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The ''Zhuangzi'' (pronounced ; ) is an ancient Chinese text from the late Warring States period (3rd century BC) which contains stories and anecdotes that exemplify the carefree nature of the ideal Daoist sage. Named for its traditional author, "Master Zhuang" (Zhuangzi), the ''Zhuangzi'' is one of the two foundational texts of Daoismalong with the ''Dao De Jing (Laozi)''and is generally considered the most important of all Daoist writings. The ''Zhuangzi'' consists of a large collection of anecdotes, allegories, parables, and fables, which are often humorous or irreverent in nature. Its main themes are of spontaneity in action and of freedom from the human world and its conventions. The fables and anecdotes in the text attempt to illustrate the falseness of human distinctions between good and bad, large and small, life and death, and human and nature. While other philosophers wrote of moral and personal duty, Zhuangzi promoted carefree wandering and becoming one with "the Way" (''Dào'' 道) by following nature. Though primarily known as a philosophical work, the ''Zhuangzi'' is regarded as one of the greatest literary works in all of Chinese history, and has been called "the most important pre-Qin text for the study of Chinese literature." A masterpiece of both philosophical and literary skill, it has significantly influenced writers for more than 2000 years from the Han dynasty to the present. Many major Chinese writers and poets in history—such as Sima Xiangru and Sima Qian during the Han dynasty, Ruan Ji and Tao Yuanming during the Six Dynasties, Li Bai during the Tang dynasty, and Su Shi and Lu You in the Song dynasty—were influenced by the ''Zhuangzi''. ==History== The ''Zhuangzi'' is named for and attributed to Zhuang Zhou"Master Zhuang" (Chinese: "Zhuangzi" 莊子)a man generally said to have been born around 369 at a place called Meng () in the state of Song (near modern Shangqiu, Henan Province), and died around 301, 295, or 286. Almost nothing is concretely known of Zhuangzi's life. He is thought to have spent time in the southern state of Chu, as well as in Linzi, the capital of the state of Qi. Sima Qian's monumental history ''Records of the Grand Historian'' (''Shiji'' 史記), the first of China's 24 dynastic histories, has a biography of Zhuangzi, but most of it seems to have simply been drawn from anecdotes in the ''Zhuangzi'' itself. East Asia scholar and ''Zhuangzi'' translator Burton Watson has noted, "Whoever Zhuang Zhou was, the writings attributed to him bear the stamp of a brilliant and original mind."〔Watson (2003): 3.〕 Even though the text is generally treated as a single whole, scholars have recognized since at least the Song dynasty that some parts of the book could not have been written by Zhuangzi himself. Since ancient times, however, the first 7 chaptersthe ''nèi piān'' 內篇 "inner chapters"have been considered to be the actual work of Zhuangzi, and most modern scholars agree with this view. How much, if any, of the remaining 26 chaptersthe ''wài piān'' 外篇 "outer chapters" and ''zá piān'' 雜篇 "miscellaneous chapters"was written by Zhuangzi has long been debated. It is generally accepted that the middle and later ''Zhuangzi'' chapters are the result of a subsequent process of "accretion and redaction" by later authors "responding to the scintillating brilliance" of the inner chapters. All of the 33 surviving chapters are accepted as compositions from the 4th to 2nd centuries BC. Details of the ''Zhuangzis textual history prior to the Han dynasty are largely unknown. The ''Records of the Grand Historian'', completed around 104 BC, refers to a 100,000-word ''Zhuangzi'' work and references several chapters that are still in the text. The ''Book of Han'' (''Han shu'' 漢書), finished in AD 111, lists a ''Zhuangzi'' in 52 chapters, which many scholars believe to be the original form of the work. A number of different forms of the ''Zhuangzi'' survived into the Tang dynasty (618907), but a shorter and more popular 33-chapter form of the book prepared by the philosopher and writer Guo Xiang around AD 300 is the source of all surviving editions. In 742, the ''Zhuangzi'' was canonized as one of the Chinese Classics by an imperial proclamation from Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, which awarded it the honorific title ''True Scripture of Southern Florescence'' (''Nanhua zhenjing'' 南華真經). ===Manuscripts=== Portions of the ''Zhuangzi'' have been discovered among bamboo slip texts from Warring States and Han dynasty tombs, particularly at the Shuanggudui and Zhangjiashan Han bamboo texts sites. One of the slips from the Guodian texts, which date to around 300 BC, contains what appears to be a short fragment from the "Ransacking Coffers" ("Qu qie" 胠篋) chapter. A large number of ''Zhuangzi'' fragments dating from the early Tang dynasty (c. 6th century) were discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts in the early 20th century by the expeditions of Hungarian-British explorer Aurel Stein and French sinologist Paul Pelliot. They collectively form about twelve chapters of Guo Xiang's version of the ''Zhuangzi'', and are preserved mostly at the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Among the Japanese national treasures preserved in the Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto is a ''Zhuangzi'' manuscript from the Muromachi period (13381573). The manuscript has seven complete chapters from the "outer" and "miscellaneous" chapters, and is believed to be a close copy of an annotated edition written in the 7th century by the Chinese Daoist master Cheng Xuanying (成玄英; fl. AD 630–660). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Zhuangzi (book)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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