THE CICADA & THE BIRD

THE USEFULNESS OF A USELESS PHILOSOPHY

Chuang Tzu’s ancient wisdom
translated for modern life
by Christopher Tricker

Chuang Tzu uses grand metaphors and charming parables to help us to stop identifying with this and that thing, and to instead identify with our horizon-spanning field of consciousness and our embodied sense of spirit or energy. This frees us to be present with, and to playfully engage with, whatever things happen to appear before us.


His remarkable book, written in Ancient China sometime around 300 BC, has lain hidden for millennia in a sprawling morass misleadingly known as the Chuang Tzu. Now, at last, it has been excavated. Here for the first time in over two thousand years is Chuang Tzu’s actual book: crisp and poetic, structured and elegant. A philosophical and literary work of art.