Zhuang Zhou
Chinese Taoist philosopher of the Warring States period (c. 369–c. 286 BC), probably born in the state of Song, about whom very little is known with historical certainty beyond what later, often anecdotal, sources convey, including the account that he refused an offer to become a king's minister, comparing himself to a sacred tortoise that would rather drag its tail through the mud than be stuffed and honoured on a palace altar — an anecdote emblematic of his radical rejection of power, ambition and social convention as a way of life. Traditionally regarded, together with later commentators and disciples, as co-author of the text bearing his name, the Zhuangzi, whose 'Inner Chapters' (the first seven) are generally considered his direct work, while the 'Outer Chapters' and 'Miscellaneous Chapters' are thought to reflect the elaboration of a later school of followers. Together with Laozi's Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi constitutes one of the two foundational texts of philosophical Taoism, but it differs radically in literary style: rather than the terse aphorisms and sententious tone of the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi deploys an exuberant prose full of fantastical allegories, fables with talking animals, logical paradoxes and a sophisticated, often self-ironic humour that is itself a philosophical vehicle, not mere rhetorical ornament. Philosophically, Zhuangzi carries to its ultimate conclusions an epistemological relativism and a critique of rigid distinctions between opposing categories — good and evil, life and death, dreaming and waking — as illustrated by his most famous parable, the butterfly dream, in which he recounts dreaming he was a butterfly and, upon waking, being unable to determine with certainty whether he was a man who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man, thereby calling into question the ultimate reliability of any fixed distinction between reality and illusion. The resulting ethical and existential ideal is that of the sage who attains freedom ('free and easy wandering', xiaoyao you) through spontaneous adaptation to the natural flow of things (following the Tao) and the abandonment of every effort to impose artificial, rigid categories on an essentially fluid, ever-changing reality.