Experimental Essays on Chuang-Tzu (Asian Studies at Hawaii, No. 29)

As Mr. Van Norden has it, this is one of the finer anthologies available for an Asian thinker and actually gives us a quite radically different picture of the major Taoist, and the intellectual movement as a whole, than we are used to. A.C. Graham's book *Disputers of the Tao* offers a brisk history of ancient Chinese thought which presents it as by turns dynamic and agreeably skeptical; but here Hawaii treats us to a "present history" of Chuang-tzu which makes the gnomic aphorisms we are familiar with less than *idealites*. The early Taoists were less about endurance races and more about the already-crushing cultural *staseis* of the Middle Kingdom, and "the Chuang-tzu" (rather than its more famous counterpart) contains observations on epistemology and moral-psychology to rival Plato in their evident richness; and here we have interpretations matching contemporary work on Hellenic antiquity in their contemporaneity and philological scruple: nearly all of the contributors are rather serious Siniticists (and although editor Mair's inexpensive translation of the entire Chuang-tzu, including apocrypha, is recommended as well this is no mean distinction).
Would that we had a greater variety of thinkers available in such a format, i.e. accessible to us as figures with an "unhistorical" bearing on the present.


A thought-provoking anthology.   November 20, 2000
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

There is good reason for this book being in print after almost twenty years. It includes some excellent essays on Chuang-tzu, a "Taoist," and one of the greatest philosophers and literary stylists in Chinese history.

Chuang-tzu is perhaps best known for his anecdote of how he dreamed that he was a butterfly and awoke from the dream, unsure of whether he was a man who had dreamed that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who was now dreaming that he was a man. Also famous is his story of the butcher whose skillful dismembering of an ox is, surprisingly, a model for how we should lead our lives.

Chuang-tzu is always a delight to read, but it is also a great challenge to try to figure out what he is trying to communicate to us (if anything!). The essays in this anthology are "experimental" in that they explore the writings of Chuang-tzu from a variety of perspectives. Especially worthy of note are the essays by A.C Graham, Chad Hansen, and Lee Yearley. Graham argues that Chuang-tzu gives us a way for dealing with the troubling gap between "is" and "ought" (between the way things are and the way they ought to be). Hansen argues that Chuang-tzu is a relativist, for whom there is no objective truth. Yearley suggests that we see two different images of the "perfected person" in Chuang-tzu. One is a person who is much like the rest of us, except that she takes less seriously the commitments that make most of us so prone to suffering. The more radical vision is that of a strange, alien sage, who could look on the death of his own wife as an interesting aspect of the great spectacle of change. The other essays in this collection offer many other interesting suggestions and perspectives.

Good translations of the writings of Chuang-tzu (also written "Chuang Tzu" and "Zhuangzi") include those by Burton Watson (who wrote the Foreward to this anthology) and Victor Mair. Another excellent (and more recent) anthology of essays on Chuang-tzu was edited by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Paul Kjellberg.