Once again, the book is changing as I try to write seriously about it. Even calling it a friend is starting to seem inadequate, inaccurate. I embrace the cackling that Watson describes, relishing the discomfort that inevitably accompanies attempts to pin it down. The late translator and sinologist Burton Watson captured how it feels to attempt straightforward exegesis: ‘Whenever I sit down and try to write seriously about Zhuang Zi,’ he explained, ‘I seem, somewhere in the back of my head, to hear Zhuang Zi cackling away at the presumption and futility of such an endeavour.’ Like Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, Master Zhuang – the supposed author of this eponymous mystery – appears to have engineered his work to resist definitive interpretation. Scholarly introductions to the Zhuang Zi frequently include disclaimers. In speaking for the Zhuang Zi, I’m somewhat uncomfortable, just as I would be uncomfortable speaking for a friend. Here too I’m running into problems, however.

(I understand that might sound strange but, then again, strange claims abound in the arena of sacred texts.) Trust me: I know this book and, like any good friend, I’m pretty sure it would be unhappy at the thought of being venerated. I consider it a partner, an adversary and a companion, one that learns from me and is changed by me, just as I learn from it and am changed by it every time we interact. I imagine that members of religious faiths feel like this about their revealed holy scriptures, which would be inexcusably diminished if understood simply as books.īut ‘holy scripture’ is no better when it comes to the Zhuang Zi. Though the Zhuang Zi is, technically, a book – a proto-Daoist Chinese classic authored c300 BCE – my relationship with it differs from my relationship with any other book. The Zhuang Zi has been my close friend for more than two decades, since we first met when I was an undergraduate, then all through my dissertation on it, and right up to the moment of this writing.

Zhuangzi chuang tzu