Chuang Tzu - The Inner Chapters

Revered for millennia in the Chinese spiritual tradition, Chuang Tzu stands alongside the Tao Te Ching as a founding classic of Taoism.

The Inner Chapters are the only sustained section of this text widely believed to be the work of Chuang Tzu himself, dating to the fourth century B.C.E. Witty and engaging, spiced with the lyricism of poetry, Chuang Tzu''s Taoist insights are timely and eternal, profoundly concerned with spiritual ecology. Indeed, the Tao of Chuang Tzu was a wholesale rejection of a human–centered approach. Zen traces its sources back to these Taoist roots—roots at least as deep as those provided by Buddhism.

But this is an ancient text that yields a surprisingly modern effect. In bold and startling prose, David Hinton''s translation captures the "zany texture and philosophical abandon" of the original. The Inner Chapters'' fantastical passages — in which even birds and trees teach us what they know — offer