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Zhuangzi (The Book of Master Zhuang)莊子

Zhuang Zhou and later hands · Warring States period (4th–3rd century BC) · Guo Xiang's thirty-three-chapter recension · China · 33 pieces · 69,968 Chinese characters

"In the dark sea of the north there is a fish, and its name is Kun" — the book opens with this one line, and with a bird whose back is so wide that no one knows how many thousand li it measures setting out for the southern sea. He dreams he is a butterfly and wakes to ask whether he dreamed the butterfly or the butterfly is dreaming him; a butcher cuts up oxen for nineteen years without ever whetting his blade; when his wife dies he drums on a tub and sings. He stops a war with the tale of two kingdoms fighting on the horns of a snail until tens of thousands of dead lay fallen, and passing the grave of Huizi he says that he has no one left to talk with. Set beside the Daodejing, it can be heard speaking of the same ground in a very different voice.

Following Guo Xiang's recension as it stands, the seven Inner Chapters, fifteen Outer Chapters and eleven Miscellaneous Chapters were divided chapter by chapter. Where the source edition had attached variant-text notes (一作「…」), only the characters of the outer main text were kept; and the marks for missing characters, which wrote variant character forms absent from Unicode as ■{character}, and the collation marks (wrong character)[right character] and [supplied], were smoothed out so that they read. A subheading given by the translator was attached to each chapter so that the passages can be found.

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Miscellaneous Chapters
Outer Chapters
Inner Chapters