Early Chinese Textual Culture and the Zhuangzi Anthology: An Alternative Model for Authorship

A widely accepted view about the Zhuangzi 莊子 is that its core was written by a Warring States (476–221 BCE) figure named Zhuang Zhou 莊周. The remainder of the work, according to this view, is a mixture of material that might have come from Zhuang Zhou, or from his followers, or from others whose ideas sometimes differ considerably from those typically ascribed to Zhuang Zhou. Such a view is problematic in several ways. First, it relies on an anachronistic picture of textual production that goes against much of what we now know about Warring States textual culture. Second, it downplays suggestive evidence from the Han 漢 (205 BCE-220 CE) and Six dynasties (220–589 CE) periods that could easily push us toward quite a different picture of Zhuangzi text formation. Third and most consequential, the conventional view leads to a way of approaching the Zhuangzi that over-emphasizes the Inner Chapters at the expense of the other parts of the text. For all of these reasons, it is time to seriously entertain alternative proposals about the Zhuangzi’s authorship and process of text formation.