Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters by A. C. Graham
‘While we dream, we do not know that we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream interpret a dream within it… You and Confucius are both dreams, and I who call you a dream am also a dream.’
According to the historical records of Sima Qian, the philosopher Chuang-Tzu (full name Chuang Chou and now commonly known and hereafter transliterated as Zhuangzi) lived in the 4th Century BCE, probably in the Meng district of present day Honan. He might have held a minor local government post, possibly in a lacquer garden, before retiring to private life and writing.
Angus Graham (1919-1991) was a professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and his 1981 translation of the collected writings later attributed to Zhuangzi is distinguished by both its rigour and its literary quality. Graham was a philosopher as well as a philologist, and his 38-page introduction to the book, as well as the extensive notes on each chapter, themselves comprise a substantial commentary on Zhuangzi’s positions, as well as those of rival schools from Confucius onwards.
I first read this book as a master’s student at Soas the year after Graham’s death (though studying Japanese not Chinese history), and I have returned to it many times since then. If you are interested in Chinese philosophy, you have probably already read Zhuangzi in one version or another, but should definitely read Graham’s version as well.
I would also recommend it to ACX readers steeped in the ways of rationalism, utilitarianism and effective altruism based on logical argument. It will annoy, infuriate and challenge you, and surely that is good enough reason to read it. It also contains many delightful stories that bring to life the world of ancient China, its society, fauna, flora, hundreds of historical and mythical characters, and the arguments of competing contemporary philosophical traditions.
Introduction: authorship, language and translation
There are several problems with the book, and Graham addresses these in the excellent introduction. For a start, most of the ‘Zhuangzi’ was not written by Zhuangzi, and not all of the Inner Chapters are in the ‘Inner Chapters’.
‘Who is it that puffs out the myriads which are never the same? Who in their self-ending is sealing them up, in their self-choosing is impelling the force into them?
Heaven turns circles, yes!
Earth sits firm, yes!
Sun and Moon vie for a place, yes!
Whose is the bow that shoots them? Whose is the net that holds them?
Who is it sits with nothing to do and gives them the push that sends them?’
The text that has come down to us in thirty-three chapters is a composite, assembled and edited by the scholar Guo Xiang around 300 CE, some six centuries after Zhuangzi's death. But only the seven ‘Inner Chapters’ can be attributed to Zhuangzi himself with confidence. These stories, poems and essays would have been written on bamboo strips, later compiled and copied out with commentary by successive editors. The remaining twenty-six chapters are the work of various later writers and commentators loosely identified as ‘Daoist’ though by no means all in the tradition of Zhuangzi.
Further, Graham argues that portions of the text have been misplaced by later editors, and that some passages conventionally assigned to the Inner Chapters do not belong to them, while some passages from the Outer Chapters may represent authentic early material. His edition therefore presents not one book but several, layered and interwoven across centuries.
Graham identifies them variously as ‘School of Zhuangzi’ (including stories about Zhuangzhi, although unlike Confucius or Socrates, there is no evidence of an actual school), ‘the Primitivist’ (a distinctly acerbic critical voice possibly writing during the more violent Chin dynasty), the ‘Yangist miscellany’ (a separate ‘longevist’ tradition focused on bodily wellbeing), and the later ‘Syncretist writings’ (probably by a ‘Daoist’ compiler and editor during the later Han dynasty). Each of these layers needs to be understood in the context of the political and philosophical debates of their own times.
‘Saying is not blowing breath, saying says something; the only trouble is that what it says is never fixed. Do we really say something, or have we never said anything? If you think it different from the twitter of fledgelings, is there proof of the distinction?’
There are also multi-layered problems of language and translation. Over the 600 years between Zhuangzi’s writing and Guo Xiang’s edited collection, much of the original Chinese would have changed in meaning. Added to this, Zhuangzi used many compounds that appear to be original to his writing, and swiftly fell out of use after his lifetime. Recovering such fine distinctions of meaning in a modern English translation is hard, and while Graham reconstructs and the text with some scholarly confidence, he acknowledges that any translation is bound to be clouded by the passage of time and culture.
A particular issue he claims dogged previous translations is the failure to distinguish between prose and verse. The Inner Chapters include stories in which speakers burst into song, sequences of rhymed quatrains, strings of aphorisms, didactic verses with scattered prose comments, and logical propositions with annotated commentary by Zhuangzi or possibly his disciples. The formal distinctions between these are not obvious in the original Chinese, which is why in some English translations Zhuangzi: ‘suffers a strange mutation into a whimsical, garrulous wiseacre… that bears no relation to anything except the situation of a translator cracking under the multiple strains of his craft’.
