Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting about and happy with himself. He woke up and could not tell whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it was a man.
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This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Zhuangzi’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
The other founding book of Daoism, and much funnier than the Tao Te Ching. Where Laozi speaks in short oracles, Zhuangzi tells stories: a cook who carves an ox so easily his knife never needs sharpening, a giant fish that turns into a bird, a skull that refuses to be brought back to life. It is next in the press, beginning with the butterfly. None of it can be read here yet, so this is the moment a gift counts most.
Zhuang Zhou lived in the fourth century BC, during the Warring States period; the traditional dates are about 369 to 286 BC. A famous story in the book has him turn down a king who wanted to make him chief minister, saying he would rather be a live turtle dragging its tail in the mud. The text we have runs to 33 chapters in the edition of Guo Xiang, made around AD 300, and most scholars give the first seven, the Inner Chapters, to Zhuangzi himself.
The butterfly story closes chapter two in a few dozen characters, and its last phrase is wu hua, the transformation of things. The same character 化 turns up in the book's first lines, where the fish Kun changes into the bird Peng. It will be read with the same Chinese reader and Kangxi dictionary as our Tao Te Ching, so every character opens onto its own entry.
Making an interlinear Zhuangzi is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, The butterfly dream gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true Zhuangzi that anyone can read for free.
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