Problems in textual scholarship

[randy_byers]

Chuang Tzu, as I have said, rejects all conventional values, and as a result, like so many mystical writers, he rejects the conventional values of words as well, deliberately employing them to mean the opposite of what they ordinarily mean in order to demonstrate their essential meaninglessness. When a writer does this, he of course invites misunderstanding, no matter how dazzling the literary effects he achieves. This is what has happened to Chuang Tzu. His grammar is regular enough; his sentence patterns are for the most part like those of other writers of the period; but, because what he says is so often the direct opposite of what anyone else would say, commentators have again and again been led to wonder if he really does not mean something other than what he says, or if the text is perhaps corrupt.

-- Burton Watson, Introduction to Chuang Tzu -- Basic Writings