So the text is mangled, its authorship uncertain and its translation unreliable. What kind of philosophical authority can rest on such foundations? The paradox would no doubt have delighted Zhuangzi, for whom such paradoxes provided the crux for his radical questioning of Confucian virtues, the ‘universal love’ of the Mohist schools and the logical propositions of contemporary ‘Sophists’ such as Hui Shi (Huizi), among other contemporary rival schools.
‘How do I know that what I call knowing is not ignorance? … In my judgement the principles of Goodwill and Duty, the paths of ‘That’s it’ and ‘That’s not’ are inextricably confused; how could I know how to discriminate between them?’
Finally in the introduction, Graham admits the necessity of choosing between accurate translations of philosophical concepts and literary style. While presenting the verse as verse, he sacrifices some of the elegance of the prose passages to preserve the kernel of the philosophy, especially in the Inner Chapters, where Zhuangzi debates fine points of logic and conduct.
Footnotes and annotations do a lot of heavy lifting in Graham’s translation, which together with the verses and multiplicity of characters, make it a dense, difficult book. Moreover, its arguments, themselves offensive to all right-thinking rationalists, have become distorted through millennia of misunderstanding, so how can I persuade you that it is worth your time?
Really, you should stop reading this review and pick up the book right now. But for those who wish to continue, I will go through each of the seven Inner Chapters in turn (remember, these form just a small fraction of the entire collection) and try to present some of their philosophical arguments in ways that might make sense to 21st Century ACX readers. While the equivalence is far from exact, the Confucian virtues of Goodwill and Duty may crudely be equated with the desire to do the most good, Mohist virtues with the expanded moral circles of effective altruism, and Huizi’s logic with aspects of utilitarianism. Let’s see how that goes:
‘It makes no difference whether the voices in their transformations have each other to depend on or not. Smooth them out on the whetstone of heaven, use them to go by and let the stream find its own channels; this is the way to live out your years. Forget the years, forget duty. Be shaken into motion by the limitless and so find things their lodging places in the limitless.’
Who’s who in Chuang-Tzu: a dramatis personae
But first, another digression. I mentioned the multiplicity of characters, and the Inner Chapters are remarkably densely populated. Across the seven chapters, around seventy people are named, though many appear only briefly in a single exchange or passing allusion.
The human population includes several overlapping categories: historical figures such as Confucius, his disciples, and various rulers and ministers; legendary culture heroes Yao, Shun, Yu, the Yellow Emperor and others from the mythological past; Daoist and other philosophical figures, historical and others legendary, associated with various strands of early Chinese thought; allegorical figures with names that carry philosophical meaning, and an assortment of artisans, cripples, freaks and sages who are philosophically central.
Confucius (Kong Qiu, 551–479 BCE) appears repeatedly, often in highly ambiguous ways. Sometimes he is gently mocked as a man trapped in the conventional virtues of ‘Goodwill and Duty’, who cannot see beyond the human and social world. In other passages, he appears almost as a proto-Daoist sage himself, dispensing wisdom that sounds remarkably like Zhuangzi's own.
Other recurring characters include Confucius' favourite disciple Yen Hui, Old Tan (traditionally identified with the legendary Laozi, but also presented as a wise master to Confucius), the Daoist sages Lieh-Tzu and Hu-Tzu, Yao and Shun (legendary sage-kings of mythological antiquity), Chieh and Chou (legendary tyrants), the reclusive Hsü Yu and the madman Chieh-Yu.
Zhuangzi himself appears directly in several of the most memorable passages, often with his great friend and philosophical sparring partner Hui Shi (Huizi), a ‘sophist’ logician associated with the School of Names. Huizi was apparently a leading public intellectual - prime minister of the state of Wei and the author of paradoxes about the relativity of size and time that have some affinities with Zhuangzi's own perspectives. In the Inner Chapters he plays the role of the clever man who cannot quite reach understanding of ‘the Way’.
In contrast, skilled craftsmen like Cook Ding illustrate the Daoist concept of ‘wu wei’, or effortless, unforced action in harmony with the natural order. Zhuangzi’s characters are rarely psychologically complex, but they are philosophically precise: each one embodies a particular orientation to the world, and the drama of their encounters is the drama of competing ways of understanding and being.
