Customer Reviews

Zhuangzi: Basic Writings

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This is a very different book than the Lao Tzu. It's written in a much less poetic style, but I find Zhuangzi 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. Zhuangzi 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 Zhuangzi's magical sages were taken as literal beings. Zhuangzhi 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 Zhuangzi is a more recent romanization of "Chuang Tzu" - 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 ago under the "Chuang Tzu" spelling, and now as "Zhuangzi." While I have the highest respect Burton's scholarship, I think that this difference-without-a-difference should be made more explicit.

The Zhaungzi is one of the two most important Daoist texts in the Chinese tradition, but it gets short shrift next to its cousin, the Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing). One of the reasons is the length of the Zhaungzi. It has none of the brevity and conciseness of the Tao Te Ching. It is a collection of many materials, of varying quality and authenticity, often in the same passage.

That is why Burton Watson's translation of the Zhuangzi is so useful. He has culled through the text, and presented us with only the very best material. This, coupled with his fine introduction and notes on the translation, give us a Zhuangzi that is both easy to read, interesting and smooth flowing.

This book was purchased as a gift for someone who was very pleased with it since it is hard to get this edition, so it was worth it.