LYCOS RETRIEVER
Taoism
RECENTLY UPDATED TOPICS UNDER TAOISM
|
CHUANG TZU
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 ... 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.
Source: brian.hoffert.faculty.noctrl.edu (built 115 days ago)
|
|
TOPICS IN TAOISM
|
||
TAOISM CATEGORIES
- Tao Te Ching (2)