Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly and could not afterwards tell which of them was doing the dreaming. He lived in the fourth century BC, during the Warring States period, when the philosophical schools the Chinese call the hundred were competing for the ear of rulers who wanted advice on governing and winning. Almost every school in that argument was offering a programme. The Confucians offered ritual and hierarchy, the Mohists impartial care and the abolition of waste, the Legalists reward and punishment applied without exception. Zhuangzi's position was that the programmes were the problem, and that the more a government does the worse things become. He argued it in a way none of the others attempted: in stories, jokes and conversations with imaginary interlocutors, in which cooks explain butchery as a spiritual discipline, useless trees survive precisely because nobody cuts them down, and a skull declines an offer to be brought back to life. The point of the humour is epistemological rather than decorative. He is arguing that the categories people use to sort the world - useful and useless, big and small, life and death - are relative to a standpoint, and that certainty about them is the mistake. He was offered high office by the king of Chu and, according to the story, asked whether a sacred tortoise would rather be honoured in a temple or alive dragging its tail in the mud. With the Laozi he is the foundation of philosophical Daoism, and his influence on Chan and Zen Buddhism, on landscape painting and on Chinese poetry is difficult to overstate.

• Lived: 369 BCE – 286 BCE
• Nationality: Chinese
• Roles: philosopher, writer