‘Is it not sad how we and other things go on stroking or jostling each other in a race ahead like a gallop which nothing can stop. How can we fail to regret that we labor all our lives without seeing success, wear ourselves out with toil, in ignorance of where we shall end? What use is it for man to say that he will not die, since when the body dissolves, the heart dissolves with it, how can we not call this our supreme regret? Is man's life really as stupid as this? Or is it that I am the only stupid one, and there are others not so stupid?’
As well as the confusing plethora of human characters, there are some 50 distinct animal, bird, fish and insect references across the seven Inner Chapters alone, though as with the human figures, many appear only briefly. Fish are particularly interesting in Zhuangzi because they operate on several levels simultaneously: as creatures with their own valid perspective on the world, as symbols of depth and freedom, as figures for the naturalness of being in one's proper element, and as vehicles for some of the text's most memorable philosophical statements.
‘Chuang-tzu and Hui Shih were strolling on the bridge above the Hao river.
“Out swim the minnows, so free and easy” said Chuang-tzu. “That’s how fish are happy.”
“You are not a fish. Whence do you know that the fish are happy?”
“You aren’t me, whence do you know that I don’t know the fish are happy?”...’
Plants, fungi and microbes are also represented. Among the most arresting passages in the text are about great trees, left to grow ancient in peace because they are useless as timber and don’t provide edible fruit. One such tree speaks to Carpenter Shih in a dream about how its very uselessness has allowed it to survive and flourish, just as the cripple Shu escapes conscription, in contrast to those who make themselves useful and are exploited.
‘There is a place in Sung, Ching-shih, where cataplas, cypresses and mulberries thrive, but a tree an arm-length or two round will be chopped down by someone who wants a post to tether his monkey…’
This diverse non-human natural world in the Inner Chapters serves several connected purposes: it relativises human perspectives by showing that every creature inhabits a partial but valid world of its own; it models the naturalness and spontaneity that the sage aspires to; it challenges the Confucian prioritisation of human social relationships as the proper focus of ethical attention, and it illustrates Zhuangzhi’s philosophical points with vivid and engaging imagery. So like the fish plunging deep to avoid the sight of the beautiful (to human eyes) Lady Li, let’s dive down and explore the Inner Chapters in turn.
Chapter One: Going Rambling Without a Destination (against goal-setting)
“I heard Chieh-Yu (the madman of Chu) say something. He talked big, but there was no sense in it. He left the firm ground and never came back. I was amazed and frightened by his words, which streamed on into the infinite like the Milky Way, wild extravagances nothing to do with man as he really is.”
The pieces which the compilers of Zhuangzi assembled in ‘going rambling without a destination’ are all on the theme of soaring above the restricted viewpoints of the worldly. Escape the fixed routes to worldly success and fame, defy all reproaches that you are useless, selfish, indifferent to the good of the Empire, and a perspective opens from which ordinary ambitions are seen as negligible, and the journey of life becomes an effortless ramble.
Zhuangzi opens his book with a fish so vast that no one knows how large it is, dwelling in the northern darkness. This fish transforms into a bird, the Peng, whose back is thousands of miles wide and whose wings are like clouds across the sky as it flies south. From below, a cicada and a young dove watch and scoff: ‘What is the point of flying so high? We fly from tree to tree and that is enough.’
As rational agents of utilitarian philosophy, we set goals, evaluate and work out theories of change, so that we can justify each step of the journey. The cicada and the dove are not stupid. They are well adapted to their world and capable of evaluating any proposed action in terms of their own established frameworks. Zhuangzi's alternative is introduced in this chapter through the figure of Hsü Yu, the hermit recluse who is offered the throne by the sage-king Yao.
Yao is the Confucian ideal of the virtuous ruler, the effective altruist of ancient China, dedicated to the greatest good of the greatest number. He genuinely wants to hand power to someone wiser than himself. Hsü Yu's refusal is not strategic or false-modest; he simply has no use for the throne.
The great difference between the Peng and the cicada is not intelligence or virtue but scale of perspective. And the humbling suggestion of Chapter One is that the perspective available to any given creature, however clever, is always partial and limited by what that creature is and how it sees.
The chapter concludes with several stories about people failing to perceive the usefulness of the apparently useless, a theme that is taken up later in the book, and finally a dialogue with Huizi:
‘I have a great tree. People call it the Tree of Heaven. Its trunk is too knobby and bumpy to measure with the inked line. Its branches are too curly and crooked to fit compasses or L-square. Stand it up in the road and a carpenter wouldn't give it a glance. Now this talk of yours is big, but useless, dismissed by everyone alike.’
