The cicada and the bird: The usefulness of a useless philosophy

Chuang Tzu uses grand metaphors and charming parables to help us to stop identifying with this and that thing, and to instead identify with our horizon-spanning field of consciousness and our embodied sense of spirit or energy. This frees us to be present with, and to playfully engage with, whateverthings happen to appear before us.

His remarkable book, written in Ancient China sometime around 300 BC, has lain hidden for millennia in a sprawling morass misleadingly known as the Chuang Tzu. Now, at last, it has been excavated. Here for the first time in over two thousand years is Chuang Tzu’s actual book: crisp and poetic, structured and elegant. A philosophical and literary work of art.

This new translation is groundbreaking in three ways:

It presents you with Chuang Tzu’s actual book. Whereas other translations mix Chuang Tzu’s writing up with other people’s comments and stories, this new translation is the first to remove all that clutter and reveal Chuang Tzu’s elegantly structured book. (The omitted material is moved to an appendix, so you can decide for yourself if the translator was right to remove it.)
It presents you with Chuang Tzu’s crisp, clear, poetic writing. Whereas other translations play freely with the original text (they tend to paraphrase and rewrite), this new translation adheres to the grammatical structure (the line structure, the phrasing, the exact imagery) of the text. The result is that whereas other translations ramble semi-coherently, now like an old drunk with pretensions of grandeur, now like a philosophy undergraduate dosed up on speed, this new translation presents you with Chuang Tzu’s crisp, clear, poetic writing. (For side-by-side comparisons with other translations and the Chinese text, see the book’s webpage: thecicadaandthebird dot com)
It provides a running commentary. Chuang Tzu’s stories are witty, funny, and profound, but to see this we often need to know the cultural context of the stories, and we often need some interpretive guidance. This translation is the first to have a running commentary that provides this context and guidance. Many stories in Chuang Tzu's book have never been coherently or deeply interpreted by anyone, until now.