Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi

The ideas

29 ideas. Scroll sideways for the next one.

• When something is too big to picture, it can look silly. A cicada that can barely fly from one tree to the next laughs at a giant bird climbing thousands of miles into the sky. A mushroom that lives for one morning never finds out what night is.

• A keeper tells his monkeys they will get 3 chestnuts in the morning and 4 at night, and they are furious. So he offers 4 in the morning and 3 at night, and they are delighted. The total never changed. He went along with what they liked and lost nothing.

• A person who sleeps in a damp place gets sick, while an eel lives there happily. A person up a tree is frightened, while a monkey is at home. Ask which of the 3 has the right home, and no answer fits all of them.

• Suppose you and I argue and you win. That doesn’t make you right. Whoever we bring in to judge will side with you, side with me, or disagree with us both, so none of them can settle it.

• Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

• A cook cuts up an ox so smoothly that it looks like a dance. When he started, he saw a whole ox. After 3 years he stopped seeing the whole animal and saw the gaps between the joints, and now his knife goes only where there is room.

• A good cook changes his chopper once a year,–because he cuts. An ordinary cook, once a month,–because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone.

• Listen with your mind instead of your ears. Then stop listening with your mind too. Let hearing end at the ears and thinking end at itself, until you are empty and simply answer what comes. That emptiness is called the fasting of the heart.

• A carpenter walks past a huge sacred tree without a glance, since its wood is useless. That night the tree comes to him in a dream. Fruit trees get stripped and broken for their fruit, it says, while it lived this long by being useless.

• All men know the use of useful things; but they do not know the use of useless things.

• A man whose toes were cut off as a punishment studies beside a proud official. Laughter at his feet used to make him angry. After 19 years with his teacher, he says, he no longer notices the loss. The official is the one who keeps pointing at it.

• When a pond dries up, the fish keep each other wet with their breath and spit. They would be better off left in their rivers and lakes.

• A man lies dying while his friend wonders out loud what he will be turned into next, maybe a rat’s liver. The dying man is calm. Metal that jumped up in the furnace and demanded to become a famous sword would seem strange, he says, and so would he.

• In one story, Confucius’s best student has let go of kindness and duty. Good, but not yet, says Confucius. Then ritual and music go, and he hears the same. Finally he lets go of body and mind, and Confucius asks to follow him.

• Hun Tun, ruler of the middle land, has no holes in his face. His friends want to repay his kindness, since everyone else has 7 holes for seeing, hearing, eating and breathing. They drill one hole a day. On the 7th day Hun Tun dies.

• Horses eat grass, drink water, and kick up their heels. Then a famous trainer brands them and ties them up in stables, and 2 or 3 in 10 die. He drills them hungry under the whip until more than half are dead. People still praise his skill.

• An old man waters his garden by carrying a jar up from a well. A traveler describes a wooden lever that lifts water with almost no effort. The gardener knows of it and refuses. Clever tools lead to clever dealings, he says, and a clever heart can’t stay simple.

• A duke is reading the old sages when a wheelwright asks if they are still alive. They’re dead, says the duke. “Then the words your Highness is studying,” rejoined the wheelwright, “are only the dregs of the ancients.” He can’t teach even his son how a wheel feels.

• Swollen by the autumn floods, the river spirit is proud of his size. Then he reaches the ocean and sees no end to it.

• You cannot speak of ocean to a well-frog,–the creature of a narrower sphere. You cannot speak of ice to a summer insect,–the creature of a season.

• A prince sends 2 officials to offer a fisherman the running of his state. Would a sacred tortoise rather be dead, its shell kept in a temple chest, or alive and dragging its tail in the mud? Alive, they say. “I too will wag my tail in the mud.”

• On a bridge, one friend says the minnows darting below are happy. Hui Shi objects that he isn’t a fish, so he can’t know. The answer is that the question already granted he knew: “I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.”

• A man’s wife dies, and his friend finds him drumming on a bowl and singing. It hurt at first, he says. Then he remembered she had no body before birth, and now she is “passing from one phase to another like the sequence of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.”

• Playing for cheap tokens, a man plays well. With gold at stake he can’t think straight. His skill is the same both times.

