A Chinese sage dreamed he was a butterfly, then wondered which was real.
More than 2,000 years ago, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting about happily. He woke up and asked: was he a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it was a man? His playful book became a founding text of Taoism.
The butterfly dream closes the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, 'On the Equality of Things', and is the book's most famous passage. It is short, a dream briefly recalled, but it poses a question philosophers still ask: how can you tell whether you are awake or dreaming? For Zhuang Zhou, the sharp line between the two was one more false division, and the dream is a meditation on transformation, the way one thing flows into another.
Almost nothing certain is known about Zhuang Zhou. Historians usually place his birth around 369 BC in the state of Song, in present-day Henan, during China's Warring States period. The book named after him is, with the Tao Te Ching, one of the two foundational texts of Taoism. The version that survives has 33 chapters, edited by the scholar Guo Xiang around AD 300 from an earlier 52-chapter form. The first seven 'inner chapters' have long been credited to Zhuang Zhou himself; the rest were probably added by later writers.
The book is unusually funny and irreverent. Where many Chinese thinkers of the time stressed duty and good conduct, Zhuangzi celebrates spontaneity, carefree wandering and following nature. He argues that distinctions such as good and bad, large and small, useful and useless are human inventions that cut us off from the natural flow of the world. In one story he is found drumming on a basin and singing after his wife's death, treating death as nothing to fear. In another he debates his friend Huizi about whether a person can know that fish are happy.
The Zhuangzi's influence reaches far beyond Taoism. It helped Buddhism adapt to Chinese culture after arriving from India, and it shaped Chan Buddhism, which became Zen in Japan, with its distrust of words and logic. It is also prized as literature, sometimes called the most important pre-Qin text for the study of Chinese literature.
Source: Wikipedia — Zhuangzi (book) · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
