‘The Way that can be told’: introduction

The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi tells us in a famous passage how he dreamed that he was a butterfly but, on waking, was unable to decide whether he was Zhuangzi dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuangzi. Has he indeed awoken, he wonders, or is he still dreaming? Can he even tell the difference? ‘There’s no telling whether the man who speaks now is the waker or the dreamer’, he muses. The sense of what is real or unreal, even the very distinction itself, becomes problematic for him. In the great transformation of things, dream and reality are endlessly confused (Graham 1981: 61, 91).