SOURCE: The Book of Lieh-Tzu, translated by A. C. Graham, John Murray, 1960, pp. 1-17, 32-3, 58-61, 74-5, 92-4, 118-21, 135-37, 158.

[In the following excerpt, Graham examines the teachings of Lieh Tzu in relation to other formulations of Taoism and provides an introduction to each chapter of the Book of Lieh Tzu.]

Taoism is the greatest philosophical tradition of China after Confucianism. From its first maturity in the 3rd century B.C. we find references to a certain Lieh-tzu, who travelled by riding the wind. His historicity is doubtful, and it is not even clear when he is supposed to have lived; some indications point to 600, others to 400 B.C. The book which carries his name is a collection of stories, sayings and brief essays grouped in eight chapters, each loosely organised around a single theme. Among these the 'Yang Chu' chapter preaches a hedonism out of keeping with the rest of the book; but the remaining seven chapters make up the most important Taoist document after the Tao-te-ching and the Chuang-tzi. Some authorities still maintain that it belongs (like the latter two books) to the 3rd century B.C. It certainly contains material coming from this period; but the predominant opinion of scholars in China is now that it was written as late as A.D. 300, only a little earlier than the first extant commentary, that of Chang Chan (fl. 370). If so, it belongs to the second great creative period of Taoism, which is otherwise known mainly by works hardly suitable for translation, the commentaries of Wang Pi (226-249) on the Tao-teching and of Kuo Hsiang (died 312) on the Chuangtzu. But apart from its value as a representative document of this period, the Lieh-tzu has the merit of being by far the most easily intelligible of the classics of Taoism. For a Westerner it is perhaps the best introduction to this strange and elusive philosophy of life; for however obscure some of it may look, it does not present the infinite possibilities of divergent interpretation and sheer misunderstanding offered by the Tao-te-ching itself.

The Tao or 'Way', the path along which all things move, is a concept shared by all the philosophical schools of China. Heaven, earth and the 'myriad things' between them all follow a regular course, an unvarying sequence of day and night, spring, summer, autumn and winter, growth and decay, birth and death. Man alone is uncertain of his true path. The sages of the remote past knew the right way to live and to rule the Empire. But in the degenerate present each school (Confucians, Mohists, Taoists, Legalists) has its own 'Way', which it presents as the doctrine of the ancient sages. For Chinese thinkers, who are never much interested in speculation for its own sake, the basic question is 'Where is the Way?'—that is, 'How shall I live? How should the Empire be governed?'

The Way of Confucianism is primarily a system of government and a moral code, mastered by study, thought and discipline. Man is the centre of the universe, 'making a trinity with heaven and earth'; heaven is a vaguely personal power, ruling as the Emperor, the 'Son of Heaven', rules men; destiny is the 'decree of heaven', the world order is a counterpart of the social order, and the myriad things follow a Way which is essentially moral, given life by the kindness of spring, executed by the justice of autumn. For Taoists, on the other hand, man occupies the humble position of the tiny figures in Sung landscape paintings, and lives rightly by bringing himself into accord with an inhuman Way which does not favour his ambitions, tastes and moral principles:

Heaven and earth are ruthless;
For them the myriad things are straw dogs.
The sage is ruthless;
For him the people are straw dogs.¹

One characteristic of this accord with the Way is 'spontaneity' (tzū-jan, literally 'being so of itself')—a concept, prominent from the beginnings of Taoism, which assumes the central place in the thought of the Lieh-tzu and of philosophers of the same period such as Kuo Hsiang. Heaven and earth operate without thought or purpose, through processes which are tzǔ-jan, 'so of themselves'. Man follows the same course, through the process of growth and decay, without choosing either to be born or to die. Yet alone among the myriad things he tries to base his actions on thought and knowledge, to distinguish between benefit and harm, pose alternative courses of action, form moral and practical principles of conduct. If he wishes to return to the Way he must discard knowledge, cease to make distinctions, refuse to impose his will and his principles on nature, recover the spontaneity of the newborn child, allow his actions to be 'so of themselves' like physical processes. He must reflect things like a mirror, respond to them like an echo, without intermediate thought, perfectly concentrated and perfectly relaxed, like the angler or the charioteer whose hand reacts immediately to the give and pull of the line or the reins, or like the swimmer who can find his way through the whirlpool:

I enter the vortex with the inflow and leave with the outflow, follow the Way of the water instead of imposing a course of my own.… I do it without knowing how I do it.²

This does not mean that we should act 'thoughtlessly' in the English sense, that is inattentively. The spontaneous reaction can be sound only if we are fully attentive to the external situation. But we must not analyse (pien 'discriminate'), must not split the changing but undifferentiated world to which, in spontaneous activity, we make a varying but unified response. In thought we distinguish alternatives, joy and sorrow, life and death, liking and dislike, and we mistake the principles which guide us to the preferred alternative for the Way itself. But the alternation of joy and sorrow, life and death, is itself the Way, and we run counter to it when we strive to perpetuate joy and life. If, on the other hand, we cease to make distinctions, we experience, beneath joy and sorrow, the underlying joy of according with the Way.

The Taoist must 'know nothing' and 'do nothing'—two claims which are deliberately paradoxical. He knows how to act, but this awareness is a knack which cannot be reduced to communicable information; he acts, but in the manner of natural processes, not of the unenlightened man who tries to force his will on events. Translators sometimes resort to special phrases such as 'non-action' for the second of these terms (wu-wei), in order to avoid the impression that Taoism recommends idleness; but it seems better to choose an equivalent which, like the Chinese phrase, is strong enough to be obviously paradoxical. Wu-wei, 'doing nothing', is one of the main themes of the Tao-teching, where it implies governing the state by following the line of least resistance, yielding until the moment when the opposing force reaches its limit and begins to decline—for it is the Way that, to use an English instead of a Chinese expression, 'Everything that goes up must come down.' Wu-wei is less prominent in the Lieh-tzi, which directly discusses the principle of conquering by yielding only in a single passage.³ With the growing stress on spontaneity, 'knowing nothing' tends to usurp the place of 'doing nothing'.

Confucians can describe their Way; it consists of explicit rules of conduct, customs, institutions. But Taoists hold that fixed standards originated when men forgot the Way and, although designed to repair the damage, only made it worse. We must respond differently to different situations; action should depend, not on subjective standards, but on the objective situation, to which we should adjust ourselves with the immediacy of the shadow adjusting itself to the moving body. It is therefore impossible to define the Way in words, just as the swimmer cannot describe what he does to keep afloat. The Lieh-tzu opens with a denial that the Way can be taught in words, echoing the opening sentence of the Tao-te-ching: 'The Way that can be told is not the constant Way.'

