ICLP Week 5

We’re going to be covering a lot of ground on the Zhuangzi these next six weeks. For a brief introduction to the Zhuangzi, it’s considered one of the most seminal texts of the Chinese tradition, and its imagination and mystic style continues to captivate people to this day. At its core it entreats us to rid ourselves of conventional values and unnatural systems of labelling in order to attain a sort of mystical freedom that will allow us to get closer to the Dao. By using language to touch on the passages of this text, I’ll undeniably be doing injustice to Zhuangzi who entreats us to recognize the futility of language itself but I hope you’ll bear with me. You might also observe here that I’m using “Zhuangzi” to refer to both the text and the author, which is an entirely different area matter altogether that I won’t get into too much here. A lot of work was done this week trying to understand the background of Zhuangzi, the backdrop in which it was put together, and how it connects to other philosophical traditions of the time, notably Confucianism

The Zhuangzi is broadly split into the Inner Chapters, the Outer Chapters and the Miscellaneous Chapters. Each chapter is furtherroken down into many small stories/sections that appear disjointed at first but share common themes that I hope to touch on. For the sake of brevity, over the next five weeks, I’ll pick out five stories/passages from the first two Inner Chapters, “Free and Easy Wandering” and “Discussion on Making All Things Equal” to discuss with you the central ideas of the Zhuangzi .