庄子

庄子

庄子（约公元前369年—约公元前286年），姓庄名周，出生于战国时期宋国蒙邑（今河南省商丘市），著名思想家、哲学家和文学家，是继老子之后道家学派的主要代表人物，与老子并称“老庄”。

“道”是庄子思想的核心。庄子继承和发展了老子的“道法自然”学说。庄子的“道”是天道，是效法自然的“道”。他主张顺从“天道”，而摒弃“人为”，把“道”和人紧密结合，使“道”成为人生所要达到的最高境界。庄子思想蕴含着朴素辩证法以及相对论认知，其自然原则是和相对主义联系在一起的。他认为，事物总是相对而又相生的，也就是说任何事物都具有既互相对立，又互相依赖的正反两个方面，事物的变化总是向其对立的方面转化。

庄子著说十余万字，大多都是寓言，收录于《庄子》中。《庄子》一书想象奇幻，构思巧妙，用寓言故事表达哲学主张，把微妙难言的哲理写得引人入胜，乃先秦诸子文章的典范之作，对中国哲学思想和文学艺术发展产生深远影响。

Zhuang Zi

Zhuang Zi (369-286 BC), whose real name is Zhuang Zhou, is a renowned thinker, philosopher, and litterateur. Born in Mengyi (present-day Shangqiu, Henan Province) in the Warring States Period, he is a chief representative of Daoism after Lao Zi, and the two of them are often collectively referred to as "Lao-Zhuang."

The core of Zhuang Zi's thinking is dao. He further developed Lao Zi's idea that dao follows nature and advocated that people should follow dao of nature and heaven, minimize human interference, and strive to attain dao as the ultimate realm of personal achievement. Zhuang Zi's ideas contain naive dialectics and the theory of relativity. He believed that things are always conflicting and mutually promoting, that everything contains two opposing yet interdependent aspects, and that things always evolve toward their opposites.

Zhuang Zi's writings, immense in quantity and mostly fables and allegories, are collected in an eponymous treatise. Zhuang Zi is a well-conceived, widely imaginative illustration of subtle and abstract philosophical assertions written in an apprehensible and engrossing way. A paradigm of articles by pre-Qin thinkers and philosophers, the book has left far-reaching influences on the development of Chinese philosophy, literature, and art.