Structure & Authorship of the Text

This page sets out the divisions, the evidence for multiple authorship, the standard classification of the material, the text's own remarkable account of its methods, and the practical consequences for reading.

Thirty-three chapters, and the ones that are missing

The received text has thirty-three chapters. An imperial bibliography compiled around the beginning of the first millennium records a Zhuangzi in fifty-two chapters. The version we read is the result of an editor working around the end of the third century AD, whose commentary is inseparable from the text and who reduced the fifty-two to thirty-three.

So roughly nineteen chapters were lost or cut. Fragments survive in quotations by other authors and in manuscript material recovered from cave libraries and preserved in Japan. What survives of the excluded material suggests the editor removed things he considered inferior or repetitious, and possibly material he found doctrinally awkward. We cannot check his judgement.

This is worth knowing for a general reason. The Zhuangzi we discuss is a selection made by a philosopher with his own agenda, working six centuries after the man it is named for.

The three divisions

The chapters are grouped into three sets, conventionally called inner, outer and miscellaneous: seven, fifteen and eleven respectively.

The grouping is not merely traditional labelling. There is a formal difference visible at a glance. The seven inner chapters have descriptive titles — short phrases naming a theme, such as free wandering, the equalising of things, or the great source. The outer and miscellaneous chapters are titled by their opening words, which is the default convention for a text whose chapters have no thematic titles.

That difference tells you something. Chapters with thematic titles were treated as compositions with subjects. Chapters titled by their first words were treated as blocks of material.

The evidence for multiple hands

Four kinds of evidence converge, and taken together they are decisive rather than suggestive.

Vocabulary and grammar differ measurably between groups of chapters, in ways consistent with different periods and different authors.

Positions conflict. Some chapters denounce civilisation, technology, ritual and music outright and call for a return to a simple condition. The inner chapters do nothing of the kind; they are interested in how to live within the world, not in dismantling it. Some chapters treat preserving one's own life as the highest good, which the inner chapters explicitly do not. Some chapters attempt to rank and harmonise all the schools of thought into a single system, which is a project the inner chapters would find comic.

Zhuangzi himself appears as a character, in the third person, in a number of chapters. Those chapters were plainly not written by him.

And the treatment of Confucius varies. In some chapters he is mocked; in others he is a wise spokesman for positions the text endorses; in others he is a straw man. This is not one author changing his mind but different writers with different attitudes.

The standard classification

The most widely used analysis in English divides the material into five groups, and although the boundaries are debated the scheme is a genuine advance on reading the text flat.

The seven inner chapters are the earliest layer and the most likely to derive from the man or his immediate circle. They contain most of the famous philosophical argument and most of the best writing.

A group of chapters in the middle of the outer section reads as the work of followers developing the inner chapters' concerns. These contain many of the best-known stories, including the debate about the happiness of fish and the reflections on the death of Zhuangzi's wife.

A group of chapters near the start of the outer section is sharply anti-civilisation, attacking sages, ritual, music, technology and government, and closely echoes the Tao Te Ching. This is where the reputation of Taoism as primitivist largely comes from, and it is not the voice of the inner chapters.

A group in the miscellaneous section argues that one's own life and person are what matter and should not be sacrificed for anything external. This position was associated with a different thinker of the period and sits awkwardly with the rest.

And a group of chapters attempts synthesis: ranking the schools, assigning each its proper sphere, and connecting the whole to cosmology and to government. This layer is closest to the state-oriented philosophy of the early imperial period.

The last chapter, and why it is valuable

The final chapter deserves separate mention because it is not really part of the same enterprise. It is a survey of the thinkers of the age, describing each school's characteristic doctrine and criticising it.

It is one of the most important documents in existence for the history of early Chinese thought. For several thinkers it is a principal source, and for one logician it preserves a list of paradoxes that would otherwise be entirely lost. It also ends with a warm and rather sad assessment of Zhuangzi's own friend, which is one reason to think the chapter comes from close to that circle.

It is also, in form, doxography rather than philosophy: it summarises and judges. Reading it early is useful, because it gives you the map of positions that the rest of the book is arguing with.

The text's account of its own methods

One chapter contains something unusual: an explicit statement of the three kinds of speech the book uses. It is short, and it is the best available guide to how the text works.

The first kind is speech attributed to others — words put in the mouths of characters, including invented ones. The stated reason is that a point made in one's own voice will be resisted, whereas the same point attributed to a father's neighbour will be accepted. This is an admission that the book's dialogues are devices, not records.

The second kind is weighty speech: appeals to venerable figures and to the authority of age. The text is candid that this works because of who is quoted rather than what is said.

The third kind is the strangest and has been translated in various ways, most often as goblet words — speech that tips over and empties itself, using an image of a vessel that cannot stay full. This names a style of saying something and then withdrawing it, or making a claim in a form that undermines its own finality. It is precisely the feature that makes readers looking for doctrine so frustrated.

A book that tells you its dialogues are inventions, its authorities are rhetorical, and its assertions are designed not to settle, is telling you how to read it. Very few ancient texts do this.

Where the famous passages come from

A practical observation. The passages everyone knows are concentrated in a small part of the book: the seven inner chapters, plus three or four chapters in the middle of the outer section.

The butterfly, the cook, the useless tree, the fasting of the mind, the death of the wife, the fish debate, the frog in the well, the skull, the bird that flies for months — almost all of them come from that portion. A reader who works carefully through those chapters has read what matters most and can approach the rest selectively.

The anti-civilisation chapters and the synthesising chapters are worth reading for a different reason: they show what happened to the ideas afterwards, and they explain features of later Taoism that the inner chapters do not.

What this means for reading

Four practical consequences.

Do not harmonise. When two passages conflict, the likeliest explanation is different authors, not a deeper unity. The interpretive effort spent reconciling them is usually wasted.

Check which layer a quotation comes from. A claim from the anti-civilisation chapters is not evidence about the inner chapters, and secondary literature frequently blurs this.

Treat attributions to Zhuangzi with care. Sentences beginning with his name appear in chapters he did not write.

And be alert to the third mode of speech. When a passage seems to assert something and then destabilise it, that is not carelessness or mysticism; it is a declared method.

Key points

• The received text has thirty-three chapters, reduced from fifty-two by a third-century editor whose commentary is inseparable from it.
• The three divisions are formally distinct: inner chapters have thematic titles, the rest are titled by their opening words.
• Multiple authorship is established by vocabulary, by conflicting positions, by third-person references to Zhuangzi, and by inconsistent treatment of Confucius.
• The standard analysis identifies five layers: the inner chapters, a school of followers, anti-civilisation material, life-preservation material, and a synthesising layer.
• The final chapter is a survey of the schools and is a major independent source for early Chinese thought.
• The text names its own three modes of speech, including one designed to undercut its own assertions.