Extract

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, fluttering happily. Then he woke and was Zhuang Zhou again. But was he a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man?

A butterfly dreams it is a man, or a man dreams he is a butterfly, and in the space between those two possibilities an entire philosophy takes root. The parables, dialogues, and rhapsodic arguments attributed to the fourth-century sage Zhuang Zhou form the foundational text of philosophical Daoism, yet they read less like scripture than like a mind intoxicated by the strangeness of existence. Rulers and sages are mocked, usefulness is questioned, a cook carving an ox becomes a portrait of spiritual mastery. The prose shifts between earthy humour and passages of soaring lyrical power, insisting always that the way cannot be captured in doctrine. To read it is to feel the categories by which we organize the world gently dissolving.