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Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (Translations from the Asian Classics)

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Anyone who may be coming to Chuang Tzu for the first time is in for a treat. Although Chuang Tzu is sometimes described as the most brilliant of all Chinese philosophers, what we find in him isn't what we normally understand by 'Philosophy' and isn't technical at all.

His appeal is not so much to the intellect as to the imagination, and he chose as a vehicle for his philosophical insights, not tedious and lengthy abstract treatises, but brief and witty anecdotes and dialogues and tales. His humor, sophistication, literary genius, and philosophical insights found their perfect expression in his brilliant fragments, and once having read them you never forget them.

Not much is known about Chuang Tzu, other than that he seems to have lived around the time of King Hui of Liang (370-319 B.C.). The received text of his book, which is sometimes referred to as 'the Chuang Tzu' (CT), is made up of thirty-three Chapters. Most scholars seem to feel that the CT is a composite text, and that only the first seven - the Inner Chapters - plus a few bits from the others are Chuang Tzu's own work, the remainder being by others.

Among the better known of his translators, all of them excellent, are Arthur Waley, Burton Watson, and A. C. Graham, though only the latter two translated the complete text. An abridged version of Watson's complete translation has now been made available for those who want to confine themselves mainly to the Inner Chapters.

Watson has always struck me as an eminently civilized scholar and as a brilliant translator. Unlike certain others, he wears his scholarship lightly, and doesn't overburden the text with extraneous matter. His many translations from Ancient Chinese Literature are of uniformly high quality, and are well worth having as they are books one often wants to returns to.

The present book won't, as I've said, give you the whole of Watson's Chuang Tzu. For that you'll have to find a copy of his 'Complete Works of Chuang Tzu.' But it will give you most of what is generally agreed to be Chuang Tzu, and everyone should read it. If you're not a Chuang Tzu enthusiast before you start, I can guarantee that you'll be one before you finish.

Most people have heard of Lao Tzu, the alleged author of the Tao Te Ching. However, cognoscenti know that the writings attributed to the Chinese "Taoist" Chuang Tzu are at least as interesting, challenging, and profound.

Chuang Tzu shows his mastery of almost every form of writing in this work: parable, humor, philosophial dialogue, even what seem like brief philosophical essays. Sometimes the net effect is quite dizzying: what are we to make of the story of how Chuang Tzu was dreaming that he was a butterfly, and then awoke, but was unsure whether he was Chuang Tzu who had been dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was now dreaming that he was Chuang Tzu?! And how is a butcher who carves an ox carcass with seemingly supernatural grace and ease a model for how we should lead our lives? Understand this book or not, you'll have fun reading it!

The eponymous book, the _Chuang Tzu_ is actually a collection of writings by different authors from different periods. However, many scholars believe that the so-called "Inner Chapters" are by one hand. Watson's translation includes all of these, as well as selections from some of the other portions of the text. (Watson has also published separately a complete translation, although it is rather expensive.) Watson is a very gifted translator, and his love for this text shows. This is one of the standard translations, and for good reason. (One tidbit: Watson seems to translate into English, not from the original Chinese, but from Japanese translations of the Chinese. Surprisingly, the result is very good.)

There is much disagreement over how to interpret Chuang Tzu, so you may want to compare how different translators do different things with the same text. A.C. Graham's translation (soon to be reprinted, I understand) is excellent, with helpful introductory material, but Graham rearranges the text according to his own sometimes idiosyncratic view of how it should be organized. Victor Mair's translation is also excellent, and gives a reasonably priced version of the complete Chuang Tzu. (I often find Watson's English the most beautiful of the three.)

For help in understanding the text, Victor Mair has edited an anthology of secondary essays on it, and so have Philip J. Ivanhoe and Paul Kjellberg. (Kjellberg has done an excellent but briefer translation himself, which is included in Ivanhoe and Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy.)

The language is direct, giving some hint of the concision and grace of classical Chinese, but also retains some of the subtle humor of this profoundly subversive philosopher. Burton Watson tried to create a translation that serves both scholarly and a poetic purposes, and to a large extent his elegant work succeeeds better than any other English translation to date.

This is a very different book than the Lao Tzu. It's written in a much less poetic style, but I find Chuang Tzu more readable for that reason. The style is more conversational, and well rendered into contemporary English by Burton Watson.

These inner chapters contain only the core of a much longer work. Over the 2200 years since its writing, many accretions had crept into the work, including commentaries and addenda by other authors. Watson strips those away and leaves only the central and most vivid writings. Some of those may already be familiar to today's reader. For example, this book originates the man dreaming to be a butterfly dreaming to be a man. Chuang Tzu offers many more of these anecdotes, too long to be analogies but too short for fables. He also calls on the history and mythology of his time - not always distinct from each other - and creates mythology of his own, whether he meant to or not.

That mythology lived on in Chinese alchemy, when Chuang Tzu's magical sages were taken as literal beings. Chuang Tzu lived on, too, in Taoism's eventual alignment with Buddhism. His cryptic, non sequitur style of answer seems to foreshadow the koans of the distinctly Chinese and Japanese schools of Buddhism.

This is a wonderful complement to the Lao Tzu. If that book is the art of enlightenment, then this is more like the practical craft. I recommend it highly to any student of eastern classics.

