Philosopher · Antiquity
Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu)
c. 369–286 BC · Taoism (philosophical; the Inner Chapters)
The second founder of philosophical Taoism; Thomas Merton's renderings brought him into Catholic reading, and Nostra Aetate 2 commends what is true and holy in the Chinese traditions.
Zhuang Zhou, a minor official of the state of Song, is the presumed author of the Inner Chapters of the book that bears his name, the most playful and the most skeptical text of classical China. “Free and Easy Wandering” opens with a fish that becomes a bird too vast for the quail to understand; “The Discussion on Making All Things Equal” argues that “this” and “that,” right and wrong, are relative to a standpoint, that Confucians and Mohists each affirm what the other denies, and that the sage rests at the “pivot of the Way” where distinctions fall away; the dream of the butterfly asks whether Zhuang Zhou dreamed the butterfly or the butterfly him. He taught “the fasting of the mind” and “sitting in forgetfulness,” accepted death as one more transformation of the Great Clod, drummed on a tub when his wife died, and declined office with the figure of the sacred tortoise that would rather drag its tail in the mud.
Why he matters: Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965), made with John C. H. Wu, is among the most read Catholic encounters with Chinese thought, and Merton found in him a kinship with the Desert Fathers' freedom from ambition and with the apophatic way. He is also the clearest ancient test of whether skepticism about human judgments must become relativism about truth.
Where to be careful
His relativizing of right and wrong, his indifference to the afterlife and his impersonal Tao sit against the Church's teaching that truth is objective (Fides et Ratio 25, 82), that the moral law binds all (Veritatis Splendor), and that the Way is a Person; his withdrawal from society leaves no place for the works of mercy. His freedom from status and wealth, his acceptance of death, and his sense that the Tao is present in the lowest things and beyond all words are what Merton rightly loved.
Reading
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The Complete Works of ZhuangziZhuangzi (trans. Burton Watson) · The standard complete translation; the first seven chapters are the core.
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Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, with Selections from Traditional CommentariesZhuangzi (trans. Brook Ziporyn) · A philosophically alert translation that shows how the Chinese tradition itself argued over his skepticism.
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The Way of Chuang TzuThomas Merton · A Trappist's free renderings with an introduction that says what a Christian may and may not take from him.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.