The Zhuangzi
A fish in the northern darkness turns into a bird whose back is no one knows how many thousand miles across, a butcher carves oxen for nineteen years without dulling his blade because he cuts where there is space, and a man wakes not knowing whether he dreamt he was a butterfly or is now what a butterfly is dreaming. Confucius appears again and again, usually to be put right by a cripple, a woodcarver, a robber, or a drunk who falls from a cart unhurt because he did not know he was falling; useless trees are praised for living out their years. The literary masterpiece of early Daoism, and the text through which Chan Buddhism and most later Chinese poetry acquired their taste for paradox.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ Tao Te Ching
- responds to ↑ The Analects
Attributes
Closest analogues
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