32. Chris Fraser on Mohism

We conclude our series on Mohism with an interview that looks at the Mohists' dialectic and its relationship to their ethics. 

• C. Fraser (trans.), Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (Oxford: 2024).

• C. Fraser,  Zhuangzi: Ways of Wandering the Way (Oxford: 2024).

• C. Fraser, Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford: 2023).

• C. Fraser (trans.), The Essential Mozi: Ethical, Political, and Dialectical Writings (Oxford: 2020). Digital supplement.

• C. Fraser, The Philosophy of the Mozi: The First Consequentialists (New York: 2015).

• C. Fraser, D. Robins, and T. O'Leary (eds), Ethics in Early China: An Anthology (Hong Kong: 2011).

Prof Fraser’s website has a full list of his publications.

Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.

PA: You're a leading expert of Mohism, so you're the perfect person to help us round off this series of episodes on their thought. Let's start talking about the main text we have to work with, which is the *Mozi*, which is a complicated text. So it has these central chapters, which people read more often. These are really focused on ethics. And then we have the canons and greater and lesser selection chapters, which are on logic or something like that. Is the fact that these are all together in the same work just a historical accident, or does it actually make philosophical sense?

CF: Well, I'd say it's a bit of both, Peter. The *Mozi* as a whole is in effect an archive or a library of anonymous writings compiled by unknown editors sometime between the last decades of the Warring States period and the first few decades of the Han dynasty. So in terms of content, some of these things that they collect together are more closely related to each other than others. On one extreme, you've got the military writings, which of course have relatively little connection to the ethical and political material. The first three short books in the *Mozi* have little in common with most of the other material. By contrast, the fourth short book is a very concise, well-written elaboration of ideas from some of the ethical texts, in particular Heaven's Intent texts. So the *Canons* and the other dialectical writings include short pieces about geometry, optics, mechanics, and economics - all of which are of great interest for the history of science. These also contribute to our understanding of the Mohist worldview, their epistemology, and their conception of explanation. But they're really only pretty loosely related to the ethical and political material. Now, I say loosely because although there's no direct relation, it's not surprising that these sort of proto-scientific inquiries were pursued by members of a social movement or a fellowship, which shared a general conviction that the patterns by which things work - including ethics and argument - can be identified and explained through investigation. So if we're considering specifically the dialectical and epistemological material, and we're asking your question about 'why has it been collected together with the other material?' Well, to a significant extent, it's an elaboration or a further investigation of argumentative techniques and epistemological notions that are introduced and applied in the triads and the dialogues of the conversations. The ethical material in the canons is also very clearly related to the ethics of those other writings. In some places, it goes a bit deep on key issues. And the survey of methods of argumentation in the lesser selection text covers rhetorical methods that are used in the wadze and actually across the pre-Han literature, including in Ruest and other texts.

PA: So as you just mentioned, this is all obviously within a larger landscape of philosophy. And in particular, I mean, not only there's a kind of larger landscape of thinking about ethics, right, so with Confucians or Ruest, for example, but there's also a context of debate culture. So there's a lot of people interested in drawing distinctions like Gongsun Long, for example, who's the author of the notorious 'white horse is not horse' material. So how do these parts of the Mozi that are about dialectic and logic fit into that larger culture of debate, as it were?