How then can we discover the Way? By a spiritual training comparable to the physical training by which the angler, archer, swimmer or boatman learns his incommunicable skill. The Taoist classics give no details about the techniques of contemplation which lead us to the Way. Writers belonging to a branch of Taoism which aimed at physical immortality have recorded their methods in some detail—breathing exercises, sexual gymnastics, herbal drugs, alchemy; and breath control is mentioned in the Lieh-tzu&.⁴ However, the cult of immortality is quite foreign to philosophical Taoism, which recommends acceptance of the Way, by which everything which is born must in due course die; indeed Pao-p'u-tzu (c. 300), the greatest of the Taoist alchemists, goes so far as to question the authority of Chuang-tzu and even of the Tao-te-ching.⁵ All that philosophical Taoists tell us about their technique of meditation is its object—to return from motion to stillness, from existence to the Void, the Nothing out of which all things emerge and to which they go back in endlessly recurring cycles.

This conception of mystical contemplation as a withdrawal into the ground underlying the multiple and changing world is of course shared by many mystical schools, Western and Eastern. But Taoists think of this experience in terms peculiar to China. A Westerner tends to fit the mysticism of other civilisations into a Neo-Platonist frame, thinking of a primarily cognitive experience in which the seer rends the veil of illusion and discovers his oneness with the underlying Absolute, Reality, Being. For Chinese thinkers however the basic question is not 'What is the Truth?' but 'Where is the Way?' They conceive the ground to which they return in meditation, not as ultimate Reality, but as the Way for which they are searching. This explains an apparent contradiction in the concept of the Tao. As long as they are concerned with action, Taoists, like Confucians, conceive it as a metaphorical path to be followed. But when, as in the opening section of the Lieh-tzu, they eulogise the Tao revealed in contemplation, they use such metaphors as 'root', 'ancestor', 'mother', the 'Unborn' from which all things are born. They present it as the source from which the myriad things emerge, and even contradict the metaphor of a highway by calling it the 'gate' from which the highway starts.

It is therefore a mistake for the Western reader to connect the Way with his own concepts of Being and Reality. Indeed, in terms of the Chinese words (yu/wu, shih/hsiu) which are closest to these words in function, it is material things which exist and are solid (real), the Tao which is Nothing and tenuous or void (unreal). 'Nothing' is conceived (as Hegel and other Westerners have also conceived it) as a positive complement of Something, not its mere absence. The Tao is like the hole in the wheel which takes the axle, the inside of a vessel, the doors and windows of a house; they are Nothing, but we draw advantage from the wheel, vessel or house only by using its empty spaces.⁶

One consequence of this difference of viewpoint is that for Taoists the absolute stilling of the mind in contemplation is only a means of discovering the Way to live; it cannot be (as it may be for those who conceive it as a revelation of absolute Truth, in comparison with which all normal experience seems trivial) a state supremely valuable in itself. Just as Nothing has no significance except as the complement of Something, so the withdrawal into Nothing has no significance except in relation to the ordinary life to which the mystic returns. Pure trance states in fact have a very modest place in the Lieh-tzu. We read of a certain Nan-kuo-tzfi who sat like a clay image:

Nan-kuo-tzū's face is full but his mind void; his ears hear nothing, his eyes see nothing, his mouth says nothing, his mind knows nothing, his body never alters.⁷

But the ideal in the Lieh-tzū is a state, not of withdrawal, but of heightened perceptiveness and responsiveness in an undifferentiated world:

My body is in accord with my mind, my mind with my energies, my energies with my spirit, my spirit with Nothing. Whenever the minutest existing thing or the faintest sound affects me, whether it is far away beyond the eight borderlands, or close at hand between my eyebrows and eyelashes, I am bound to know it. However, I do not know whether I perceived it with the seven holes in my head and my four limbs, or knew it through my heart and belly and internal organs. It is simply self-knowledge.⁸

Only then, when I had come to the end of everything inside me and outside me, my eyes became like my ears, my ears like my nose, my nose like my mouth; everything was the same. My mind concentrated and my body relaxed, bones and flesh fused completely, I did not notice what my body leaned against and my feet trod, I drifted with the wind East or West, like a leaf from a tree or a dry husk, and never knew whether it was the wind that rode me or I that rode the wind.⁹

If nothing within you stays rigid,
Outward things will disclose themselves.
Moving, be like water.
Still, be like a mirror.
Respond like an echo.¹⁰

Lieh-tzu riding the wind is superior only in degree to a skilful charioteer, whose dexterity is described in very similar terms:

If you respond with the bridle to what you feel in the bit, with the hand to what you feel in the bridle, with the mind to what you feel in the hand, then you will see without eyes and urge without a goad; relaxed in mind and straight in posture, holding six bridles without confusing them, you will place the twenty-four hooves exactly where you want them, and swing round, advance and withdraw with perfect precision. Only then will you be able to drive carving a rut no wider than the chariot's wheel, on a cliff which drops at the edge of the horse's hoof, never noticing that mountains and valleys are steep and plains and marshlands are flat, seeing them as all the same.¹¹

Unlike many mystical schools (including Zen Buddhism, which continued its cult of spontaneity), Taoism does not seek an absolute, unique and final illumination different in kind from all other experiences. Its ideal state of enhanced sensitivity, nourished by withdrawal into absolute stillness, is the same in kind as more ordinary and limited sorts of spontaneous dexterity. The practical applications of Taoism interested other schools such as the Legalists, who present them in the same mystical-sounding language, so that we are often in doubt whether an author is really recommending a 'mystical' attitude to life at all. Even in the case of the Tao-te-ching, which teaches that 'reversion is the movement of the Way',¹² that strength and hardness always revert to weakness and softness, so that the sage conquers by yielding until the turning-point, we may well ask whether the author is advising the rulers of his time to seek mystical illumination or merely to cultivate a knack of ruling in the manner of judo wrestling. (Judo, as is well known, is an application of this Taoist principle, which was disseminated in Japan by Zen Buddhists.) But the question is probably an empty one. A Taoist would no doubt answer, on the one hand that the skilled wrestler is, within the limits of his art, in possession of the Way, on the other that only the fully illumined Taoist adept can entirely master the knack of responding immediately to the give and pull of political events.

