The Inner Chapters

It is worth saying right at the beginning that the book that bears his name is not quite the work of a single author.

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.

Zhuangzi loved especially to put words into the mouth of Confucius, the great solemn sage of the rival school, sometimes to mock him and sometimes mischievously to make him voice the very ideas he opposed.

Scholars believe that only the first seven chapters, the ones called the Inner Chapters, come directly from Zhuangzi's own hand, and that the rest were added over time by his followers and admirers, students carrying on in the Master's key.

But those seven inner chapters are enough to place him among the greatest writers who have ever lived, in any language, anywhere.

To feel the man, take two of his most famous moments: One about grief and one about a dream.

When Zhuangzi’s wife died, his friend Huizi came to the house to offer his condolences and found a scene that shocked him.