ABSTRACT
Zhuangzi has long been admired for his philosophical depth and perhaps even more for his unsurpassed literary style. In regard to ethics, however, the general consensus is that Zhuangzi has little to offer. It is often assumed that no genuine ethical point of view can be found in Zhuangzi, and that Zhuangzi is an amoralist if not outright immoral. The great twelfth century Confucian Zhu Xi said that “Laozi still wanted to do something, but Zhuangzi did not want to do anything at all. He even said that he knew what to do but just did not want to do it.” Because Zhuangzi was perceived as someone who shrinks from the task of imposing a moral order on the world, he, as Wing-tsit Chan points out, “was so much rejected by Chinese thinkers that since the fifth century, his doctrines have never been propagated by any outstanding scholar” (1963: 178-9). Several modern Western scholars also see in Zhuangzi an ethical relativist or an amoralist. Robert Eno, for example, argues that for Zhuangzi “butchering people might provide much the same spiritual spontaneity as the dao of butchering oxen – as many a samurai might testify” (1996: 142), and Chad Hansen (1992: 290)
says that Zhuangzi is unable to censure even the worst atrocities (such as the Nazi exterminations) beyond saying “it happened”.
