Chinese Philosopher Zhuangzi and His Theories of Death

Zhuangzi (4th-c BCE) is one of the most famous philopsophers in Chinese history. In that oh-so-paradoxical-sounding way that Daoists often express themselves, Zhuangzi has a lighthearted and quippy way to think about death.

The story he gives in the eponymously named _Zhuangzi_ tells of the sage’s response to his wife’s demise. After she passed away, a neighbor came by only to find the philosopher drumming on a tub and singing. Fairly horrified at his friend’s irreverent response, the neighbor asked Zhuangzi to explain himself. The Daoist teacher responded, saying “When (my wife) first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else?” But then he thought about her existence — the point before she had a body, then when she was formed, and then birthed, and how she lived and died. The progression was natural, just like “the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.” The discomfort with death, then, comes from an “injurious, strong sense of self that impedes our efforts to accept our own mortality,” as historian Amy Olberding writes. Since death is a part of nature, acceptance of its inevitable place in our lives would help us avoid sorrow.

Zhuangzi stresses that humans attach a preference to life and an aversion to death, when these categories are merely human inventions. Instead of preferring the one to the other, we could recognize that our judgements are not rooted in objective reality. Who’s to say death might not be an improvement? Zhuangzi ends the conversation with his neighbor, saying “now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about fate. So I stopped.”