Although the Chuang Tzu has been revered as a classic of Taoist wisdom for over two thousand years, the question of the text’s origins have remained largely unexplored until recent times. The book was traditionally attributed to a figure named Chuang Chou who was active in the latter half of the fourth century BCE, though modern scholarship has demonstrated that Master Chuang himself wrote only the first seven (or "inner") chapters, the remaining material being written over a period of approximately two centuries. Particularly important in this regard is the work of A. C. Graham, who argues that the text can be divided into five strata with varying degrees of proximity to the philosophy of Chuang Tzu. According to Graham, the latest stratum was written by a group which he calls the Syncretists, whom he also credits with compiling the earliest edition of the text. Since Graham finds no evidence of an organized school surviving Chuang Tzu’s death, he believes that the Syncretists compiled the text from a variety of different sources as "an anthology of writings with philosophies justifying withdrawal to private life, passing under the name of their greatest representative, and including a batch of chapters which are not Taoist at all but Yangist." [A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989), p. 172.] Through an analysis of the Syncretists own writings, however, I argue that they had no interest in promoting the notion of a withdrawal to private life, but rather were primarily concerned with the mystical dimension of Chuang Tzu’s thought, which served as the foundation for their "syncretic" perspective and the unifying principle behind the text’s organization. Based on this new understanding of the Syncretists’ interest in Chuang Tzu’s philosophy I go on to demonstrate that the text was not compiled from a variety of different sources, but from a single collection of writings which evolved through a process of accretion as successive generations of Chuang Tzu's followers appended their own writings to those of their Master.

© Brian Hoffert 2000