Description
The book
Where the Tao Teh King is compressed and oracular, Chuang Tzu is expansive, funny, and rude. He argues in stories: a butcher carving an ox, a man who dreams he is a butterfly, a crippled sage who is happier than any minister. The thirty-three chapters collected under his name are the second founding document of Daoist thought, and the more readable of the two — the Tao Teh King tells you what the Way is, Chuang Tzu shows you someone living in it.
It is also a book about freedom, written by a man who refused office. For a reader coming from Western philosophy, the strange thing is how little it argues and how much it demonstrates.
What you get
- A 380-page A5 PDF, typeset — not a scan.
- All thirty-three chapters, in Herbert Giles’s translation of 1889.
- A title page, an edition note on the source, and running heads for navigation.
- Instant download after payment, in your account and by email.
About this edition
Herbert A. Giles was the British consular officer and sinologist who, more than any other single translator, made Chinese literature readable as English prose in the late nineteenth century. His Chuang Tzu of 1889 is still quoted; it is freer than Legge, and the gain in readability is real.
We have re-typeset the text from the Project Gutenberg transcription. Giles’s wording and chapter order are unchanged; the layout, cover and edition note are ours.
Rights
The translation is in the public domain. Our typesetting and cover are our own work. You may read, print and quote this edition for your own study; you may not resell it or redistribute the file.
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