The Shu Zhuang School

Abstract

Among all the post-Zhuang Zi schools of Zhuang Zi philosophy, the Shu Zhuang school was the school of most direct descent. Its works included the twelve "chapters": "Qiushui" (Autumnal floods), "Zhi le" (Utter happiness), "Da sheng" (Arriving at life), "Shan mu" (The forest in the mountain), "Tian Zifang," "Zhi beiyou," "Geng Sang Chu," "Xu wugui," "Ze yang," "Wai wu" (External things), "Yuyan" (Fable), and "Lie Yukou." From the intellectual content and linguistic style of these essays, the works of the Shu Zhuang school appear to belong to a chronologically earlier category of the outer and miscellaneous chapters. The chief characteristic of this category of writings is that they inherited and basically developed the meaning of the ideas of the "inner chapters." They provided a more careful and detailed explanation of Zhuang Zi's theories of original source (bengen), true knowledge (zhenzhi), and the equality of things (qi wu), and they also developed other key ideas of Zhuang Zi, including his idea of human life. The Shu Zhuang school did, to a certain extent, reform and develop Zhuang Zi's ideas, but there is no major breakthrough (or breaking away) from his ideas, and, basically, the work of this school was to elaborate but not to innovate. The works of the Shu Zhuang school served as the major corpus of reference material for the study of Zhuang Zi's ideas. In Part 2 of this book, where we developed an interpretaion of Zhuang Zi's ideas, we have already touched on some of these essays written by the people of the Shu Zhuang school. Let us now analyze and critique the ideas of this school in a more concentrated fashion.