The laughing sage

If you have just opened this book, here are a few things worth saying before you go any further. Think of this less as an introduction and more as the conversation we would have if you were sitting across from me at the kitchen table, holding a copy of the Zhuangzi for the first time.

The first thing I want to tell you is that I am going to introduce you to a friend of mine. He has been dead for around two and a half thousand years, and we have never spoken, and I do not, in any literal sense, know him. But he is a friend of mine. I read him for the first time many years ago and recognised, almost immediately, that I was reading the work of someone I would have liked to sit with for an afternoon. Probably for several afternoons. Probably with tea, talking about nothing important and everything important, in the way you sometimes can with a person whose mind moves the same way yours does.

I never got that afternoon. This book is my way of having it anyway, and of inviting you in.

The third thing is that Zhuangzi is funny. I want you to know this in advance, because some people pick up old philosophical books expecting them to be dry, and they brace themselves for difficulty, and the bracing makes them miss what is actually happening on the page. Zhuangzi is not dry. He is one of the funniest writers I have ever read. He is funny in the way a very intelligent friend is funny, affectionately, often surreally, and almost always with a point hidden inside the joke that you only notice afterwards.

This is not a book you read once. It is a book you read across a life. There are stories in here that will hit you immediately, the way a song does when you hear it at the right moment. There are others that will say nothing to you at all. That is fine. Some of the silent ones will speak to you later, when something has happened to you that they were waiting for.

Take what you can use. Leave what you cannot. Come back.

The reflections are my personal feelings about what the scenes have meant to me, after many years of reading them and thinking about them and trying to live with them. They are not the official meaning of the scenes. They are not the only meaning. They are not even, necessarily, the right meaning for you. They are one reader's careful response, offered in case it is useful to another reader who is just beginning their own response.

There is an old image in this tradition, and in others, that I want to leave you with. The image is of a finger pointing at the moon. The teacher points at the moon. The student looks. If the student looks at the moon, the pointing has done its work. If the student looks at the finger, the student has missed the moon entirely.

This book is the finger. The reflections in it are the finger. My voice, as I walk through the scenes with you, is the finger. None of it is the moon.

Hold the book lightly. Look up from the finger when you can. The meaning is the weight, not the words.

Welcome back, again. If you have arrived here, you have walked through the Inner Chapters with me in Book One and the Outer Chapters with me in Book Two. You know, by now, how the books work. The verse, the plain prose, the reflection, the closing practice. The slow walking through each scene.

Some of these chapters are among the most beautiful in the entire tradition. The old fisherman who teaches Confucius about authenticity. Robber Zhi tearing apart the Confucian teaching to its founder's face. Zhuangzi dying and refusing the elaborate burial his disciples want for him. The closing essay on the philosophical schools, which describes the Zhuangzi school itself from the inside as one tradition among several. These are passages that have been treasured for two and a half thousand years for good reason.

The tradition is still here. The voice has dispersed.

If you have just opened this book, welcome back. If you have been with me through the first three volumes, welcome especially. This is the fourth and last book in the project, and it is, in its own way, the most different of the four. The first three were walking-throughs. This one is something else.

None of these pieces is essential. The first three books are complete in themselves. If you never opened this fourth book, you would still have received what the tradition has to offer. But if you, like me, find yourself returning to the tradition over many years, the companion is there. It is not the moon. It is, at most, a slightly more useful finger than the chapter-by-chapter finger of the first three books. The moon is still where it has always been.