O nce, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly. Not a dream in which he retained some awareness of being Zhuang Zhou — a butterfly, simply and completely: wings and air, every movement its own, happy in itself, free in its own will. No part of it knew it was Zhou. Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly — a vivid, fluttering butterfly — pleased with himself and at ease in his will. He did not know he was Zhou.
Then he woke. In an instant there was Zhuang Zhou again — heavily, unmistakably Zhuang Zhou, with the full mass of a particular man's life reassembling itself around him. Then suddenly he woke, and he was, startledly, Zhuang Zhou.
And now the question. Had Zhou just been dreaming he was a butterfly? Or is there a butterfly somewhere, dreaming it is Zhou? The butterfly-state was perfectly convincing. The Zhou-state is perfectly convincing. This is not a problem that waking up solves. One cannot know: was it Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Zhou?
“The butterfly-state was perfectly convincing. The Zhou-state is perfectly convincing. This is not a problem that waking up solves.”
Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there is, necessarily, a distinction. Something is real; something is the dream of something real. What the passage withholds is which is which. The movement back and forth between one form and another — that cycling of what a thing is — is what is called the transformation of things. Between Zhou and the butterfly there must necessarily be a division. This is what is called the transformation of things.
蝴蝶The original Chinese · honored as an artifact
昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與！不知周也。
Opening lines, classical Chinese · Zhuangzi 莊子 · Zhuang Zhou
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The original author
Zhuang Zhou (attrib.) 莊周
A 4th-century-BCE thinker we know mostly through the book that bears his name — the wittiest, least preachy of the Daoist classics. We keep his jokes intact and resist the urge to tidy his paradoxes into lessons.
Our method
We render freely so the story lives — then flag every interpretation where we took a liberty. Switch to Faithful read to see how close the source runs.