Zhuangzhi suggests he plants it in the realm of Nothingwhatever and goes rambling around to fall asleep in its shade:
‘Spared by the ax.
No thing will harm it.
if you're no use at all.
Who'll come to bother you?’
The effective altruist might find this irresponsible. There is suffering to be alleviated, institutions to be reformed, futures to be secured. The hermit who opts out is complicit in the harms he declines to address. But Zhuangzi's point is more radical than mere quietism. It is that the framework of problems to be solved, of destinations to be reached, of utility to be maximised, is itself a kind of trap. The free and easy wandering of the chapter's title represents a different relationship to the world, one that does not begin by converting everything into a problem requiring solution.
Chapter Two: The Sorting Which Evens Things Out (against analysis)
If Chapter One challenges the utilitarian's destination, Chapter Two attacks the rationalist's primary tool: the capacity for analysis, for sorting the world into categories, for saying this rather than that, ‘That’s it’ rather than ‘That’s not’, true rather than false.
This is the most technically demanding of the Inner Chapters, and Graham's commentary is essential for navigating it. The chapter's title in Chinese ‘qi wu lun’ can be read as either the sorting which evens things out or the evening out of sortings. What Zhuangzi is criticising is not any particular set of distinctions but the activity of making distinctions as such, or more precisely, the assumption that our distinctions carve the world at its real joints.
The argument begins with the different sounds made by wind passing through holes of different sizes, each producing its own note, each equally natural, none more correct than any other. This is the music of the earth. The music of heaven is the sound that underlies all of these, the undifferentiated ground from which all particular sounds emerge. The rationalist hears the individual notes and analyses their frequencies. Zhuangzi is pointing at the silence from which they all arise.
‘The winds rise in the north,
Blow West, blow east,
And now again, whirl high above
Who breathes them out? Who breathes them in?
Who is it sits with nothing to do and sweeps between and over them.
He then turns to language and argument. Every assertion of this is also an assertion that something else is not-this. Every act of naming creates a boundary, and every boundary is, to some extent, arbitrary, imposed on a continuum that does not itself contain the boundary. The Confucians say that benevolence and righteousness are good. The Mohists say something different. Each side argues that the other is wrong. But from where does either side argue? From within its own framework of distinctions, using its own categories and standards of evidence. Neither side can step outside its own perspective to adjudicate the dispute.
For the rationalist, this looks like relativism. If there is no vantage point from which to say that preventing suffering is better than causing it, then effective altruism has no foundation. Zhuangzi seems to be sawing off the branch on which all rational ethics sits. But Graham argues that Zhuangzi is not a naive relativist. He is not saying that all views are equally valid but that all, including his own, are equally partial.
Understanding that there can be no neutral viewpoint, the sage holds any views lightly, without the attachment that turns a (necessarily contingent) philosophical position into a motte to be defended. S/he seeks the centre from which all perspectives can be seen as perspectives, without being captured by any of them:
‘Suppose I put it to you in abandoned words, and you listen with the same abandon.
Go side by side with the sun and moon,
Do the rounds of space and time
Act out their neat conjunctions,
Stay aloof from their convulsions.
Dependents each on each, let us honor one another.
Common people fuss and fret; the sage is a dullard and a sluggard.
Be aligned along a myriad years in oneness, wholeness, simplicity,
The chapter ends with the famous butterfly dream. Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, with no awareness of being Zhuangzi. He wakes and is entirely Zhuangzi, with no butterfly-nature remaining. But there must be, he says, a ‘barrier’ between Zhuangzi and the butterfly. The word Graham translates as barrier is also used for the physical transformations of natural things.
The rationalist's deepest assumption is that the analysing mind stands apart from what it analyses, that the self who sorts is not itself subject to sorting, that there is a stable subject doing the reasoning. Zhuangzi's butterfly dissolves that assumption in a single image. The altruist who is certain they know what counts as good, who can specify the utility function and apply it consistently across cases, has not yet wondered whether they might be a butterfly.
Chapter Three: What Matters in the Nurture of Life (against ability)
This is the shortest of the Inner Chapters, and the most deceptively simple. It contains the ‘Cook Ding’ passage, one of the most celebrated in the book and the one most likely to be quoted out of context, reduced to a motivational poster about finding your flow state.
