Amazon.com
If you have looked long at the serene freedom of a Chinese painting or been baffled by a Zen koan or been knocked off your stool by a Beat poet, you have met Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi). If you would like to get to know him better, spend some time with poet Sam Hamill and scholar J.P. Seaton's translation of
The Essential Teachings of Chuang Tzu.
Of the 33 chapters in the original, Hamill and Seaton render 19 completely and 3 partially into a naturally flowing English idiom that captures the vibrancy, humor, and playful sincerity of Chuang Tzu's language. Chuang Tzu offers insights more than teachings, startlingly transparent nuggets of wisdom in short episodes with colorful characters and trenchant punch lines. His overarching themes of freedom, living naturally, using the useless, the interconnectedness of all things, natural transformation, and such materialize as the eye meanders from passage to passage. Here is a concise, fluent rendition that makes reading Chuang Tzu almost as much fun as wandering free and easy through the infinite. --Brian Bruya
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Like a treasure chest of precious stones, the writings of Chuang Tzu shine with uncommon wisdom and insight. This new translation, which expertly preserves the humor and bite of these ancient teachings, will entice a whole new audience to read?and re-read?Chuang Tzu's writings. In their informative introduction, Hamill and Seaton discuss the vast influence Chuang Tzu, a disciple of Lao Tzu, has had on writers as diverse as Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot. Chuang Tzu's moral and spiritual instructions teach distaste for technology, love of nature and suspicion of social convention. This revered Taoist teacher also longs in his writings for a golden age when everyone lived a better life. Although written in the third century B.C., Chuang Tzu's teachings are astonishingly contemporary.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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