• An empty boat drifts into yours on the river, and even a short-tempered man stays calm. If someone is sitting in it, he shouts, and by the third shout he is cursing. “If he could only roam empty through life, who would be able to injure him?”

• Someone asks where the Tao, the way everything runs, can be found. Everywhere, comes the answer, and when pressed for one place: in the ant, then in a weed, then in a broken pot, then in dung. The questioner goes quiet.

• Passing his friend Hui Shi’s grave, a man tells of a mason who could chip a thin scab off a man’s nose with an axe, because the man stood perfectly still. When that man died, it ended. Since Hui Shi died, he has had no one to talk with.

• A fish trap is for catching fish, and once you have the fish you can forget the trap. Words are for catching an idea, and once you have it you can forget the words. The speaker wants a person who has forgotten words, to talk with.

• A dying teacher’s students plan a grand funeral, and worry the birds will eat his body if he refuses one. “Above ground I shall be food for kites; below I shall be food for mole-crickets and ants. Why rob one to feed the other?”

The book in short

In plain words

A bird so big it blocked the sun

Far in the cold north, the old stories say, there was a fish so huge that no one could measure it. One day this fish turned into a bird. The bird was just as huge. When it opened its wings, they covered the sky like storm clouds, and when it pushed off the water and climbed, it went up and up, tens of thousands of miles, on its way to an ocean at the other end of the world.

Down in a tree, a cicada and a little dove watched it go, and they laughed.

Why would anyone fly that high? the dove wondered. It jumps up, flaps, and lands on the next branch. Sometimes it doesn’t even make the branch and just drops to the ground. That’s plenty of flying for a dove.

Here’s the thing. The dove isn’t stupid. The dove just can’t picture the bird. Its whole life is this tree and the next branch, so to the dove, this tree and the next branch is the whole world. It has no way to know there’s a sky big enough for a bird like that — because it has never needed one.

The man who told these little stories was named Zhuangzi, and he lived in China a very long time ago, back when everyone around him was sure they had the one right answer for how to live. Zhuangzi wasn’t sure anyone did. He thought we’re all a little like that dove — we see the whole world from one small branch, and we forget it’s a small branch. He built almost all of these stories on that one quiet notion.

The frog who thought his well was the whole world

So Zhuangzi liked to tell stories about small branches.

There was a frog who lived at the bottom of a well. He loved his well. He could hop along the cracks, float in the water, sit in the cool mud. To him, the well was everything good in the world, and he honestly thought he had the best home there was. You couldn’t tell that frog about the sea. He had no idea what a sea even was. How do you explain an ocean to someone whose whole life is one round wall of stone?

Zhuangzi has another one like it. A river got bigger and bigger after the autumn rains, until it was rushing and wide and full of itself. The river felt enormous. Then the river flowed all the way out to the sea — and stopped. Because the sea had no other side. The river had been proud of being big, and now it saw water that went on past where its eyes could reach, and it understood, finally, that it had only ever been big for a river.

The frog wasn’t wrong that his well was nice. The river wasn’t wrong that it was wide. They were just sure their corner was the whole thing. And that’s the trap Zhuangzi keeps poking at — not that you’re small, but that you can’t feel how small your corner is while you’re standing in it.

The cook who never wore out his knife

If the frog teaches you something about seeing, the next story teaches you something about doing.

A prince once watched his cook cut up a whole ox, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. The cook wasn’t sweating or hacking or fighting the meat. His hands and his shoulders and his feet all moved together, smooth, almost like a dance, and the blade just slid through, like the ox was falling open on its own.

The prince asked how he got this good.

The cook said that when he first started, all he saw was a big solid ox, and he chopped at it like anybody would. But after a few years, he stopped seeing it that way. Now he doesn’t look with his eyes so much as feel where the body wants to come apart — the soft gaps between the joints, the spaces that are already there. He never cuts through bone, and he never forces it. He finds the opening and lets the knife follow it.

Then he said the part that sticks with you. A good cook needs a new knife every year, because he cuts. An ordinary cook wrecks his in a month, because he hacks. But this cook had kept the same knife for 19 years, and its edge was still as sharp as the day he got it. Nineteen years of cutting up oxen, and the blade was like new — because it never once smashed into something hard.