Taoism represents everything which is spontaneous, imaginative, private, unconventional, in Chinese society, Confucianism everything which is controlled, prosaic, public, respectable; the division runs through the whole of Chinese civilisation. We might be inclined to call one tendency 'romantic', the other 'classical'. However, these terms imply a preconception, foreign to China, that order and spontaneity are mutually exclusive. The 'classicist', we tend to assume, forces order on to recalcitrant material by thought and effort; the 'romantic' freely expresses his emotions at the risk of disorder. But order, for the Chinese, does not depend on intellectual manipulation, and is the goal of Taoists as well as Confucians. The spontaneity of Taoism and its successor Zen is not a disruption of self-control, but an unthinking control won, like the skill of an angler or charioteer, by a long discipline. The tendency in Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting which shows the influence of Taoism and Zen is often called 'romantic', but it would be misleading to take this label too seriously. Out of seven qualities which Dr S. Hisamatsu¹³ proposes as characteristic of the Zen tradition in the arts, spontaneity, distrust of symmetry, and the suggestion of a mystery which the artist refuses to define may seem 'romantic'; but simplicity, detachment, stillness, and the austerity which prefers the aged to the young and beautiful face and the withered branch to the flower, accord rather with our ideas of 'classicism'. Order and discipline are taken for granted; but the work assumes its proper order following the Way only if the artist refrains from imposing order on it.

Nearly all the early Chinese philosophies, Mohism and Legalism as well as Confucianism, are primarily theories of government. They prescribe the conduct of individuals within society, but first of all they address the ruler. The Taoism of the Tao-te-ching is no exception to this generalisation. Its political doctrine is sometimes described as 'anarchism', since its essence is that events accord with the Way only if the ruler refrains from interfering with their natural tendency. But the fact remains that the Tao-te-ching assumes that there is a ruler, addresses itself to him rather than to the private individual, and advises Doing Nothing as a means of ruling, not as an abdication of ruling. Its doctrine is a development of the ancient Chinese belief (also visible in the background of Confucianism and Legalism) that the true Emperor does not need to govern at all, because the pervading influence of his mana, nourished by proper observance of ritual, is enough to maintain social harmony, avert natural disasters, and ensure good harvests.

However, from the first Taoism was also, notably in the Chuang-tzu, a philosophy of life for the private individual. The only fit occupation for a gentleman in traditional Chinese society was a career in the civil service; Taoism appealed especially to those who rebelled against this convention, or who failed to realise their worldly ambitions. In the reign of Wu-ti (140-87 B.C.) Confucianism finally ousted its rivals as the official theory of government and the moral code of the ruling class. The philosophical Taoism which revived about A.D. 200, in an age of political disunion and social disruption, was a private mysticism appealing, against the growing competition of Buddhism (which arrived from India in the 1st century A.D.), to individuals more interested in personal than in public life. Some Taoists of the period, such as Yüan Chi (210-263) and Pao Ching-yen (c. 300), were 'anarchists' in a new and different sense; they completely rejected the political institutions of the Empire, and imagined a simpler society without ruler and subject.¹⁴

The Lieh-tzu itself reflects this tendency, although very cautiously. The hedonist chapter explicitly recommends a society in which each pursues his own pleasure without interfering with others, and 'the Way of ruler and subject is brought to an end'.¹⁵ The Taoist chapters retain the old assumption that the power emanating from a true sage maintains the harmony of society without the need of government, but imply that he is not an Emperor; such sages have only existed either before or outside the Chinese Empire. The ideal society of which the Yellow Emperor dreams is that of Hua-hsü, mother of the first Emperor Fuhsi, and he does not quite succeed in realising it.¹⁶ Confucius is made to deny that any Emperor since the beginning of history has been a sage, although there may be a sage in the Western regions outside China.¹⁷ In the earthly paradise in the far North 'no one is ruler or subject'.¹⁸ Yao abdicates when he discovers that the Empire is in perfect order and no one is aware he is ruling.¹⁹

The Taoist, it will already be clear, cannot be a 'philosopher in the Western sense, establishing his case by rational argument; he can only guide us in the direction of the Way by aphorisms, poetry and parable. The talents which he needs are those of an artist and not of a thinker, and in fact the three classics of Taoism are all in their different ways remarkable purely as literature (in the original Chinese, I hasten to add). The strength of the Lieh-tzu is in its stories, vivid, lively, full of marvels, often humorous, to all outward appearances guilelessly simple. More abstract passages, such as the rhapsodies about the Way with which the book opens, tend to be vague and long-winded, lacking both the enigmatic terseness of the Tao-te-ching and the lyrical drive of the Chuang-tzū.

The Lieh-tzū contains many passages which are common to other books, and seem on internal evidence to be borrowed directly from them. Nearly half of ch. 2 comes from the Chuang-tzu (c. 300 B.C.), and more than half of ch. 8 from sources of the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. The Chuang-tzu, although heterogeneous in authorship, shows marked differences in style from the Lieh-tzu, some of them visible even in translation.²⁰ Stories from this source have a very simple narrative organisation, being little more than settings for dialogue; on the other hand, while the characteristic Lieh-tzu stories are straightforward prose, these are written with the metaphorical concentration of poetry, in a rhythmic prose which often changes into rhymed verse and back again.

No doubt the Lieh-tzu contains other passages taken from older works now lost. But when known parallels are excluded, its thought and style are fairly uniform. I incline to the opinion (which is however far from universally accepted) that most of it comes from one period (c. A.D. 300) and may even, except for the hedonist chapter, be the work of a single hand.

The Western reader of this book, struck first of all by its naive delight in the irrational and marvellous, may well feel that no way of thought could be more alien to the climate of twentieth-century science. Looking more closely, he may be surprised to discover that Taoism coincides with the scientific world-view at just those points where the latter most disturbs Westerners rooted in the Christian tradition—the littleness of man in a vast universe; the inhuman Tao which all things follow, without purpose and indifferent to human needs; the transience of life, the impossibility of knowing what comes after death; unending change in which the possibility of progress is not even conceived; the relativity of values; a fatalism very close to determinism, even a suggestion that the human organism operates like a machine.²¹ The Taoist lives in a world remarkably like ours, but by a shift of viewpoint it does not look so bleak to him as it looks to many of us. The answer to Shun's question, 'Can one succeed in possessing the Way?', will sound to some ears like a confession that life is meaningless, that we might as well never have been born. Yet its tone is one of lyrical acceptance, of the universal order and of man's place in it:

Your own body is not your possession.… It is the shape lent to you by heaven and earth. Your life is not your possession; it is harmony between your forces, granted for a time by heaven and earth. Your nature and destiny are not your possessions; they are the course laid down for you by heaven and earth. Your children and grandchildren are not your possessions; heaven and earth lend them to you to cast off from your body as an insect sheds its skin. Therefore you travel without knowing where you go, stay without knowing what you cling to, are fed without knowing how. You are the breath of heaven and earth which goes to and fro; how can you ever possess it?²²

Heaven's Gifts

The theme of this chapter is reconciliation with death. It begins by stating its metaphysical premises; all things follow a course of growth and decline between birth and death; nothing can escape change except the Tao, from which they come and to which they return. A series of anecdotes follows, illustrating the theme that we should accept death with equanimity.

