Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher whose name is attached to the Zhuangzi, a text that is central to philosophical Daoism. Little is reliably known of his life beyond a few anecdotes, and the book is generally understood to contain material from several hands. Its style is playful and parabolic, using dreams, butterflies, fish, and useless trees to question fixed distinctions between self and world, life and death, and useful and useless. It emphasizes spontaneity, relativity of perspective, and freedom from social and intellectual constraints.