The hardest things often have a grain to them, like wood, like the gaps in that ox. You can fight straight through and wear yourself down to nothing. Or you can slow down, feel for the natural lines, and slip along them — and it stops feeling like a fight at all.

The tree nobody wanted to cut down

There’s a flip side to that, and it’s one of the strangest things Zhuangzi ever said.

A carpenter was walking with his apprentice and they passed an enormous old tree, so big that a crowd had gathered to stare at it. The apprentice stopped to stare too. But the carpenter didn’t even slow down. Useless wood, he said. Make a boat of it and the boat sinks; make a coffin and the coffin rots. That’s why it got so big. It’s no good for anything.

That night, the story goes, the tree spoke to the carpenter in a dream. It asked what he was comparing it with. Look at the trees that are useful, it said. The fruit trees get their branches ripped off the second their fruit is ripe. The tall straight trees get chopped down young, because their wood is perfect for building. Being useful is what kills them. It had lived a very long time, safe, exactly because nobody wanted anything from it.

Zhuangzi put it in one plain line: “All men know the use of useful things; but they do not know the use of useless things.” It’s worth sitting with, because the whole world tells you the opposite: that you should be useful, win, impress, grow up into the straight tall tree everyone wants. And sometimes that’s fine. But Zhuangzi noticed that the parts of a life that don’t win anything or prove anything — the lazy afternoon, the walk to nowhere, the friend who can’t do a thing for you — are sometimes the parts that keep you whole. The fruit tree pays for being wanted.

Was he a man, or a butterfly?

Now things get a little dreamlike, which is exactly where Zhuangzi loved to be.

One afternoon he fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. Not a man dreaming about a butterfly — an actual butterfly, drifting around in the sun, going wherever the air took him, not knowing he had ever been a person at all. It felt completely real. Then he woke up, and there he was, a man again, lying on the ground.

And he was left with a funny, dizzy question. “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”

He’s not really trying to scare you into thinking your life is fake. He’s doing something gentler. You feel so solid, so sure of exactly who you are. But you were a baby once, and you’ll be old someday, and you change a little every year, and you can’t even prove you’re not dreaming right now. So maybe the line between you and the butterfly, between the kid you were and the person you’ll become, is softer than it feels. Not a wall. More like changing clothes. And once you see it that way, you can hold on to things a little less tightly — including who you think you are.

Why he sang when his wife died

Which leads to the strangest scene of all, and you should know up front it starts off looking almost rude.

In one of the stories told about him, Zhuangzi’s wife died. His friend came over to be sad with him, the way you do. But when he walked in, he found Zhuangzi sitting on the floor with his legs sprawled out, banging on a bowl like a drum — and singing.

The friend was horrified. She had lived with him and raised his son, he said, and now she had died and he was sitting there singing? That was too much.

Zhuangzi said it wasn’t what it looked like. When she first died, of course he was crushed, like anyone would be. But then, he said, he started thinking back, way back. There was a time before she was born, when there was no her at all. Then something shifted, and there was breath. After that, a body. After that, a whole life, all those years. And now one more shift, and the life is over. It’s like spring turning into summer, summer into fall, fall into winter — one season quietly becoming the next. She was resting now, he said, in the middle of all of it. If he sat there sobbing and wailing, it would only show he never understood how any of this works.

He’s not cold. He misses her — he said so. He just followed the sad thought all the way to the end, past the part that stings, to the place where he could see her death as one more turn of a wheel that never stops turning. And that’s the thing underneath all the rest: everything is always changing into something else, and the peace comes from going along with it instead of clamping down and screaming at the seasons to stop.

Another story told about him catches the same lightness. Zhuangzi was standing on a bridge with that same friend, watching little fish flick around in the water below. Look how happy those fish are, he said. His friend, who loved to argue, jumped on it: you’re not a fish, so how could you know? Zhuangzi answered that his friend wasn’t him, so how could he know what Zhuangzi knew? Then he ended it: “I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.” Leaning on a rail, watching fish dart in the sun, feeling glad — that’s a real thing you can know straight through your skin, no proof required. Some of the best things you’ll ever be sure of, you’ll never be able to prove. You’ll just know them, standing on the bridge.

That was Zhuangzi’s whole way of being. Don’t be the dove laughing at the sky you can’t see. Don’t grip your little well like it’s the world. Stop hacking at the ox; feel for the gaps. Worry less about being the useful tree. And when things change — and they always change — let them. Catch the fish, then let go of the net. Hold nothing so hard that it can hurt you when it slips away.