The cosmology of the Lieh-tzū, and of Chinese philosophy generally, assumes that ch'i, 'breath', 'air', is the basic material of the universe. The ch 'i is constantly solidifying or dissolving; its substantiality is a matter of degree, one term of which is the absolute tenuity, the nothingness, of the Tao itself. The universe began with the condensation of the ch 'i out of the void, the relatively light and pure ch 'i rising to become heaven, the heavy and impure falling to become earth. Moving, opening out, expanding, the ch 'i is called Yang; returning to stillness, closing, contracting, it is called Yin. Between heaven and earth the Yang and Yin alternate like breathing out and in ('Is not the space between heaven and earth like a bellows?'²³) accounting for all pairs of opposites, movement and stillness, light and darkness, male and female, hardness and softness. Solid things are begotten by the active, rarefied, Yang breath of heaven, shaped by the passive, dense, Yin breath of earth, and in due course dissolve back into the nothingness from which they came. The human body is dense ch 'i which has solidified and assumed shape, activated by the purer, free moving ch 'i present inside it as breath and as the vital energies which circulate through the limbs. (In the present translation the words 'forces' and 'energies' as well as 'breath' are used for the ch 'i inside the body.)

The chapter gives a number of separate reasons for reconciling ourselves to death, and even to the final destruction of heaven and earth:

1. Opposites are complementary, and one is impossible without the other. We cannot have life without having death as well.
2. Individual identity is an illusion, and the birth and death of an individual are merely episodes in the endless transformations of the ch'i. ('You were never born and will never die.' 'Will heaven and earth end? They will end together with me.' 'You are the breath of heaven and earth which goes to and fro.')
3. The nothingness from which we came is our true home, from which we cannot stray for long.
4. We cannot conceive what it is like to be dead, so there is no need to be afraid. Perhaps we shall enjoy death more than life (the theme of a famous passage from the Chuang-tzū which will be quoted later).²⁴ Perhaps we shall be reborn elsewhere. ('How do I know that when I die here I shall not be born somewhere else?' evidently refers to the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration, but only as a remote possibility.) This kind of speculation implies something less than a complete acceptance of death, and the Lieh-tzu presents it with reservations, through the mouth of Lin Lei, who had 'found it, but not found all of it'.
5. Life is perpetual toil, and death is a well-earned rest. This point of view is confined to the dialogue between Confucius and Tzŭ-kung, a Confucian story which first appears in ch. 27 of the Hsun-tzu (3rd century B.C.).

All philosophical Taoists agree in admitting the inevitability of death. But there was a cult of physical immortality in China (using, among other means, an elixir distilled by alchemy), and by the Ist century A.D. at latest its practitioners were claiming the authority of the Tao-te-ching and calling themselves Taoists. The relation between this cult and philosophical Taoism remains something of a mystery. Alchemists, in China as in Europe, made genuine discoveries in the course of their search for the elixir; and Joseph Needham, in the second volume of his Science and Civilization in China, combining the experiments of the alchemists with certain theses of the philosophers which connect with Western scientific theories and principles of research,²⁵ presents even the philosophical Taoists as scientists not quite emancipated from the mystical ideas common in the primitive stage of a scientific tradition. His argument, ingenious as it is, prevents him from recognising just how far the philosophical Taoists go in their rejection of knowledge, of analytic thinking, of the whole basis of scientific method. However, for present purposes it is enough to say that in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. philosophers still kept aloof from the alchemists who had usurped the name of 'Taoist'.²⁶ With one dubious exception,²⁷ references in the Lieh-tzu to the cult of immortality are hostile.²⁸

It may be noticed that the mythology of the Lieh-tzu, if taken literally, often seems to contradict its philosophy. Its stories mention immortals living in remote regions,²⁹ a supreme God (Ti),³⁰ even a personal Creator³¹—the last a pure metaphor for the process of transformation, without basis even in popular religion. The Yellow Emperor at death 'rose into the sky'³²—a ritual phrase for the death of Emperors, but apparently meant literally, since elsewhere it is implied that King Mu of Chou did not rise into the sky.³³ It is not easy to decide how far the author believed in the historical truth of some of his stories; certainly many of them are yü-yen, 'parables', an acknowledged literary form among Taoists from the 3rd century B.C. Very likely he did not ask the question himself. A delight in the marvellous, a confidence that there are astonishing things beyond the reach of our knowledge, is an important part of the Taoist sensibility. One has the impression that stories of immortals, not here and now, but in remote times and places, are in a twilight between dream and reality, true enough to remind us of the limitations of ordinary knowledge, not quite true enough to suggest the possibility of becoming immortal ourselves.…

The Yellow Emperor

This chapter is concerned with the Taoist principle of action. Faced with an obstacle, the unenlightened man begins to think about possible benefit and injury, and ponder alternative courses of action. But this thinking does him harm instead of good. A gambler plays better for tiles than for money, because he does not bother to think; a good swimmer learns to handle a boat quickly, because he does not care if it turns over; a drunken man falling from a cart escapes with his life because, being unconscious, he does not stiffen himself before collision. It is especially dangerous to be conscious of oneself. A woman aware that she is beautiful ceases to be beautiful; teachers aware of their own merit soon degenerate.

Boatmen, swimmers and insect-catchers do not think what to do next and are not conscious of themselves; their minds are totally concentrated on the object, to which they react without intermediate thought. One whose mind is a pure mirror of his situation, unaware of himself and therefore making no distinction between advantage and danger, will act with absolute assurance, and nothing will stand in his way. 'The man who is in harmony is absolutely the same as other things, and no thing succeeds in wounding or obstructing him. To pass through metal and stone, and tread through water and fire, are all possible.' Not that such powers are his goal; even when he gets them, he may not want to put on such a vulgar performance. Confucius himself 'is one who, though able to do it, is able not to do it'.

