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THE ATLAS OF THE UNCARVED BLOCK

Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi
nature
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 slaughter. He wrote the Way as story and joke: the butcher whose blade never dulls, the useless tree that lives long precisely because no one wants it, the dream of the butterfly.

The other pole of philosophical Taoism — where Laozi is aphorism, Zhuangzi is parable, freedom, and the dissolving of fixed names and fixed selves.
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly… suddenly he awoke. Now he does not know whether he is Zhuang Zhou who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuang Zhou.
rhymes with
sephirahchokhmah
whyChokhmah is the flash of insight before it hardens into structure — the loosening Zhuangzi prizes, the mind unstuck from its categories.
tags
zhuangzi · chuang tzu · butterfly dream
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Wikipedia directthe Zhuangzi at the Internet Archive direct
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scholarship — Zhuangzi philosophy skepticism search
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