Zhuangzi: A Clear English Translation for Modern Readers

The complete Zhuangzi , in English you can actually read.

Twenty-three centuries ago, a Chinese thinker named Zhuangzi wrote a book of stories, dialogues, and arguments that has unsettled and delighted readers ever since. The dream of the butterfly. The cook whose blade never dulls because he follows the grain. The useless tree that lives out its full span precisely because no one wants to cut it down. The emperor Hundun, killed by friends who tried to improve him.

This edition presents all thirty-three chapters — Inner, Outer, and Miscellaneous — translated directly from the classical Chinese into clear, modern English. Nothing has been abridged or rewritten as self-help. The strange stories remain strange. The philosophical pressure has been kept intact. But the prose moves at the pace of a contemporary reader.

Re-reading the whole book in the course of translating it, the translator was struck by how contemporary Zhuangzi feels. The dream of the butterfly speaks to a world where the line between the real and the fabricated keeps dissolving. The fable of Hundun reads as a precise prophecy of an age that hacks away at whatever lacks a definite shape, in the name of efficiency. The paradox of the usefulness of the useless no longer sounds like a warning. It sounds like relief.

Names and key terms are gathered in two short appendices at the back, so the main text can stand on its own.

If you have always meant to read the Zhuangzi but have been put off by dense academic editions, this is the version to start with.