Outside things can obstruct and injure us only if we are assertive instead of adaptable. To take a simile from the Tao-te-ching, we must be like water making its way through cracks. If we do not try to impose our will, but adjust ourselves to the object, we shall find the Way round or though it. The softer a substance is, the narrower the crack through which it can pass; the absolutely soft 'comes out of nothingness and finds its way where there is no crack'.³⁴ Wang Pi (226-249), commenting on this passage, writes:

'The air (ch 'i) finds its way in everywhere, water passes through everything.'

'The tenuous, non-existent, soft and weak goes through everything; nothingness cannot be confined, the softest thing cannot be snapped.'

Possession of the Way is thus a capacity for dealing effortlessly with external things. Its theoretical limit is absolute power, or rather absolute liberty; for the whole point is that, instead of controlling things, the sage ceases to be obstructed by them. Lieh-tzū riding the winds is an image, not of mastery, but of free, unimpeded movement.…

King Mu of Chou

The doctrine that the world perceived by the senses is an illusion is familiar in mystical philosophies everywhere; we expect it to have the corollary that illumination is an awakening from illusion to the Reality behind it. It is impossible to draw this conclusion within the metaphysical framework of Taoism, which assumes, as we saw in the Introduction, that the visible world is more real than the Tao, the Nothing out of which it emerges. Nevertheless, the idea that life is a dream appears occasionally in early Taoism, not as a metaphysical thesis, but as a fancy exciting the imagination. In the first of these two passages from the Chuang-tzu it is connected with a Taoist argument for accepting death: we cannot know what it is like to be dead, and when the time comes we may find we prefer it to life:

'How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion? How do I know that we who hate death are not lost children who have forgotten their way home? The lady of Li was the daughter of the frontier commander of Ai. When the army of Chin first took her, the tears soaked her dress; only when she came to the royal palace, and shared the King's square couch, and ate the flesh of grain-fed beasts, did she begin to regret her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret that they ever prayed for life? We drink wine in our dreams, and at dawn shed tears; we shed tears in our dreams, and at dawn go hunting. While we dream we do not know we are dreaming, and in the middle of a dream interpret a dream within it; not until we wake do we know we were dreaming. Only at the ultimate awakening shall we know that this is the ultimate dream. Yet fools think they are awake; they know just what they are, princes, herdsmen, so obstinately sure of themselves! Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who call you a dream am also a dream.'

'Once Chuang-tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly. He was a butterfly gaily flapping its wings (Was it because he saw that this was just what he wanted to be?), and did not know he was Chuang-tzū. Suddenly he awoke, and all at once he was Chuang-tzū.

He does not know whether he is Chuang-tza who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Chuang-tzu.'

There is no suggestion here that meditation can penetrate illusion; life is a dream which lasts until death, the 'ultimate awakening'. Chuang-tzū's dream that he is a butterfly suggests to him, not that there is some deeper Reality, but simply that he may be a butterfly dreaming that he is a man.

In the Lieh-tzu this theme occupies a whole chapter. Although its new prominence may well be the result of Buddhist influence, the treatment of the theme remains purely Taoist; there is no implication that it is either possible or desirable for the living to awake from their dream. Indeed, except in the second episode (where Yin Wen says that 'the breath of all that lives, the appearance of all that has shape, is illusion'), perception and dreaming are given equal weight. If waking experience is no more real than dreams, then dreams are as real as waking experience. We perceive when a thing makes contact with the body, dream when it makes contact with the mind, and there is nothing to choose between one experience and another—a claim supported by a series of parables designed to abolish the division between illusion and reality. If a magician transformed your house into a fairy palace in the clouds, and turned it back again in a few minutes, you would think the cloud palace a hallucination—although all things are in constant transformation, and in this case the difference is only that the change is relatively short and abrupt. (In China the magician is conceived to transform rather than conjure out of nothing, just as the generation of things is conceived as a process of transformation, not an act of creation.) A people awake for only one day in fifty would trust in dreams and doubt its waking consciousness. A slave who dreamed every night that he was a rich man would lead the same life as a rich man who dreamed every night that he was a slave.

We generally assume that the comparison of life to a dream is inherently pessimistic, implying that no joy is real and no achievement lasting. This is indeed the aspect on which Buddhism and other Indian systems lay most stress. But it is only one implication of a simile which in poetry, Eastern and Western, is very complex; and it would certainly be more useful to explore the significance of the comparison in the Lieh-tzū by the techniques with which literary critics sort out the implications of 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on' in the Tempest than by philosophical analysis. Unlike the Indian philosophies, neither of the great Chinese philosophies, Confucianism and Taoism, can be called pessimistic; both assume, not that life is misery, but that joy and misery alternate like day and night, each having its proper place in the world order. If 'Life is a dream' implies that no achievement is lasting, it also implies that life can be charged with the wonder of dreams, that we drift spontaneously through events which follow a logic different from that of everyday intelligence, that fears and regrets are as unreal as hopes and desires. The first and longest story in this chapter compares the visible world to a magician's illusion; and the dominant feeling throughout is not that life is futile, but that it can assume the marvellous quality of magic and dreams.

The story of the Chou Emperor Mu (?1001-947 B.C.) at the head of this chapter seems designed to contrast with the story of the Yellow Emperor at the head of the preceding chapter. The Yellow Emperor, after trying and rejecting both hedonism and Confucian moralism, travels in a dream to the ideal country of Huahsiu; on waking he applies what he has learned, almost achieves perfect government, and at death 'rises into the sky'. King Mu on the other hand is a lifelong hedonist; he travels to the magician's palace in the clouds, enjoys its pleasures, but is terrified when the magician tries to lead him to still higher regions. On waking he has learned nothing but a taste for travel. He sets out on a journey to the West, is disillusioned with pleasure, and dies without 'rising into the sky'. Is it a coincidence that Hua-hsü's country is West of Yen (the place where the sun goes down), while King Mu's journey ends at Yen after passing a palace of the Yellow Emperor? King Mu on his earthly journey unwittingly follows the tracks of the Yellow Emperor…

Confucius

Early Taoist stories sometimes make fun of Confucius, sometimes claim him as an ally. The Lieh-tzu, written after Confucianism won official recognition, confines itself to the second course, and criticises the doctrine through the mouth of its founder. The theme of the present chapter is the futility of the Confucian faith in knowledge.

