Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer

Confucius (p. 275)! And even into the mouth of the Yellow Emperor Huang Di, the legendary ancestor of the Chinese people (pp. 277-278), whose date is some twenty centuries earlier than that of Lao Tzu himself!!

Two centuries before the Christian era, an attempt was made to destroy—with some exceptions—the whole of Chinese literature. This was done so that history might begin anew from the reign of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the ruler who first unified China of united China. The extent of the actual mischief done by this "Burning of the Books" has been greatly exaggerated. Still, the mere attempt at such a total destruction original: "holocaust" gave a fine chance to the scholars of the later Han dynasty (25–221 AD), who seem to have enjoyed nothing so much as forging, if not the whole, at any rate portions, of the works of ancient authors. Someone even produced a treatise under the name of Lieh Tzu a legendary Taoist philosopher, a philosopher mentioned by Chuang Tzu, not seeing that the individual in question was a creation of Chuang Tzu's brain!

And the Tao Te Ching The Classic of the Way and Virtue was undoubtedly pieced together somewhere about this period, from recorded sayings and conversations of Lao Tzu.¹

Chuang Tzu's work has suffered in a similar manner. Several chapters are clearly fake original: "spurious", and many episodes have been inserted original: "interpolated" by feeble imitators of a style that is impossible to copy original: "inimitable".

The text, as it now stands, consists of thirty-three chapters. These are a reduction from fifty-three, which

¹ A curious similarity original: "parallelism" will be found in Supernatural Religion An anonymous 1874 work by Walter Richard Cassels regarding the origins of Christianity, vol. i, p. 460:
"No period in the history of the world ever produced so many fake original: "spurious" works as the first two or three centuries of our era. The name of every Apostle, or Christian teacher, not excepting that of the Great Master Jesus, was freely attached to every description of religious forgery."