‘Cook Ting was carving an ox for Lord Wen Hui. As his hand slapped, shoulder lunged, foot stamped, knee crooked with a hiss with a thud, the brandished blade as it sliced, never missed the rhythm, now in time with the mulberry forest dance, now with an orchestra playing the Ching shou…’
Graham's translation resists this reduction. The chapter is called, in his rendering, ‘What matters in the nurture of life’, and what matters, it turns out, is not ability at all, at least not in the sense that a meritocratic rationalist would recognise. Cook Ding does not carve the ox by developing superior knife skills. He carves it by following the natural structure of the animal, finding the cavities and passages that are already there, letting his knife go where the ox itself opens. His blade never dulls because it never meets resistance.
The contrast with the conventional understanding of skill and ability is precise. The effective altruist values ability highly, for obvious reasons. Earning to give requires being good enough at something that someone will pay you well for it. Direct work requires developing and applying expertise. The whole apparatus of cause prioritisation and evidence-based intervention depends on the ability to gather and evaluate information accurately and act on it effectively.
Zhuangzi does not deny that these things have value. He questions whether ability, in this sense, is the deepest level at which one can operate. Cook Ding began as an ordinary butcher, seeing only whole oxen. After three years he no longer saw whole oxen. Now, after many years more, he works entirely with his mind and not with his eye, guided by natural principle, finding the great joints and cavities that Heaven itself has provided.
The progression is from ability, which is the manipulation of external things through learned skill, to something deeper, which is a kind of attunement to the nature of things that makes the question of ability almost irrelevant. The knife finds its own way. The hand follows without forcing.
A second, briefer passage in this chapter makes the point in a different register. Prince Hui's cook is congratulated, and the Prince says the lesson he has learned from watching him is how to nurture life. But a second figure, Kung-wen Hsien, sees a one-footed man and reflects that this is Heaven's doing, not man's, and that Heaven singles out the man by giving him one foot where others have two. The maimed or incomplete person may be closer to the natural than the fully abled, fully functioning person who takes their capacities for granted.
The chapter ends with a passage about the death Old Tan, the only character in the book who has the seniority to talk down to Confucius, and who is later identified with ‘Laozi’, the supposed author of that famous Daoist text.
‘When Old Tan died, Ch’in Yi went in to mourn him, wailed three times and came out. “Were you not the Master's friend?”, said a disciple.
“I was”.
“Then is it decent to mourn him like this?”
“It is. I used to think of him as the man, but now he is not.”’
Ch’in Yi scandalises the disciple by failing to mourn the Master fulsomely according to the rites, but in doing so shows he understands the inevitable transformation of life and death, proving an apt student of Old Tan. This foreshadows similar passages in later chapters, including an account of Zhuangzhi mourning his own wife by banging on a pot and singing.
Chapter Four: Worldly Business Among Men (against ambition)
Chapter Four is most directly engaged with the world of political action, ethical responsibility and the question of how the wise person should conduct themselves among other human beings. It is thus the chapter that the effective altruist would find most immediately legible, and the one in which Zhuangzi's challenge is therefore most pointed.
The chapter opens with Yen Hui, Confucius's most gifted disciple, announcing that he plans to travel to the state of Wei, whose ruler is young, reckless and causing great suffering to his people. Yen Hui wants to do good. He has diagnosed the problem, identified the intervention, and is ready to act. He is, in short, an effective altruist, and Confucius spends the rest of the opening section explaining why this plan will end badly.
The problem is not Yen Hui's intentions, which are good. Nor is it his intelligence, which is considerable. The problem is that he is approaching the situation from within a framework of virtue and correction: he knows what good looks like, he can see that the Prince of Wei falls short of it, and he proposes to enlighten the prince accordingly. Confucius points out that this approach will make the prince defensive and dangerous. The do-gooder who arrives with a diagnosis and a plan threatens the ego of the person they are trying to help.
What is the alternative? Confucius introduces the concept of fasting of the mind, which Graham translates with particular care. It is not fasting in any physical sense. It is the emptying of the mind of its fixed purposes, its predetermined categories, its agenda for the encounter. You go to the prince not to correct him but to attend to him, to find out what is actually there rather than what you expect to find, to respond to what arises rather than to implement a plan.
For the effective altruist, this is very nearly a counsel of despair. The entire architecture of evidence-based giving, of cause prioritisation, of systematic impact maximisation, depends on having a prior view of what good looks like and pursuing it deliberately. Zhuangzi is suggesting that this prior view is precisely what gets in the way.