The most important Taoist critique of knowledge is the chapter Treating Things as Equal in the Chuang-tzi. Its target is the analytic method of the Dialecticians, the one Chinese school which studied logical problems for their own sake.³⁵ The earlier Dialecticians, such as Kung-sun Lung (c. 300 B.C.), were sophists who dazzled their audience with paradoxes. During the 3rd century B.C. the authors of the Mohist Canons advanced from this stage to the clarification of problems by exposing false analogies and establishing rules of reasoning. But the movement soon came to an end, defeated on one side by the Confucian suspicion of speculation without practical or moral relevance, on the other by Taoist irrationalism.

When interest in the paradoxes of the Dialecticians revived for a time in the 3rd century A.D., it was, curiously enough, in Taoist circles. By this period the major enemy of Taoist mysticism was not logical analysis, but the practical thinking of Confucians, who insisted on weighing benefit and harm, and distinguishing between right and wrong. Sophistries without practical application rather pleased the Taoist taste for marvels. One episode in the present chapter makes fun of Kung-sun Lung, and quotes a number of paradoxes ascribed to him, four of which are known to have been discussed by the original Dialecticians ('Pointing does not reach', 'The shadow of a flying bird never moves', 'A white horse is not a horse', 'An orphan colt has never had a mother'). The author of the Lieh-tzd is quite kind to him, as he is to all eccentrics, and enjoys his sophistries without taking them seriously. The same pleasure in ingenious argument, providing it is unsound, is visible at the end of the Yellow Emperor chapter, where he reproduces the story of Hui Ang, first found in ch. 15 of the La-shih ch'un-ch'iu (c. 240 B.C.), a philosophical encyclopaedia representing the opinions of several schools. He quotes the Mohist Canons three times in the course of the Lieh-tzū³⁶ and at the beginning of the Questions of T'ang even makes serious use of the paradox of infinity.…

The Questions of Tang

The universe is infinite in space and time. Outside heaven and earth, who knows whether there may not be a greater heaven and earth? Beyond the narrow range of human perception there must be things too large or small for us to see; who knows whether there may not be insects so minute that they can settle in swarms on the eyelashes of mosquitoes? The Questions of T'ang is a prolonged assault against the unenlightened man's ignorance of the limitations of prosaic, everyday knowledge, beginning with a discussion of infinity (the only analytic reasoning in the Lieh-tzu which, against all the author's principles, is intended seriously), continuing with myths, folk tales and reports of monstrous animals and trees, proceeding to accounts of the strange customs of remote peoples, then to a tale which shows that even Confucius did not know everything, at last to a sequence of tall stories about anglers, surgeons, musicians, craftsmen, archers, charioteers and swordsmen. It concludes, as a final proof of the futility of common sense, with the case of the jade-cutting knife and the fireproof cloth (asbestos), two articles which reached China from Central Asia not long before the Lieh-tzu was written, confounding hard-headed people who had refused to believe ancient records of their existence.

It must not be supposed that the Lieh-tzu belongs to an age in which marvels were taken for granted. The whole range of Chinese sensibility associated with Confucianism is thoroughly sensible, sceptical, contemptuous of fantasy; the ascendency of Confucianism indeed obliterated most of the ancient mythology of China. The Taoist delight in the extraordinary is a protest against the imaginative poverty of Confucianism, a recovery of numinous wonder, a reversion to a primitive and child-like vision. Taoism cultivates naivety as it cultivates spontaneity. In particular its insistence that we can know only a minute fraction of an immeasurable universe serves as another weapon against the pretensions of ordinary common-sense knowledge. This is the point stressed by the commentator Chang Chan, who is well aware that the fantasies of this chapter will not appeal to everyone. 'How can anyone suppose,' he asks, apostrophising Lieh-tzū, 'that you engage in pointless extravagances simply from a love of marvels and esteem for the extraordinary? Alas, when even Lao-tzu and Chuangtzu are ridiculed by critics of the age, how can you escape?'

A second theme, which falls out of sight early in the chapter, is the relativity of judgments. Everthing is bigger than some things and smaller than others, similar to other things if you take account of resemblances and unlike them if you take account of differences, good by some standards and bad by others. In some parts of the Chuang-tzu this is the basic argument against analytic thought—it is useless to conceive alternatives because neither of them will be right or wrong. The Questions of T'ang assumes, without developing it further, the relativism of such passages as this:

From the point of view of the Tao, no thing is noble or base. From the point of view of things, each considers itself noble and others base. From the point of view of conventions, nobility and baseness do not depend on oneself. From the point of view of degree, if you judge them arguing from positions where they are big (judge in relation to smaller things), all things are big; if you argue from positions where they are small, all things are small. If you know that heaven and earth may be treated as a tiny grain, and the tip of a hair as a hill or a mountain, estimates of degree will be graded.

From the point of view of their functions, if you judge them arguing from those which they have, all things have them; if you judge them arguing from those which they lack, all things lack them. If you know that East and West are opposites yet cannot do without each other, the allotment of functions will be decided.

From the point of view of tastes, if you judge them arguing from positions where they are right (judge in relation to people who approve them), all things are right; if you argue from positions where they are wrong, all things are wrong. If you know that the sage Yao and the tyrant Chieh each considered himself right and the other wrong, standards of taste will be seen in proportion.³⁷ …

Endeavour and Destiny

The Chinese word for 'destiny' is t'ien-ming, 'the decree of heaven', often reduced to ming alone, 'the decree'. Behind it is the image of heaven ruling events as the Emperor, the 'son of heaven', rules men. But heaven is only vaguely personal even for Confucians, and quite impersonal for Taoists. In the Lieh-tzū the 'decree' is a pure metaphor; events either happen 'of themselves', spontaneously, or are the effects of human endeavour, and are 'decreed' if they belong to the former class.

Where to place the dividing line between 'heaven' and 'man', the 'decree of heaven' and 'human action', is one of the constant problems of Chinese thought. According to Confucianism, whether we act rightly or wrongly depends on ourselves, but whether our actions lead to wealth or poverty, long life or early death, is decreed by heaven.³⁸ The Mohist school rejected this limited fatalism, claiming that wealth and long life also depend on ourselves, since they are heaven's reward's for righteous conduct. Both these theories of destiny are designed to encourage moral endeavour. Mohism, like the great Western and West Asiatic religions, promises rewards for the good. Confucianism, recognising that good is not always rewarded in practice, argues from a different direction, claiming that it is a mistake to let selfish considerations distract us from acting morally, since wealth and long life are the gifts of destiny, and no endeavour can bring them nearer.

