ABSTRACT
Several centuries after the Laozi, the second foundational text of the Daoist philosophical and religious tradition is the Zhuangzi. Many important commentaries have been written on the Zhuangzi, including a famous philosophical commentary by Guo Xiang, which focuses on his understanding of Zhuangzi's philosophy of spontaneity, and the commentary by Cheng Xuanying, a religious Daoist master. Zhuangzi developed the concepts of the total spontaneity of nature, the incessant transforming activity of things, and the underlying unity of all existence. Zhuangzi suggests that the limited point of view of instrumental mentality, dependent upon preconceived categories and conceptual distinctions, should be broadened into an unlimited point of view. Although acknowledging the preliminary and practical usefulness of conventional knowledge, Zhuangzi has four arguments against accepting ordinary, instrumental knowledge as adequate for achieving authentic self-transformation. These are the argument from the relativity of distinctions, the argument from the complementariness of opposites, the argument from perspectives, and the argument from general skepticism.