The chapter continues with a series of further encounters and parables, all circling the same theme. A man is asked to go on a diplomatic mission that he does not want, to a ruler who is unstable and violent. He is given advice about how to conduct himself that amounts to: do not go in with a fixed position, do not argue when the other person is not listening, do not exhaust yourself trying to change what cannot be changed, find the natural grain of the situation and follow it.
‘To leave off making footprints is easy. Never to walk on the ground is hard.
What has man for agent is easily falsified. What has heaven for agent is hard to falsify.
You have heard of using wings to fly. You have not yet heard of flying by being wingless.
You have heard of using the wits to know? You have not yet heard of using ignorance to know.’
Another great useless tree appears in this chapter, in the dream of a carpenter who has passed a magnificent ancient tree without cutting it. The tree speaks in the dream and explains its survival: it is useless. Its fruit is inedible, its wood rots, nothing can be made from it. For this reason, it has grown to an age and size that useful trees never reach.
This is the chapter's central provocation for a philosophy built on maximising useful impact. The tree that maximises its usefulness is also the tree that gets cut down. The person who is maximally productive is also the person most thoroughly consumed by the system they are serving. Survival, depth and the kind of wisdom that actually helps people, as opposed to the kind that merely appears to help them, may require a deliberate cultivation of uselessness.
The mantis waves its arms to stop an oncoming carriage. It does not lack courage or conviction, but It simply doesn’t understand the scale of what it is facing. The effective altruist who believes that the problems of global poverty, existential risk and animal suffering can be addressed by sufficiently clever allocation of charitable resources may be like the mantis. Love of animals and concern for their welfare can even be fatal:
‘The man who loves his horse will pamper it with a basket for a dung and a clam shell for its piss. But if a fly or mosquito should happen to hover near and he slaps it unexpectedly, the horse will burst its bit and smash his head and kick in his chest. There was nothing wrong with the intention, but the love did damage. You can't be too careful.’
Chapter Five: The Signs of Fullness of Power (against altruism)
This chapter is populated by cripples, the maimed, the disfigured and the condemned. These people who would by any standard measure be considered disadvantaged, disabled or marginalised, Zhuangzi presents as models of the fullest human life.
A man with no toes, a criminal whose foot has been chopped off in punishment, a man with a hideously ugly face, a hunchback whose organs are displaced: these figures attract disciples, inspire love, and demonstrate a quality of being that the conventionally whole and able-bodied characters in the chapter lack.
The cripples who have fully accepted their nature, who do not rage against what they are or strive to be otherwise, who move through the world without the friction of unmet ambition, manifest power or virtue in ways that the able-bodied, busily pursuing goals and projecting identities, typically do not.
The challenge to altruism here is structural. Altruism, in the utilitarian and effective altruist tradition, is built on a model of the helper and the helped, the person with resources and the person without, the agent who can increase wellbeing and the patient whose wellbeing is to be increased. This model requires a clear distinction between those who have and those who lack, between the capable and the incapable, between the suffering to be relieved and the capacity to relieve it.
Zhuangzi's chapter systematically dissolves this distinction. The people who lack, in conventional terms, are the people who are fullest, in the terms that matter. The people who have, who are whole and able and confident in their capacity to do good, are often revealed as empty, their apparent fullness a kind of defensive inflation of the ego.
A man condemned to death and disfigured by punishment becomes the centre of a devoted circle of followers, all of whom find in him something they cannot find elsewhere. When asked how he does it, he demurs: he does nothing. He simply is what he is. The disciples are drawn not to his achievements but to his quality of being, which is indifferent to achievement.
‘Death and life, survival and ruin, success and failure, poverty and riches, competence and incompetence, slander and praise, hunger and thirst. These are the mutations of affairs, the course of destiny. They alternate before us, day and night and knowledge cannot measure back to where they began. Consequently, there is no point in letting them disturb one's peace.’
Confucius appears in this chapter in his most Daoist mode, expressing admiration for these figures and confessing that he himself has not yet achieved their quality of selflessness. It is one of the passages in which Graham argues that Zhuangzi is not simply mocking the Confucian tradition but finding, within it, intimations of the deeper understanding he is developing.
The effective altruist who reads this chapter carefully may find themselves asking an uncomfortable question: whether the framework of helping, with its implicit hierarchy of capable helper and needy recipient, is itself a form of the ego inflation that Zhuangzi is pointing at. The person who has organised their life around doing the most good may be, in Zhuangzi's terms, conspicuously less full than the cripple who has simply accepted what they are.
