I. The Question

Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly—fluttering freely, a butterfly through and through, with no awareness of being Zhuangzi. Then he woke, and there he was, unmistakably Zhuangzi. But now he couldn’t be sure: was he Zhuangzi who had just dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being Zhuangzi?

This question has fascinated philosophers for over two thousand years. But what interests me is not the content of the question—it is the stance from which the question is posed. Zhuangzi gave no answer. He did not claim there is no answer. He simply placed the question as it was, hanging in the air. No more, no less.

Reading Zhuangzi through the lens of Self-as-an-End (SAE) theory, a paradox emerges. SAE theory holds that persons must treat themselves as ends, never reducing the self to a mere means. But Zhuangzi submitted the very self to questioning. Whether there is such a thing as a fixed self—this he refused to take for granted.

Is this a negation of SAE? Or is it SAE in its most profound form?

II. Cook Ding’s Knife

Before the court of King Hui of Liang, Cook Ding butchers an ox. The blade glides through the spaces between bones. No sound—only silence. The king watches in amazement and asks about the technique.

The cook answers: I work with my mind, not my eye. Sensation stops and I yield to the natural principles. I follow the natural cavities and do not cut where there is resistance. My blade has not been dulled in nineteen years.

Analyze this scene precisely and a structure appears. Ding has surpassed technique. He has surpassed effort. He has surpassed self. He is not butchering the ox—butchering is happening through him. The distinction between subject and object dissolves in the depths of practice.

In SAE terms, this is not the dissolution of self. It is the transparency of self. Ding is not a tool. But he is not using himself as a tool either. He has become the flow itself. And he could become the flow only because he cultivated himself, meticulously, over many years.

Here is Zhuangzi’s first insight: the self becomes complete only when it is released.

III. The Death of Hundun

The ruler of the South Sea was called Shu. The ruler of the North Sea was called Hu. The ruler of the central region was called Hundun (Chaos). Shu and Hu often met in Hundun’s territory, where Hundun treated them with great kindness. Wishing to repay this kindness, Shu and Hu conferred: “Human beings all have seven openings—for seeing, hearing, eating, breathing. Hundun alone has none. Let us bore some for him.”

Each day they bored one hole. After seven days, Hundun died.

The parable is bluntly clear: the violence of good intentions. Murder by kindness. Hundun had asked for nothing. He was simply there. But Shu and Hu believed that giving him structure was a good thing—that making him more human-shaped was the path to a more complete existence.

What were they doing when they bored holes in Hundun? They were making him a means—a means for realizing their higher values. Not what Hundun himself wanted, but what Hundun should be, decided from outside.

In SAE vocabulary, this is the deepest form of treating another as a means: by making the other’s very mode of existence your end.

IV. Sitting and Forgetting

Yan Hui came to Confucius and said: I have made progress. I can now sit and forget. Confucius asked: what is sitting and forgetting? Yan Hui replied: I shed my limbs and trunk, dim my intelligence, depart from my form, leave out knowledge, and become one with the Great Thoroughfare.

Confucius answered: if you are one with it, you have no preferences; if you have transformed, you have no constants. You are truly worthy. I should like to follow after you.

In this short exchange lies the core of Zhuangzi’s practical philosophy. Sitting and forgetting is not forgetting something. It is forgetting how to forget. It is forgetting the intention to forget. It is forgetting the subject who is forgetting.

This is fundamentally different from Socrates, from Nietzsche. Socrates accumulated questions. Nietzsche burned propositions. Zhuangzi neither accumulates nor burns. He simply sits. And then forgets that he is sitting.

But why is this not a negation of SAE? After sitting and forgetting, Yan Hui does not vanish. He becomes “one with the Great Thoroughfare”—not dissolved into a great stream, but resonating with it. The individual remains. Only fixation disappears.

V. The Structure of the Butterfly Dream

Back to the butterfly dream. What Zhuangzi was questioning was not which state is real. Nor the paradox that both are equally real. He was questioning the arbitrariness of the boundary we call “I.”