The long read

A cicada and a little dove are sitting in a tree, watching a vast bird climb 90,000 li (tens of thousands of miles) into the sky to begin a migration to the far ocean. They laugh. Why would anyone go up that high? They can reach the nearest branch most days, and when they miss, they flop to the ground — and that’s flying enough. The joke is theirs, but it isn’t on the bird. It’s on anyone who measures the whole sky by the size of their own hop.

That little scene opens the Zhuangzi, and it tells you the kind of book this is. It does not lecture. It tells a story slightly too strange to forget, lets you laugh, and only afterward do you notice the floor has tilted under your certainties. The man behind it, Zhuang Zhou — Chuang Tzŭ in the old spelling — lived in China around 300 BCE, in the same chaotic Warring States period that produced Confucius’s heirs and many rival schools all selling their plan for how to live. Zhuangzi sold nothing. He told jokes about the sellers.

The book is not one man, and that matters. What survives under his name is thirty-three chapters, and scholars have long agreed they come in layers. The first seven, the Inner Chapters, read as one mind and are traditionally Zhuang Zhou’s own, though even that is debated. Later followers wrote the rest — students of his school filling in, arguing, sometimes contradicting the master. So “Zhuangzi” is less a single author than a voice and the people who caught it. The voice is consistent enough that you’ll know it anywhere: irreverent, allergic to solemnity, fond of cooks and cripples and talking trees over kings and sages, and always — always — turning the question over to show you its underside.

Start with the bird, because the bird is the whole argument in miniature. In the northern darkness lives a fish so large no one knows its length. The fish changes into a bird, and the bird, on a typhoon, beats its way to the southern ocean. (Zhuangzi calls them by names you should know in their proper form: the fish is Kun, the bird Peng — Giles’ old translation anglicizes them into “Leviathan” and “the Rukh,” but every reader you’ll meet calls them Kun and Peng.) The small creatures below scoff. And here is the move Zhuangzi makes that the rest of the book keeps making: he does not tell you the bird is right and the cicada is foolish. He shows you that the cicada cannot even see the question. Its world is small, so its sense of what’s possible is small, and it has no way to know that it’s small — because to a cicada, its world is simply the world. That blindness is not a bug in the cicada. It’s the condition of being anything in particular: every vantage point is a vantage point, with edges it can’t see past. Zhuangzi’s first concern is this. Not what is true, but what it costs you to stand exactly where you stand.

This is the door into the strangest and best of the Inner Chapters, the one usually titled On the Equality of Things (Giles calls it The Identity of Contraries). Zhuangzi watches the philosophers of his day argue — the Confucians and the Mohists, each calling right what the other calls wrong — and he notices that the argument never ends, and can’t, because each side is using its own standard to judge the other’s standard. There is no neutral ground to step onto, no view from nowhere from which you could finally settle it. Every “this is so” is somebody’s “this is so,” spoken from somewhere. He doesn’t conclude from this that nothing is true. He concludes something stranger and lighter: that the wise response to a world of clashing certainties is to stop grinding your one certainty against everyone else’s, and to let things be the many things they are. The Way — the Tao, the way things actually move and change when you’re not forcing them — has room for all of it.

He has a story for the people who can’t let go. A keeper feeds his monkeys, and announces they’ll get three nuts in the morning and four at night. The monkeys are furious. So he says, fine — four in the morning and three at night. The monkeys are delighted. Same seven nuts. Nothing changed but the order, and the monkeys spent real rage on it. Zhuangzi is not mostly mocking the monkeys. He’s asking, gently, how much of your own fury is over the difference between three-then-four and four-then-three.

And then, at the end of that chapter, the most famous dream in philosophy. Zhuang Zhou dreams he is a butterfly, drifting from flower to flower, entirely a butterfly, with no memory of being a man. Then he wakes, solidly himself. “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” Read it too fast and it’s a stoner’s koan. Read it slow and it’s the whole equality-of-things chapter folded into one image: the self you’re so sure of, the one doing all this judging and grinding, may be no more solid than a dream you happen to be having right now. He is not trying to make you doubt that you exist. He’s trying to loosen the grip — to make the boundary between you and the butterfly, you and the man you’ll be decades from now, feel less like a wall and more like a change of costume.

