Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings

Zhuangzi begins with a fish that becomes a bird thousands of miles long and goes on to a cook carving an ox, a butterfly dream, talking skulls and trees too useless to cut. It is the most delightful book of Chinese philosophy, full of stories, jokes and paradoxes about freedom and the Way. This edition contains the complete writings: the Inner, Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters. This is a complete new English translation, with names in modern pinyin and the text rendered as plain, readable English prose. It is short enough to read in an evening and deep enough to return to for years, and the English keeps the paradoxes and stories intact. The early Chinese thinkers argued about the same questions we still ask: how to live, how to govern, what is natural and what can be known.