Taoists are less interested in the problem of destiny, and it is interesting to find in the Lieh-Tzŭ a complete theory which can stand beside those of the other schools. Its central point is that all endeavour is powerless against destiny. It is useless to weigh benefit and harm, right and wrong; the result will be the same whatever you do. If you fall ill, don't bother to call a doctor; you will recover if you are destined to recover. This extreme fatalism is something quite unusual in Chinese philosophy, although the sceptic Wang Ch'ung (born A.D. 27), an independent thinker who criticised all the schools, held a very similar position. Lu Ch'unghsuan, who wrote a commentary on the Lieh-tzu for the Taoist Emperor. Ming-huang (713-755), found the fatalism of this chapter as detestable as the hedonism of the next.

At first sight such an extreme fatalism, like the Taoist principle of 'Doing Nothing', seems to be an invitation to complete inertia. On closer inspection we see that it is designed to encourage spontaneity in the same way that the Confucian and Mohist theories are designed to encourage moral endeavour. Fatalism disturbs us because it undermines our faith in the value of the moral choice. However, we do not mind hearing that actions are destined, if they are of a kind outside the range of conscious decision; the claim that a man may be destined to commit a murder no doubt alarms us, the suggestion that he may be fated to fall in love with a particular woman on the contrary has a romantic charm. But the Lieh-tzu directly repudiates conscious choice; it advises us to develop the capacity to respond without conceiving alternatives, and activities which are spontaneous in the sense of being unpremeditated are just those which we do not mind admitting are predictable. If we ought to train ourselves to allow our actions to be 'so of themselves', 'destined' instead of forced by conscious endeavour, then pure fatalism is healthy instead of baleful, precisely because it undermines our faith in the utility of conscious choice. Thus fatalism (like Calvinist predestination and Marxist determinism) paradoxically provides a motive for disciplining oneself for a certain kind of action.

Chinese theories of destiny seldom touch the problem of free will. They assume the capacity to choose; the question is whether the success or failure of the chosen course of action is due to heaven or to man. But the Lieh-tzd comes near to crossing the line which separates fatalism from predestination and determinism. This chapter ends with the pronouncement that aims as well as achievements are outside our control, since they depend on our situation; a man's situation makes him aim at profit if he is a merchant, at power if he is an official. A series of anecdotes illustrates the claim that certain famous men who are praised for making the right choice in fact had no choice. However, in the last resort the author does not deny that we can choose if we make the mistake of supposing that it will benefit us to do so. His point is rather that we ought not to choose. The true Taoist empties his mind of all subjective principles, attends to the external situation with perfect concentration, and responds to it without conceiving alternatives. It is usual to praise Duke Huan of Ch'i (685-643 B.C.) for his lack of prejudice when he made his enemy Kuan Chung chief minister. But he wanted to become master of the Empire, and only Kuan Chung could achieve this for him. No doubt he could have acted differently, if he had let subjective preferences distort his vision; but if his mind accurately mirrored the objective situation, what choice had he?

'The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine.' The comparison with a machine recalls the story of the robot which performed before King Mu, and Chang Chan's comment that some of his contemporaries believed that the human organism is a mechanism without a spirit inside it.³⁹ It is at first sight surprising to find such a conception in a mystical philosophy. In the West this is an idea forced on us by science, very offensive to moral, religious and aesthetic prejudices. Taoists, on the contrary, believe that there ought not to be any will preventing our actions from according with the Way like the movements of inanimate objects; the comparison with a mindless machine occurs naturally to them, even without the scientific basis which could give it plausibility. A Western example of a similar way of thinking is Kleist's essay Uber das Marionetten Theater, which argues that a puppet is more spontaneous than a living actor, since its movements depend on the interaction of parts, not on the mind of an actor thinking outside his role.…

Yang Chu

The 'Yang Chu' chapter is so unlike the rest of the Lieh-tzū that it must be the work of another hand, although probably of the same period (3rd or 4th century A.D.). Its message is very simple: life is short, and the only good reasons for living are music, women, fine clothes and tasty food. Their full enjoyment is hindered by moral conventions which we obey from an idle desire to win a good reputation in the eyes of others and fame which will outlast our deaths. If there is any philosophy which is near enough to the rock bottom of human experience to be the same through all variations of culture, this is it; and the author presents it with uncompromising lucidity. The 'Yang Chu' chapter is the one part of the Lieh-tzu in which everything is familiar, and we follow effortlessly nearly every turn of the thought without ever sensing elusive differences of preconception which obscure the point.

The historical Yang Chu (c. 350 B.C.) was the first important Chinese thinker who developed a philosophy for the individual disinclined to join in the struggle for wealth and power. Little is known of his teaching, which was submerged in Taoism during the next century. He seems to have held that, since external possessions are replaceable while the body is not, we should never permit the least injury to the body, even the loss of a hair, for the sake of any external benefit, even the throne of the Empire. For moralists such as the Confucians and Mohists, to refuse a throne would not be a proof of high-minded indifference to personal gain, but a selfish rejection of the opportunity to benefit the people. They therefore derided Yang Chu as a man who would not sacrifice a hair even to benefit the whole world. On the other hand the Taoists of the 3rd century B.C. and later, also concerned with the cultivation of personal life, easily accepted Yang Chu as one of themselves. Outside this chapter the Yang Chu of the Lieh-tzu is a Taoist, although a group of sayings and stories in 'Explaining Conjunctions'⁴⁰ shows some traces of his original doctrine.

When the hedonist author puts his very different theories into the mouth of Yang Chu he is merely following a recognised literary convention of his time. He expressed the same opinions through a dialogue between Kuan Chung (died 645 B.C.) and Yen-tzu (died 493 B.C.), although he must have known that these famous ministers of the state of Ch'i were not even contemporaries. However, there is evidence that the editor of the Lieh-tzd has expanded the hedonist document with five additions alternating with its last five sections, and that the first three of these are from older sources and concern the historical Yang Chu. Consequently there is danger of confusion, and in the present translation these passages (as well as a minor interpolation) are printed in italics in order to distinguish them.

The first of them is a dialogue between Yang Chu and Ch'in Ku-li, the chief disciple of Mo-tz (c. 479-c. 381 B.C.). It is evidently from a Mohist source, among other reasons because the story is told from the side of Ch'in Ku-li. This passage, in which Yang Chu refuses to give a hair to benefit the world, gives the false impression, if we overlook its separate origin, that the author of the 'Yang Chu' chapter was an amoral egoist as well as a hedonist. But there is nothing else in the chapter which supports this conclusion. The hedonist author is a rebel against all moral conventions which hinder sensual enjoyment, and an enemy of the respectability, the obsession with face, which the Chinese and the English confuse with morality; but he wants pleasure for other men as well as for himself. In one story the voluptuary Tuan-mu Shu gives away all his possessions as soon as he is too old to enjoy them, and dies without the money for his own funeral; those whom he has helped then club together to restore the property to his children.

