The Extravagant Zhuangzi

The Chinese philosophical text Zhuangzi is said to be the work of one Zhuang Zhou (4th century BCE), about whom little is known. Critical work on the text of the Zhuangzi usually attributes the “inner” or core chapters to Zhuang Zhou and the rest to his “school.” The historical texts, however, give little reason to believe that the “inner chapters” are the earliest. If the supposed author is merely a name affixed to a stance of radical skepticism, applied to the common ideas of the time by a series of rhetorical masters, the text becomes an accretion of arguments privileging not the first to take shape, but the last. Analogously, this text’s role in the history of Chinese translation as the “sponsor” of works from abroad that acquire Chinese form by echoing the Zhuangzi reverses the usual assumptions about the inside and outside, the core and periphery, of Chinese culture.