CF: Well the semantic, the epistemic, and the argumentative topics of the Mohist creed, both in the early writings and in the dialectical writings, are absolutely central to that shared culture of debate or disputation that was very influential for at least the second half of the Warring States period and perhaps the early Han dynasty. The Mohist writings are presenting a set of general conceptual and rhetorical tools, including terminology, methods, a general framework for how to argue or debate and with the point or aim of argument or debate is... They've got this set of tools that I think is an explication of widely shared approaches at the time. Now we've got insufficient evidence to say to what extent they're inventing this material or explicating a pre-existing shared framework. But what we can say very confidently is that the dialectical apparatus they describe ends up being applied in many texts by writers with diverse doctrinal outlooks, including people who disagree with them about substantive issues. So the argumentative moves that they describe in the lesser selection, for example, clearly show up in *Mèngzǐ* and *Zhuangzi* - these Confucian texts. They show up in the *Lüshi Chunqiu* - which is a text that includes a broad number of outlooks. You'll find them in Legalism. So you'll find them across the board. All these discussions of semantics seem mostly to be a bit earlier than the wave of interest in so-called *Zhèngmíng* - or correcting names - which shows up in the *Zhuangzi*, in the *Lüshi Chunqiu*, in the *Guanzi*, and in a late layer of the Confucian *Analects*. But those discussions about correcting names represent one line of attempts to solve problems that emerge from the Mohist *Dialectics*. And we know that there were a class of people called the disputers or the dialecticians in Chinese - the *Bianzhe* - who were applying techniques that the Mohist describe. Now how does the debate culture fit into the broader historical context? Well, I think it does just as we'd expect. The Mohists are describing a shared technical framework that many thinkers and aspiring political advisers are applying to try to convince others of their views. There was this vibrant marketplace of ideas with defenders of a range of doctrinal outlooks competing to show that their doctrines were indeed the correct ones. And the sources present many examples of them debating with each other face to face, through intermediaries... And sometimes we know that there was a practice of debating in court before aristocratic rulers at various ranks. Partly for the audience's edification, partly for entertainment, partly to establish your reputation as a wise counselor or political adviser. Victory in debate could lead to high social status and most important of all to have a ruler actually adopt your doctrines and put them into practice in government administration. And among the rulers themselves, there was a widespread conviction that adopting the right set of doctrines would steer political power and perhaps launch your state on the path to world domination, reunifying the emperor under you.

PA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think we see that in other texts like the *Mèngzǐ*, right? Where he's actually shown engaging with rulers and refuting them or trying to bring them around to his way of thinking. So he's effectively putting these kinds of argumentative techniques into practice, is that right?

CF: Yes, very much. You know, the famous dialogue between Mèngzǐ and Qí Xuān Wáng, where Mèngzǐ is trying to convince him that he has the psychological wherewithal to be a virtuous king. He's using argumentative techniques that come right out of this sort of shared playbook.

PA: Right. That's the passage about the ox who's frightened to be put to death, right?

CF: Right. And he says the fact that you can save the ox shows that... You know, saving the ox is actually more difficult than being a good king to your people, because it's harder to show sympathy for an animal than it is for other human beings. And he runs through a number of analogical arguments to make that point. And there are many other places in the *Mèngzǐ* as well, where they're using analogical, argumentative techniques that align pretty well with the sorts of things that the Mohists are describing.

PA: Right. In fact, it's even a case of like, 'Okay, here's a situation where two things have something in common, namely that you need to show benevolence to your people just as you need to show benevolence to the ox'. Or, 'Just as you have already shown benevolence to the ox, and you should notice the commonality', which is something that comes up a lot in the later Mohist material.

CF: Yeah. A funny thing about that particular *Mèngzǐ* conversation though (that many people seem to overlook this), is that saving the ox was actually wrong. He shouldn't have done that. But the fact that he made this mistake shows that he's got the wherewithal to act on behalf of the people.

PA: So it's wrong because it's a violation of ritual propriety?

CF: It was a violation of ritual. Yes. He should have allowed the ox to be sacrificed, but he didn't. He lost control.

PA: Okay. So he's wrong twice, right? So he's not showing benevolence to his people as he should, and he is showing benevolence to the ox.

CF: He was showing benevolence to the wrong object of benevolence.

PA: Okay. Fail.

CF: There's a part in the story that concludes that because the gentlemen can't bear to hear the cries of animals, they have to stay far away from the kitchen.

PA: Exactly. Yeah. So I've noticed that you've been talking about this in terms of 'dialectic', which is also a word we were using in the previous episode where we talked about this. We also talked about argumentation theory, but people also describe this as 'logic', often later Mohist logic. Do you think that it's fair to use the word 'logic' here?

