Zhuangzi · 莊子

Taoism's laughing philosopher — a minor official who quit to fish, and turned down a chief-minister's post rather than be a decorated ox led to sacrifice. He wrote the Tao not as doctrine but as story and joke: the butcher whose blade never dulls because it follows the grain, the useless tree that lives out its years precisely because no carpenter wants it, and the dream of the butterfly — he dreamt he was a butterfly, woke, and could no longer say whether he was a man who had dreamt a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming a man. His theme is ziran, the self-so: let things be what they are. The Kabbalah's Zohar is likewise a book of tales rather than a treatise — both traditions trusting the parable over the proof.