The Mountain Tree: A Walk Through the Outer Chapters of the Zhuangzi

The second volume in the four-book series, continuing the gentle walk through the Zhuangzi. The Mountain Tree takes us through the fifteen Outer Chapters, where the school's various voices argue, expand, and sometimes contradict each other in ways that the tradition treated as alive rather than as failures of consistency.

Here we meet the Primitivists with their critique of moral systems, the great chapter of Autumn Floods with its scale-correcting parable of the Lord of the River meeting the Lord of the Sea, the empty boat as the most precise image of a life that cannot be insulted, and Zhuangzi himself at the grave of his friend Hui Shi, naming what is lost when a particular conversation partner is gone forever. The walking is patient. The tradition is generous. The book invites the reader to return to it across many years.