Zhuangzi

Zhuang Zhou, native of Meng in the state of Song, once served as an official in charge of lacquer gardens and lived contemporaneously with King Hui of Liang and King Xuan of Qi. He inherited and developed Laozi’s Daoist philosophy, advocating the equality of all things, unfettered freedom, and spontaneous alignment with nature. When King Wei of Chu offered him a high office with a thousand pieces of gold, Zhuangzi refused, declaring he would rather drag his tail in the mud than be confined in court. His writings are vast, exuberant, and unrestrained: legendary parables such as the Kun-Peng transformation, the Butterfly Dream, and Cook Ding’s art of butchery have echoed through millennia, embodying profound wisdom on health cultivation and worldly conduct. Emperor Xuanzong of Tang conferred upon him the title ‘Master Nanhua’, and the Zhuangzi was enshrined as the Nanhua Zhenjing (‘True Scripture of Southern Florescence’), one of Daoism’s canonical texts. Subsequent generations of health cultivators, literati, and reclusive scholars have venerated him as a spiritual guide who liberates one from affliction and preserves the innate authenticity and integrity of life.