If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways: Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. And as the essays collected in this volume demonstrate all too well, the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing indeed, as we will see, it always has been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. It uses every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most free and unrestrained way to live one’s life in the world without being constrained by often oppressive conventional judgments and values. In many ways the Zhuangzi establishes a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and although clearly the work of many hands, it is still one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. As a canonical text, it is for the most part addressed to the project of personal realization, and only derivatively and incidentally concerned with social and political order.

This volume of essays constitutes an attempt by a community of international scholars to provide their own exegesis of one of the most frequently rehearsed anecdotes of the Zhuangzi that is often referred to as “the Happy Fish debate.” The Zhuangzi is perhaps the most deliciously protean text in all of the Chinese philosophical canons.

Zhuangzi book online