Chapter Six: The Teacher Who Is the Ultimate Ancestor (against agency)
Chapter Six directly confronts the question of death, and in doing so confronts the deepest assumption of utilitarian ethics: that there are things worth doing because the future, in which their effects will be felt, matters.
The chapter introduces the concept of the True Man, the ‘chen jen’, Zhuangzi's term for the person who has achieved the fullest possible relationship with the Tao.
‘The true man of old did not know how to be pleased that they were alive. Did not know how to hate death, were neither glad to come forth nor reluctant to go in. They were content to leave as briskly as they came. They did not forget the source where they began. Did not seek out the destination where they would end. They were pleased with the gift that they received, but forgot it as they gave it back. It is this that is called not allowing the thinking of the heart to damage the way, not using what is of man to do the work of heaven. Such men as that had unremembering hearts, calm faces, clear brows.’
What defines the True Man is precisely the absence of agency in the conventional sense. He does not plan, calculate, pursue or maximise. He does not have projects in the way that rational agents have projects, things they are trying to bring about in the world. He responds to what is there rather than imposing what he thinks should be there. His knowledge does not venture into territory where it cannot go. This is not ignorance or incapacity. It is a disciplined refusal to extend the self beyond what the situation actually requires.
The chapter contains a series of conversations between dying or recently dead men and their friends and followers, all of whom face their deaths, or the deaths of others, with equanimity that is not resignation or defeat but something more like completion.
This is Zhuangzi's most sustained engagement with the question of what it means to take the future seriously. The utilitarian takes the future very seriously indeed: future suffering matters as much as present suffering, future people matter as much as present people, the long-run consequences of actions are the primary basis for evaluating them. The whole enterprise of effective altruism, with its concern for existential risk, for the welfare of future generations, for the trajectory of civilisation across centuries, is built on the premise that the future is the primary locus of moral concern.
Zhuangzi does not deny that the future will happen. He questions whether it is possible, or wise, or even coherent, to organise one's life around it. The men in this chapter who face death without distress are not people who have become indifferent to outcomes. They are people who have released the grip of the future on the present, who have stopped treating the present moment as merely instrumental to a later moment in which things will finally be as they should be. They are, in this sense, radically anti-consequentialist.
The chapter ends with a famous passage in which Yen Hui describes the practice of sitting and forgetting, in which he gradually releases his attachment to benevolence and righteousness, to ritual and music, to his own body, his own intelligence, his own identity, until he rests in an undifferentiated openness that is indistinguishable from the Tao itself. Confucius, hearing this, asks to become Yen Hui's disciple.
For a philosophy built on the idea that the self is the primary unit of moral agency, that what matters is what I do and what I bring about, sitting and forgetting is not just counterintuitive but structurally incompatible. There is no effective altruist who has forgotten themselves into greater impact. Or rather, if there is, the forgetting has undone the very framework that makes impact measurable.
Chapter Seven: Responding to Emperors and Kings (against authority)
The final Inner Chapter is the shortest and in some ways the most enigmatic. It responds directly to the question of political authority, of how the person of understanding should relate to those who hold power, and its answer is characteristically oblique.
Three brief encounters sketch three different relationships between the sage and power. In each case the sage declines to be useful in the way that power wants them to be useful. In the first, Lieh-Tzu meets a shaman who can predict death, and is disturbed to find the shaman able to read him. He returns to his teacher Hu-Tzu, who asks him to bring the shaman to him. The shaman, confronted with genuine emptiness rather than a readable self, flees in terror.
Authority, including the authority of rational systems, needs legible subjects: people whose preferences can be identified, whose behaviour can be predicted, whose needs can be assessed and addressed. The effective altruism movement, for all its scepticism of conventional authority, creates its own forms of legibility: the QALY, the expected value calculation, the cause area ranking. These are tools for making the world readable, for converting the complex texture of human and animal suffering into numbers that can be compared and optimised.
Zhuangzi's shaman cannot read Hu-Tzu because he has emptied himself of the fixed preferences and predictable responses that make a self legible. He is not optimising anything, not pursuing any goal that could be identified and evaluated. He is, in the shaman's terms, nothing. The section ends with a Taoist version of ‘happy ever after’:
‘Only then did Lieh-Tzu conclude that he had never begun to learn, and went off home. For three years, he did not leave the house. He cooked dinner for his wife, fed the pigs as though feeding people, remained aloof in all his works. From the carved gem, he returned to the unhewn block, unique in his own shape… that's how he was to the end of his days.’