If the first lesson is about seeing, the next is about doing — and its teacher is a butcher. Prince Hui watches his cook break down an entire ox, and the work looks like a dance: every stroke lands in rhythm, the blade slipping through as if the animal were coming apart of its own accord. The prince is amazed. How? The cook explains that a beginner sees a whole ox and hacks at it. After three years, he no longer saw the ox as a solid thing. “I work with my mind and not with my eye.” He stopped cutting through bone and gristle and learned to find the gaps the joints already leave — to let the cleaver follow the lines that were always there. An ordinary cook ruins his blade in a month hacking; the cook’s own blade is nineteen years old and still sharp as the day it was ground, because he never cut anything that didn’t want to be cut.

This is the closest the Zhuangzi comes to giving you a skill, and the book’s own word for it is wu wei, usually translated non-action (Giles says inaction), which is exactly the wrong picture. The cook is not sitting still. He is working hard, with total attention. Wu wei is action without forcing: doing the thing in the grain of the thing, so that effort stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like being carried. You have felt it — in a sentence that wrote itself, a conversation that flowed, a turn taken at the right speed. Zhuangzi’s claim is that a life can be lived that way, and that most of our exhaustion comes from hacking at oxen the wrong way around.

The deepest and most counterintuitive of his lessons is the value of being useless. A carpenter passes an enormous, ancient tree, twisted and knotted, and doesn’t even slow down — the wood is no good, too gnarled for beams, too bent for boards. That night the tree speaks to him in a dream and asks what he is comparing it with. The fruit trees get their branches torn off the moment they fruit. The straight, fine trees get cut young for lumber. Their usefulness is exactly what kills them. The old tree has lived for centuries because no one wanted anything from it. “All men know the use of useful things; but they do not know the use of useless things.” This is one of the book’s most reliable reversals, and it bites in any century: the parts of your life that produce nothing, justify nothing, win nothing — the walk with no destination, the friend who’s no use to your career — may be the parts keeping you alive. A culture that grades everything by its yield is a culture of fruit trees getting their branches torn off.

The stories told about the man himself act this one out. The most repeated: two officials come to offer him control of a whole state’s government, the prize every other philosopher of the age was chasing. He’s fishing, and doesn’t turn around. He asks them about a sacred tortoise the king keeps, dead three thousand years, its shell wrapped in cloth and honored in the ancestral temple. Would that tortoise, he asks, rather be dead and venerated — or alive and dragging its tail in the mud? Alive, the officials admit. “Begone!” he says. “I too will wag my tail in the mud.” The most useful man in the room, offered the most useful job, choosing to stay useless, and free.

Which brings him to the thing he’s least afraid of: death. When Zhuangzi’s wife dies, his friend Hui Tzŭ comes to mourn and finds him sitting on the ground, drumming on a bowl and singing. Hui Tzŭ is appalled — to not weep is bad enough, but to sing? Zhuangzi says, of course at first I grieved, like anyone. But then I traced it back. Before her birth she had no form; before that, no substance; before that, not even breath. Something stirred, and there was breath, then form, then life — and now another change, and there is death. “…passing from one phase to another like the sequence of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.” She is resting now in the great room of it all, he says, and for me to sit here sobbing would be to show I understand nothing of how things move. The transformations that made her are the same ones unmaking her; grief that fights them is grief that wants the seasons to stop. He is not cold — he misses her. He has simply followed the thought all the way down to where it stops hurting in that particular way — and the chapter that holds this is the one titled Perfect Happiness, whose hardest line is that “Perfect happiness is the absence of happiness”: stop chasing the feeling and you may find you’re standing in the thing itself.

Late in the book comes the river that thought it was the sea. In autumn the floods come and a river god swells with pride at his own vastness — until he flows out to the ocean and sees water with no far shore, and understands for the first time how small “vast” had been. The ocean tells him not to feel ashamed, but to notice the pattern: “You cannot speak of ocean to a well-frog” — it knows only its well — and you cannot speak of ice to a summer insect that will be dead before winter. Big and small, much and little, are not facts about things; they’re relations to a vantage point. The river was genuinely huge — to a frog. The lesson is the cicada’s lesson again, returned at full depth: humility here means noticing the size of the well you happen to be in.