There is no sign of hedonism elsewhere in the Lieh-tzu, and the opening stories of the 'Yellow Emperor' and 'King Mu' chapters both reject it explicitly. The 'Yang Chu' chapter on the other hand is almost untouched by Taoist thought and language. The contrast is all the more striking since Chinese poets in their cups, exhorting us to enjoy life while it lasts, find it very easy to mix hedonism with mysticism. No other part of the book evokes a mood in the least like the sombre and passionate tone of this chapter. There is no question, for this writer, of seeking a stand-point from which to look with equanimity on life and death. The word 'Death' echoes through everything he writes, warning us to make merry while we can, and the only consolation which he admits is the thought that life, brief as it is, is long enough to weary us of its few pleasures. A Taoist, just as much as a Confucian, is a moderate, a compromiser who balances every consideration against its opposite, and avoids any excess which might shorten his natural span of life. This hedonist, on the contrary, is by temperament an extremist, who presents all issues with harsh clarity, and prefers the intense enjoyment of an hour to any consideration of health, safety or morality. A Taoist laughs at social conventions, and eludes or adapts himself to them; the hedonist abhors them as a prison from which he must escape at any cost. Any Taoist would understand part of what we mean by 'Liberty', but the author of this chapter is perhaps the only early Chinese thinker who would have appreciated the passion which this word excites in the West.…

Explaining Conjunctions

Explaining Conjunctions is the most heterogeneous of the eight chapters. More than half of it is taken from known sources of the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C., not all Taoist, and it is likely that much of the rest is from sources no longer extant. Nevertheless, there is a single theme guiding the selection, the effect of chance conjunctions of events. The chance combinations which make each situation unique decide both whether an action is right and how others interpret its motives. The moral is that we should discard fixed standards, and follow the external situation as the shadow follows the body. 'Whether we should be active or passive depends on other things and not on ourselves.' …

Notes

¹Tao-te-ching, ch. 5.

² p. 44 below (also in Chuang-tzu, ch. 19).

³ pp. 52 ff.

⁴ pp. 47 ff. (also in Chuang-tzu, ch. 7).

⁵ Cf. Creel (Short Reading List, p. 182), p. 152.

⁶Tao-te-ching, ch. II.

⁷ p. 80.

⁸ pp. 77 ff.

⁹ pp. 36 ff. and 90.

¹⁰ (also in Chuang-tzu, ch. 33).

¹¹ p. 114.

¹²Tao-te-ching, ch. 40.

¹³ There is an English summary of the argument of his Zen to Bijutsu in Sohaku Ogata, Zen for the West (London, 1959), pp. 24-26.

¹⁴ Cf. Lin Mou-sheng, Men and Ideas (New York, 1942), pp. 150-8.

¹⁵ p. 146.

¹⁶ pp. 34 ff.

¹⁷ p. 78.

¹⁸ p. 102.

¹⁹ p. 90.

²⁰ Sixteen complete episodes (and sections from others) are from the Chuang-tzū: Lieh-tzu and the skull (pp. 20-22), Shun's question (pp. 29 ff.), Lieh-tzu and Kuan-yin (pp. 37 ff.), Lieh-tzū's archery (pp. 38 ff.), Confucius and the boatman (pp. 43 ff.), Confucius and the swimmer (p. 44), Confucius and the catcher of cicadas (pp. 44 ff.), the seagulls (p. 45, mentioned as Chuang-tzu in early quotations), Lieh-tzu and the shaman (pp. 47-49), Lieh-tzu and Po-hun Wu-jen (pp. 49 ff.), Yang Chu and Lao-tzu (pp. 51 ff.), the innkeeper's concubines (p. 52), the fighting cocks (p. 56), Kuanyin's saying (p. 90), Kuan Chung's dying advice (pp. 126 ff.), Lieh-tzu in poverty (p. 162).

²¹ pp. 111, 120.

²² pp. 29 ff. (also in Chuang-tzu, ch. 22).

²³Tao-te-ching, ch. 5.

²⁴ pp. 58 ff.

²⁵ Cf. p. 13.

²⁶ Creel, op. cit., pp. 150-2.

²⁷ pp. 177 ff. This story, in order to make the point that some men can teach what they cannot practise, leaves open the possibility that there may be something in the arts for prolonging life.

²⁸ pp. 23, 129, 147.

²⁹ pp. 35, 97.

³⁰ pp. 97, 100, etc.

³¹ pp. 65, 111.

³² p. 35.

³³ p. 64, cf. p. 104.

³⁴Tao-te-ching, ch. 43.

³⁵ Cf. Fung Yu-lan (Short Reading List, p. 183), vol. I, chs. 9 and 11.

³⁶ pp. 22, 89, 1

³⁷Chuang-tzū, ch. 17.

³⁸ Cf. p. 76.

³⁹ p. III above.

⁴⁰ pp. 174-7.

Works Cited

Translations

Tao-te-ching:

J. J. L. Duyvendak, Tao te ching, Wisdom of the East, London, 1954. Arthur Waley, The Way and its Power, London, 1934.

Chuang-tzū:

H. A. Giles, Chuang Tzŭ, 2nd edition (revised), London, 1926.

——Musings of a Chinese Mystic (selective translation), Wisdom of the East, London, 1906.

Y. L. Fung, Chuang Tzŭ (English translation of ch. 1-7), Shanghai Commercial Press, 1931.

Lieh-tzū:

Lionel Giles, Taoist Teachings from the Book of Lieh-Tzŭ (selective translation), Wisdom of the East, London, 1912.

A. Forke, Young Chu's Garden of Pleasure (translation of ch. 7), Wisdom of the East, London, 1912.

General

H. Creel, What is Taoism? Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 76, No. 3 (July 1956), pp. 139-52.

Y. L. Fung, History of Chinese Philosophy, translated Derk Bodde, 2 vols., Princeton, 1952.

H. Maspéro, Le Taoïsme (Mélanges posthumes sur les religions et l'histoire de la Chine, vol. 2), Paris, 1950.

Arthur Waley, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, London, 1939. (Part 1, Chuang Tzŭ).