Guo Xiang

Scholars have established that the text is composite, assembled over time by multiple hands with the first seven chapters, known as the Inner Chapters, representing the layer most closely linked to Zhuangzi himself and the remaining chapters added by followers and later editors.

A scholar named Guo Xiang, working centuries after Zhuangzi's time, reduced the text from fifty-two chapters to thirty-three, and that is the version that has come down to us.

So when we say the Zhuangzi, we are speaking of something more like a tradition than a single manuscript, a gathering of voices around a shared sensibility, the way a river gathers tributaries and remains to the eye one current.

What unites those voices, or at least the strongest current among them, is a deep suspicion of fixed categories.

Being present without an agenda.

Listening to the dark without waiting for it to tell you something useful.

The Chinese scholar Guo Xiang, who edited the Zhuangzi into its current form centuries after its creation, wrote commentaries on the text that are themselves considered part of the tradition.

And one of the things he noted, though his reading differs from others, as all readings of the Zhuangzi do, is that the text's characters often discover wisdom not through study or effort, but through exhaustion.