Between human and butterfly “there is necessarily a barrier,” Zhuangzi says. He calls this wuhua—the transformation of things, the passage of forms from form to form. We are always in transformation. A fixed “I” is only a temporary resting point in wuhua.

Here a question must be asked. If there is no fixed self, who is the subject of SAE? Who is it that “treats the self as an end”?

Zhuangzi’s answer is quiet: it is the I of this moment, existing within transformation. When a butterfly, fully present as butterfly; when human, fully present as human. Not attachment to the self of the past, not investment in the self of the future—living fully in the here and now. This is SAE in its extreme form.

When we release attachment to a persisting self, the self of this very moment appears all the more completely.

VI. Contrast with Nietzsche

When Nietzsche discovered the eternal recurrence, he was terrified. The thought that the same life would repeat infinitely made him tremble. He tried to overcome that terror with force—the Übermensch loves the eternal recurrence.

Zhuangzi overcomes nothing. He finds no tension between butterfly and human. To say he “accepts” change is already too strong—there is no subject left to accept. Change simply happens.

Nietzsche’s problem was that he kept burning in a closed circuit. His own thought reinforced his self; his own suffering became fuel for his thought; there was no exit. Zhuangzi has no such circuit. Without walls to close around him, there is nothing to burn out.

But this does not mean Zhuangzi is “better than” Nietzsche. They were living fundamentally different questions. Nietzsche burned the will of the self to its limit. Zhuangzi put the will itself into question. It is not a matter of who is right, but of which question one chooses to live.

And here is an important point. Zhuangzi’s road is one only Zhuangzi can walk. His “forgetting” is an acquired forgetting—a transparency that comes after years of cultivation, deep observation, and countless failures. Beginning with nothing and having nothing is entirely different from having everything and then releasing it.

VII. The Fish Trap and the Fish

Zhuangzi says: the fish trap exists for the fish. Once you have caught the fish, forget the trap. Words exist to convey meaning. Once you have grasped the meaning, forget the words. I would like to find someone who has forgotten words and speak with him.

This metaphor is beautiful but easily misread. Zhuangzi is not denying words. Not denying the trap. Not denying means. He is saying: do not cling to means after the end has been achieved.

In SAE terms, this is an insight about the correct relationship between ends and means. When we treat ourselves as ends, we often become attached to a certain “instrumental self-image”—the I who must do this, the I who should be this way. But that self-image is a fish trap.

The real self lies outside the fish trap. Or it is something that needs no fish trap at all. The person who has “forgotten words” is not someone free of concepts—it is someone who can use concepts as needed and release them when done.

VIII. Waking as a Butterfly

Zhuangzi lived in the third century BCE. He was an official in the lacquer gardens of the state of Song, but he didn’t much care for the work. When the King of Chu invited him to serve as chancellor, Zhuangzi declined. He would rather be a tortoise dragging its tail in the mud, he said, than a sacred tortoise kept dead and enshrined in a temple.

This was not simple indifference to power. Zhuangzi knew something: taking high office means being bound to a particular self-image. You should be this, behave this way, speak this way. In the net of all these “shoulds,” the space for dreaming of becoming a butterfly disappears.

From an SAE perspective, Zhuangzi’s choice makes sense. Becoming chancellor means subordinating the self to an externally defined role—making the self a means. He refused.

But Zhuangzi’s refusal is different from Nietzsche’s solitude. Nietzsche burned while refusing the world. Zhuangzi did not refuse the world. He accepted mud, river, fish, wind—all of it. He only refused to be fixed into a particular form.

On the morning he became a butterfly, Zhuangzi returned to being human. And then asked. But the question was not an expression of anxiety. It came from a deep settledness—it doesn’t matter which. Being a butterfly and being a human are equally real. So the question doesn’t disappear. But neither does it trouble him.

That is Zhuangzi’s xiaoyao—free and easy wandering. Not a journey without destination, but a journey in which wherever you are is the destination. Living while holding a self, while refusing to fix the self. The quietest, deepest form of SAE.