Chinese philosopher of the Warring States period and the author of the central chapters of the book that bears his name; with Laozi one of the two foundational figures of the Taoist tradition, and the philosophically more adventurous of the two — the writer through whom Taoism enters the history of philosophy as something other than a political counsel or a mystical pose.
Almost nothing is known of Zhuangzi — Zhuang Zhou — with certainty. The conventional dates place him in the late 4th century BCE, a near-contemporary of Mencius. He is said to have held a minor post as an officer at the Lacquer Garden at Meng and to have otherwise lived in poverty, refusing the offer of a ministry under King Wei of Chu — the famous turtle-in-the-mud parable in which he compares a dead ceremonial tortoise venerated in the temple to a live one dragging its tail in the mud, and takes the mud. The Zhuangzi as received is a composite of thirty-three chapters, of which the first seven ("Inner Chapters") are traditionally regarded as authentically his and contain the most philosophically developed material, and the rest ("Outer" and "Miscellaneous" chapters) are the work of later Taoist writers of varying orientations.
The book is written in a prose unlike anything else in the early Chinese canon: a sequence of parables, dialogues, and small imagined encounters — the butterfly dream, the cook Ding's ox, Cook Ding's blade that never dulls because it cuts only along the grain of the ox, the happiness of fishes, the debate with the logician Hui Shi at the bridge over the Hao — that stage their philosophical point rather than state it. Where the Daodejing is aphoristic and political, the Zhuangzi is narrative and ethical-psychological. Its central arguments concern the relativity of judgment (what is large and small, useful and useless, living and dead, depends on the perspective from which one looks); the usefulness of what looks useless (the gnarled tree the carpenter rejects lives out its natural span); the freedom that comes from abandoning the project of constructing a fixed self; and the nature of skill, exemplified in the series of artisan parables — the butcher, the wheelwright, the swimmer, the cicada-catcher — whose mastery lies in the disappearance of conscious effort.
The Zhuangzi has been a permanent resource of Chinese literary and philosophical culture and the principal Taoist contribution to Chinese Buddhism's Chan (Zen) development. Its twentieth-century reception in the West — through the translations of Burton Watson, A. C. Graham, and Brook Ziporyn, and through Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965) — has made it the most read Taoist text among philosophically serious Western readers, often preferred to the Daodejing for its arguments.