Abstract
This essay suggests that a narrative genre of “kill stories” has a prominent philosophical function in the Zhuangzi 莊子. Kill stories depict the domestication and disciplining of “wild” living beings eventually resulting in their death. They typically show an incongruity between the moral attitude of the perpetrators and their destructive deeds. Thereby, they illustrate a critique of a broader sociopolitical “master narrative” associated with the Confucian tradition that had a strong impact on ideology and ethical values in early China. In the diagnosis of the kill stories, ritual practice and civilizational ordering inevitably produce discontent and unease. A second narrative genre that I call “survival stories” corresponds to the kill stories and connects with the medicinal orientation of the Daoist tradition. As therapeutic allegories, the survival stories reflect strategies for maintaining sanity and ease within society. Rather than advocating escapism or a return to a primitivist state, they promote the cultivation of immunity against consumption by social demands and pressures based on an insight into the inescapability and contingency of social roles.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ames, Roger T. 2011. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1930. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Galvany, Albert. 2019. “The Swimmer: Panic, Parody, and Pedagogy at the Waterfall: Morality as a Misleading Principle for Moral Actions.” In Skill and Mastery: Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi, edited by Karyn Lai and Wai Wai Chiu. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield International.
Girardot, Norman. 2008. Myth and Meaning in Early Daoism: The Theme of Chaos (Hundun). St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press.
Graham, Angus C. 2001. Chuang Tzu: The Inner Chapters. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Graziani, Romain. 2005. “When Princes Awake in Kitchens: Zhuangzi’s Rewriting of a Culinary Myth.” In Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China, edited by Roel Sterckx. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
______. 2014. “Of Words and Swords: Therapeutic Imagination in Action—A Study of Chapter 30 of the Zhuangzi, ‘Shuo jian’ 說劍.” Philosophy East and West 64.2: 375–403.
______. 2021. Fiction and Philosophy in the Zhuangzi: An Introduction to Early Chinese Taoist Thought. London: Bloomsbury.
Huang, Yong. 2005. “Copper Rule versus the Golden Rule: A Daoist-Confucian Proposal for Global Ethics.” Philosophy East and West 55.3: 394–425.
______. 2010a. “The Ethics of Difference in the Zhuangzi.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78.1: 65–99.
______. 2010b. “Respecting Different Ways of Life: A Daoist Ethics of Virtue in the Zhuangzi.” Journal of Asian Studies 69.4: 1049–1069.
______. 2014. “Toward a Benign Moral Relativism: From Agent/Appraiser Centered to the Patient-Centered.” In Moral Relativism and Chinese Philosophy: David Wong and His Critics, edited by Yang Xiao and Yong Huang. Albany: State University of New York Press.
______. 2015. “Respect for Differences: The Daoist Virtue.” In Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, edited by Michael Slote and Lorraine Besser-Jones. London: Routledge.
______. 2018. “Patient Moral Relativism in the Zhuangzi.” Philosophia 46: 877–894.
______. 2022. “Patient Moral Relativism in the Zhuangzi Defended: A Reply to Jianping Hu.” Philosophy East and West 72.2: 472–482.
Klein, Esther. 2010. “Were There ‘Inner Chapters’ in the Warring States? A New Examination of Evidence about the Zhuangzi.” T’oung Pao 96.4–5: 299–369.
Lai, Karyn, and Wai Wai Chiu. 2019. Skill and Mastery: Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield International.
Moeller, Hans-Georg. 2017. “Hundun’s Mistake: Satire and Sanity in the Zhuangzi.” Philosophy East and West 67.3: 783–800.
______. 2020. “The King’s Slaughterer—Or, the Royal Way of Nourishing Life.” Philosophy East and West 70.1: 155–173.
Moeller, Hans-Georg, and Paul D’Ambrosio. 2017. Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sommer, Deborah. 2007. “Images for Iconoclasts: Images of Confucius in the Cultural Revolution.” East-West Connections 7.1: 1–23.
Sturgeon, Donald, ed. 2006–2023. Chinese Text Project. https://ctext.org/ (last accessed on April 24, 2023).
Watson, Burton. 1964. Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ziporyn, Brook. 2020. Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Moeller, HG. Kill Stories: A Critical Narrative Genre in the Zhuangzi. Dao 22, 397–412 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-023-09892-w
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-023-09892-w