fame and influence as a means of spreading his own philosophy.
This would go against everything that Zhuangzi stands for but it isnt completely out of the question and would only be one more inconsistency among many within the text.



Zhuangzi, believes that the acquisition of knowledge and the expanding of ideas only breeds argument and confusion and is detrimental to our wellbeing.
People are unable to simply receive ideas from outside, they have a tendency to cling to them and view others ideas as automatically wrong if they dont marry up to their own.
This concept is radical to say the least and suggests an unrealistic wish to

return to primitiveness, but taken in a less extreme sense, I think Chuang Tzu is just trying to suggest that we are focusing too much of our attention on petty external human issues and neglecting the internal heavenly

"if sages and wisdom were abandoned, great robbers would cease destroy the jade and shatter the pearls, then petty thieves would not appear burn the accounts and rip up the contracts, and the people will return to simplicity break up the weights and the measures and the people will no longer argue obliterate the laws of the world the sages have made, then the people can begin to be reasoned with.
"

I feel like Chuang Tzu would go into cardiac arrest if he were to see the state of the world, today.
Rarely looking internally, we focus all of our attention on external trivialities, Black and white, east and west, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, good and bad, right and wrong, straight and gay we argue and debate about race, gender, abortion, the legalisation of drugs, climate change and on and on and on and its a fire thats perpetually stoked by a modern pandemic called outrage culture and selfconscious, selfaggrandizing social displays of false righteousness and virtue.
Exactly what Zhuangzi said would happen when you Pidgeonhole entire peoples and try to dictate what they should do and how they should act.



“Take care how you play with peoples hearts, Peoples hearts should not be shoved down nor pushed up, for this yoyoing up and down makes the heart either a prisoner or an avenging fury.
It can be gentle and giving, moulding even the hard and sharp, or it can be sharp and pointed, tough enough to cut, carve or chisel.
It can be as hot as a searing fire it can be as cold as ice, So swift that in the nodding of ones head it has twice roared over the four seas and beyond all boundaries.
At rest, it is as deep as the abyss when it is active, it is like a star in Heaven.
It races beyond anything that seeks to bind it, for this is in truth the heart of humanity!”


Ultimately, like Confucius, I feel as significant as a fly in vinegar when it comes to comprehending the Tao and I have a feeling that even if I could grasp its true meaning, to follow it in our time would be all but an impossibility.
Nevertheless, Ive still found a lot of introspective value in reading these ancient Chinese texts and I look forward to reading just a couple more before moving onto the Western Canon.
Mencius is next and hes got some ground to make up after Zhuangzi tore Confucius a new one.
Im all in for the Confucionist vs, Taoist beef.

”Oh dear! I do so pity those who lose themselves, I also pity those who pity others, However, I also pity those who pity those who pity others, but that was long ago, ”

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