Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi

Question) In several places the Zhuangzi advocates uselessness. What does it mean to be useless, and how is uselessness sometimes useful?

The viewpoint is decisively his, and there is an undeclared assumption that the story is being told from outside of the dream, and indeed outside both the sage's waking and dream states so that they can be compared and the pretence of equivalence teasingly advanced. What's more, there is another, larger outside-of-a-dream, which situates the dream of being a butterfly as a dream - namely, the public to whom the story was addressed, and those later publics to whom it has ...