The Whole Walk: The Complete Zhuangzi, with a Companion to the Walk

The fourth and final volume of A Walk Through the Zhuangzi is the companion that the first three books have been quietly preparing the way for. Where The Free and Easy, The Mountain Tree, and The Long Echo walked the reader through the chapters of the Zhuangzi in order, The Whole Walk is the volume the reader keeps on the shelf and returns to.

Inside are four pieces of work, each designed to be useful at different stages of a long relationship with the tradition. A Glossary of Central Concepts gathers fourteen of the most important terms from the Zhuangzi (Dao, De, Wu Wei, Zhen, the Ten Thousand Things, the Empty Vessel, Goblet Words, the Perfect Man, the Great Teacher, transformation, the natural, usefulness and uselessness, scale, and the image of the finger and the moon), each with its Chinese term, a careful definition, and references to the chapters in the earlier three books where the concept is most visibly at work. A Character Index covers twenty of the major figures, real and invented, who recur across the chapters. A Thematic Index gathers passages across the whole text under ten recurring themes, including the four great death scenes, the friendship passages, the dangers of recognition, and the school's evolving relationship with Confucianism. And four

Synthetic Essays draw out connections that the chapter-by-chapter walking could only hint at.

The book is dedicated "For my children, and yours." It is a companion volume in the deepest sense: the reference work a parent might keep on the shelf to share with the people they most want to walk through the tradition with, across many years.