The final story of the chapter is about ‘Hundun’, the ruler of the centre. ‘Fast’ and ‘Furious’, the rulers of the north and south seas, grateful for Hundun’s hospitality, decide to repay him by giving him the seven holes that all creatures have: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth. They drill one hole a day. On the seventh day, Hundun dies.
This is perhaps the devastating critique of altruism in the entire book. Hundun (which means ‘hodgepodge’, more familiar as ‘wonton’ dumplings) is killed by kindness, the well-intentioned application of a universal standard. The rulers of north and south know what creatures should be like, and their intervention is systematic, thorough and sadly fatal.
The rest of the book
Graham's ‘Chuang-Tzu’ runs to 290 pages in the Hackett edition. The introduction comprises some 38 pages and the seven Inner Chapters take us up to page 100. In the remaining two-thirds of the book, he goes on to translate and discuss substantial portions of the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters, identifying the different schools and voices at work, and tracing the ways in which later followers developed, simplified or distorted Zhuangzi's original insights.
The dialogues of Confucius with ‘Old Tan’ are intriguing, not least because Old Tan alone of all the characters in the book has the authority to talk to Confucius. Historically, Old Tan is identified with Lao-Tzu, the presumed author of the classic ‘Tao Te Ching’, which appeared around 250 BCE. Graham argues that this identification is a case of philosophical appropriation by later Taoists seeking to push the origins of their school back to Confucian times.
In the Chuang-Tzu dialogues, Old Tan is introduced as an archivist and expert in the rites from Chou, the reduced kingdom whose glories Confucius sought to restore. He would therefore be a very proper person for Confucius to consult, but Zhuangzhi is playing fast and loose by making Old Tan a spokesperson for his own positions. Graham suggests that adopting the authority able to condescend to Confucius as a proto-Taoist, and later as the author of ‘Tao Te Ching’, written centuries later, is typical philosophical gamesmanship.
‘Goodwill and Duty are the grass huts of the former kings; you may put up in them for a night, but not settle in them for too long; and the longer you are noticed in them, the more will be demanded of you.’
The ‘Primitivist’ chapters are the most politically radical, arguing for a return to a simplicity that existed before civilization imposed culture, knowledge and moral categories on human life. They are cruder than the Inner Chapters, less philosophically nuanced, but they articulate with great force and personality the anti-progressive dimension of the Zhuangzi tradition.
The four chapters of the ‘Yangist miscellany’ seem not to be Taoist at all, but by later followers of the ‘preserving life’ school identified with Yang Chu. Writing during the violent upheavals of the warring states and Chin periods, they advocate prudent calculation of benefits and harms, keeping out of trouble and ‘protecting one’s genuineness’.
The final Syncretist chapters attempt to reconcile Zhuangzi with Confucianism and Legalism, producing a more politically useful but philosophically blander synthesis. They are, in Graham's account, the work of later scholars.
Perhaps the most important additional material for the themes of this review is the collection of anecdotes about Zhuangzi himself: the conversation with the skull, the singing at his wife's death, the refusal of the prime ministership, and the dialogue with Huizi about the happiness of fish on the bridge at Hao, quoted earlier. These passages, whether historically authentic or not, constitute a portrait of a philosophical life, a demonstration of what it might actually look like to live in the way that the Inner Chapters describe.
It is a life characterised by lightness, wit, a refusal of solemnity, an indifference to reputation and legacy, and a deep, unsentimental attentiveness to the natural world. It produced a book, or contributed to a book, that has been read for two and a half thousand years, which may be worth something, though Zhuangzi himself would probably decline to quantify it.
The reader who has followed Zhuangzi through the Inner Chapters will find themselves in a curious position. They have not been given a new ethical theory, a better utility function or a more refined method of cause prioritisation. They have been subjected to a sustained, brilliant and often very funny series of attacks on the assumptions that make ethical theory seem necessary in the first place: that the world is a set of problems requiring solutions; that the rational mind can stand apart from what it analyses; that ability is the primary virtue; that helping is straightforwardly good; that the future is the primary locus of value; that authority, however rational and evidence-based, is something to be engaged with rather than evaded.
Graham's translation, notes, philosophical commentary and careful sorting of the authentic from the later additions, all serve to make the text as legible as it can be, without destroying the irreducible strangeness that is its greatest gift. Highly recommended.
Note: this review was written with some editorial assistance from Claude Sonnet 4.6 (free version). Any errors, hallucinations, fallacies and flights of fancy are the author’s.