Chuang Tzu

Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 BCE) is, with Laozi, one of the two foundational figures of Taoism, and the more literary of the two. His parables, dialogues, fragments, and the famous dream-of-the-butterfly preserve the Taoist tradition in its sharpest and most playful form.

Where the Tao Te Ching is a book of aphorisms, the Zhuangzi is a book of stories: cooks who carve oxen by knowing where the joints are, useless trees that outlive useful ones, a man who refuses the empire to sit on a riverbank. The argument is delivered by image and joke rather than by doctrine — and the book has been read for nearly twenty-five centuries as one of the world's funniest, deepest, and most disconcerting works of philosophy.