And in that same stretch, the lightest argument in all of philosophy. Zhuangzi and his logician friend Hui Tzŭ are standing on a bridge. “See how the minnows are darting about! That is the pleasure of fishes,” says Zhuangzi. Hui Tzŭ pounces: you’re not a fish, so how could you possibly know what fish enjoy? And Zhuangzi: you’re not me, so how do you know that I don’t know? They volley it back and forth, and Zhuangzi wins not by logic but by tilting the board — your very question, he says, shows you knew I knew: “I knew it from my own feelings on this bridge.” It looks like a debater’s trick, and partly it is. But underneath is the whole quarrel between Zhuangzi and the hairsplitters of his day: Hui Tzŭ wants to fence off what can be known with certainty, and Zhuangzi keeps insisting that a man leaning on a bridge, delighting in the dart of fish, knows something real that no proof can reach and no proof is needed for. There is a kind of knowing that lives in the body and the moment, and the demand to justify it is itself the mistake.

Underneath all of it runs his quarrel with the moralists. The Confucians of his age wanted to fix the world with the right rules, the right rituals, the right names for virtue — train people into goodness the way you train a horse. Zhuangzi thought this was hacking at the ox. The more loudly a society praises kindness and duty, he suspected, the more it has already lost the thing — you don’t post rules about a quality people still have. His sages are not models of correct behavior. They forget. There’s a practice he points at, usually called sitting in forgetfulness, letting drop the body, the cleverness, the sense of being a fixed self with a position to defend, until you merge into the flow of things. And there’s the fasting of the heart (most translations say the fasting of the mind) — not starving the body but emptying the chatter, so that you meet what comes without a script. The goal is never to become good at the game the moralists are playing. It’s to stop needing the game.

He even tells you what his own words are for. A fish trap exists to catch fish — once you have the fish, you forget the trap. Words exist to catch meaning — once you have the meaning, you forget the words. Then he adds, deadpan, that he’d love to find a man who has forgotten words, so he could have a word with him. The book is built to be climbed and then dropped. Hold its parables too tightly — turn going along with transformation into a new doctrine to be right about — and you’ve become the monkey furious over the order of the nuts. The point was never to win. The point was to wander freely, holding nothing so hard it can hurt you when it changes, light enough to ride the wind 90,000 li or flop happily to the next branch, knowing the difference and minding neither.

One real line. “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” — Chuang Tzŭ, Zhuangzi, ch. II.

What didn’t hold. Nothing here is a failed experiment — these are the places later thinkers push, not refuted findings. The relativism problem: if every viewpoint is just a viewpoint with no view from nowhere, on what ground does Zhuangzi recommend his own way of living over the moralists’ — isn’t letting things be equal itself one more this-is-so? Critics from his own tradition forward have pressed this self-reference charge; Zhuangzi seems aware of it and answers with a shrug and a smile rather than a proof, which satisfies some readers and frustrates others. The quietism charge: going along with transformation and wagging your tail in the mud can read as a license for political withdrawal and passivity in the face of injustice — a fair worry, though defenders read the stance as freedom and clear-sightedness, not indifference. The authorship layer: the only complete text is Guo Xiang’s 33-chapter edition of about 300 CE, cut down from a 52-chapter version. Tradition gives Zhuang Zhou the Inner Chapters (I–VII), and even their priority is now debated (Esther Klein, 2010); the Outer and Mixed chapters are later hands of several schools, 4th to 2nd century BCE, and sometimes pull against the Inner Chapters’ spirit. All three famous scenes here, the fish bridge, the wife’s death and the tortoise, come from those later chapters, so what Zhuangzi thought is always partly what his school made of him, and the stories about his life may be legend. The translation: the English quoted here is Herbert Giles’ of 1889. Giles renders tian (heaven, nature) as God, which gives the book a Western religious cast it doesn’t have, and he calls Kun and Peng the Leviathan and the Rukh; his Introduction also doubts the Tao Te Ching is genuine, a view the Guodian bamboo slips (found 1993, dated about 300 BCE) have since overturned.

For the little ones

This book as stories to read aloud, each with a note for the grown-up.