I must add that Chuang Tzu is an older romanization of "Zhuangzi" - different renderings of one name. It is easy to become confused and think that the two were different writers. It is especially confusing since Watson published this same material many years later under the "Zhuangzi" spelling (ISBN 0231129599). While I have the highest respect Burton's scholarship, I think that this difference-without-a-difference should be made more explicit.

//wiredweird

It astounds me that this translation of Chuang-tzu is still in print while A.C. Graham's is not. As one of the first translations of the work, Watson did a very respectable job. More recent scholarship has sharpened our understanding of the work and, of course, the quality of the translation.

If you want to understand the ideas in Chuang-tzu, read A.C. Graham. There are many passages that are at best obscure in Watson's translation, but in Graham's come to life with meaning.

Since this is a work that many of us can only read in translation, it is unfortunate that such a dated translation is the one most commonly read.

I have have read several differant translations of this classic and by far Watson's translation is the best. His vivid translation is the closest to the origanal Chinese text. A great book!

The Chuang Tzu (rendered Zhuangzi in pinyin, which is becoming the standard transliteration these days) is second only to Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching in its popularity and veneration in the Taoist world. If you've not heard of or read this book before, you're in for a real treat! The first time I read the Inner Chapters of the Chuang Tzu was like a revelation--the thoughts and ideas expressed in these passages still resonate today for their acuity, humor, satire, stabbing profundity, and life-changing potential. Indeed, after better understanding the thought this book expresses, I felt like so many loose ideas and insights I'd gleaned from other philosophy, literature, music, and poetry had been tied up together and formulated into a concise and elegant package that is urgently relevant to every day life--pretty amazing for a text that is well over 2000 years old!


I recently completed reading the last of three complete translations of the Chuang Tzu, and I decided to wait until I read all of them before reviewing any of the three. Since this text is written in ancient Chinese, a language that was reserved for the intellectual and cultural elite two thousand years ago and has been considered effectively "dead" (like Latin) for quite a while, even understanding what the author(s) were trying to say is difficult, let alone translating the words from Chinese to English. So I figured reading a few different translations is probably the best way to get a broad and deep understanding of the text, and the cumulative effect would make up for each translation's weaknesses. This proved a good strategy--the other translations I chose were Victor Mair's Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu and A.C. Graham's The Inner Chapters. All three were rewarding and worthwhile reads (I mean, it IS the Chuang Tzu!), but I still come back to Burton Watson's The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu as my favorite. I won't go into depth about what the Chuang Tzu says, since the writing in the text is so eloquent and vivid that any description won't do it justice, and because I would probably ramble on forever about either the academic issues and questions regarding the text's authorship, historicity, and philosophy, or about how mind-blowingly intellectually stimulating it is!

After reading three different translations of the Chuang Tzu, I have to say that this Basic Writings translated by Watson is the best place for the uninitiated to start--it contains nearly all the best ideas and passages from the text (which has many interpolations from other, later authors that are often not as interesting and never as well-written as the ideas expressed in the Inner Chapters). Graham's translation is very academically rigorous, but makes Chuang Tzu's already distant culture and time period even more distant for new readers by means of very technical terminology and commentary. Mair's translation is good but doesn't flow as well as Watson's, and it's also much longer since it contains the entire Chuang Tzu. Watson's Complete Works is great, but this Basic Writings is much cheaper and more concise an introduction--once you read it and get hooked on the surprisingly fresh insights of these ancient thinkers, perhaps you'll delve into some other illuminating translations--until then, I have to say that this should be required reading for anyone interested in philosophy or Eastern classics.

This book contains the "inner chapters," not the entire Chuang Tzu, but generally considered the essential and least corrupt chapters. It's one of my favorite books, and after reading Watson's translation I'm unable to read anyone else's - it's wonderful (and there are quite a few weak versions, and weaker paraphrases). Of the Chinese classics I've read this is not only the most subtle and profound, it's sometimes absolutely hilarious. His parodies of Confucianism are a riot, his magical unrealism is timeless, his man dreaming he's a butterfly - or is it the other way around? - the useless tree that's preserved itself so long by being useless, not like all those fructiferous trees .... It's a rare combination of inane silliness with serious reflections on human nature, existence, nature and metaphysics (if that's the right term).

Joky, elegant, infuriating -- Chuang Tzu is the greatest fun to read and consider. Easily the juiciest read in Chinese philosophy. Watson's translation (like all of his translations) is lively and elegant in its own way. What it lacks is the jumbling mess -- the crazy quilt quality -- of what is cobbled together here (this is a controversial claim in itself, but I think justifiable). Because his translation is so smooth, you don't get the sharp edges and juxtapositions that are part of Chuang Tzu's anarchic charm. For that Graham is much better. Also, Graham gives the detail of the philosophical arguments that are at the basis of many of the episodes -- without them, one has really not much idea of what is going on. I would get the two of them, and use them together.

This is a very difficult book to describe because it is written almost as a fable, that continually plays on language and the supposed logic of common sense.

It is difficult reading. I had to read it at least twice, and then several passages more times before I could take away meaning from it.

If you enjoy the Tao Te Ching, The Diamond Sutra, Nagarjuna's verses of Emptiness, and other similar buddhist / zen / tao titles, I can say with near certainty that you will greatly enjoy this book.

It is not for everyone. A person without any background buddhism may find this book to be incomprehensible and or a very difficult read.

I enjoyed it thoroughly, and consider it to be among the best books I have ever read.