CF: Yeah, I'm comfortable with all three of those terms. Some people want to use the word 'logic' in a relatively narrow sense. But I see no problem with using 'logic' in a very broad sense to refer to conceptual or inferential relations and to patterns of reasoning, including inductive or analogical reasoning as well as deductive. In talking about the Mohists, I typically use the term 'dialectics' myself because I think of it as the loosest and broadest of those terms, and we might even be able to fit epistemology under it as well. So I'm thinking of how loosely Plato and Aristotle used the term dialectics. Very much of what the Mohists are doing would also fit under the label of argumentation theory broadly construed. Of course, the Mohists, if we're going to use the word 'logic', they're not focusing on deductive logic, and they're certainly not focusing on formal logic. They don't really focus on inferences that take sentential form, including syllogistic logic. Now I say don't focus because there are several *Canons* that show a very clear unmistakable grasp of the principles of excluded middle and non-contradiction. And so obviously the writers draw what you and I would consider valid deductive inferences in some context. But they don't thematize those inferences as a topic of inquiry, and they don't formulate them as principles. What they understand themselves to be doing in their language is that that word *biàn* - Chinese -, and they give both a narrow and a broad explanation of what that is. And the narrow explanation is that *biàn* is contending over which of two contrary - or I should say contradictory terms - fits something. And in that context, we might say it's an argumentative activity. And the broad explanation is the one you get in the first few lines of the Lesser selection text, where they claim in effect that *biàn* is the core or the foundation of all inquiry, since it's the activity by which we settle what terms apply to what things, what patterns of sameness and difference underwrite the use of terms, what is beneficial and that's morally right according to them, the guidelines of good order, how things stand in the world, what assertions parallel with others... So here the scope of this field of *biàn* expands to encompass the theory and practice of semantics, epistemology, and argumentation. What's crucial to understanding the broad claims about *biàn* is that biàn in both of those senses - the narrow one and the broad one - is conceptually never fully distinct from a related word, which in Chinese is pronounced the same but written with a different graph. And that Word - also *biàn* - refers to drawing a distinction, which is how the Mohists explain cognition and judgment. Cognition and judgment are understood as a matter of assessing sameness or difference - basically analogical pattern recognition. An implication of the Mohist claims about *biàn* in the broad sense, then, is that in all these areas of inquiry, we reach solutions through analogical judgment: distinguishing what is or is not the same or similar. So semantics, epistemology, and argumentation all turn on analogical relations. One helpful way, I think, to understand their outlook is to see that in their semantics, the concept of sameness or similarity, they don't distinguish rigorously between sameness and similarity. But this concept plays a functional role that parallels the role of the copula in European languages. The Mohist *Canons* identify at least four kinds of sameness relations. It looks like they were trying to uncover some further kinds as well, but they're very clear about four kinds. And the four kinds are... They kind of map onto what we might call identity, art-whole relations, kind relations, and being grouped together in some way - such as being placed together in the same room. So if we consider a simple noun predication. An utterance such as 'Cows are animals', the parallel sentence in classical Chinese would be 牛, 兽, 野. The Mohist's theoretical explanation of what that is asserting is that it asserts a sameness relation between 'cows' and 'animals'. In this case, the implicit claim is that 'cows' are the same as other animals in being members of this kind 'animals'.

PA: Do they have a way of conceiving of what the 'kind' there is? I mean, it sounds like what we might call a 'class', right? Even a 'set'. I mean, do they have a philosophical or metaphysical understanding of what a 'class' or a 'kind' is?

CF: They have a very fascinating understanding of that. So the word they use in Chinese is 雷 (léi). And you could say that for them, and to a large extent for *Xuanzi* (early Ruist collection of texts), this question of pinning down just what a 雷 (léi) is like a core or central issue in much of philosophy: in epistemology, to some extent, even in ethics. Because they see perception, cognition, judgment, and reasoning as all turning on analogical relations. And the analogical relations are articulated through this concept of 雷 (léi). So the issue of what things are or are not the same kind - the same 雷 (léi) - is central to the whole enterprise for them. Now my own habit, rather than speaking of 'classes' or 'sets', I prefer using the English term 'kind', because I think many of us are sort of in the habit of interpreting a class or a set as an abstract object. And the Mohist view is that 雷 (léi) are actually concrete aggregates or collections of objects. So the 雷 (léi) of 'horses' - the kind 'horses', for example - for them seems to be not an abstract class, but a concrete, mereological whole formed by considering all the horses in the world as one unified body or one unified unit. Now, what counts as a 雷 (léi) - a kind? Well, the term as they use it... I think if we look at the text, we find it being used in both a loose and a strict sense, depending on the context. In some contexts, this word 雷 (léi) - kind - seems to refer to anything that's similar in taking the same predicate. So two people from the same country, have the same passport, might be of the same 雷 (léi) - the same kind -, because they both come from that country. However, there's a pair of *Canons* - in the Mohist *Canons* - 86, 87, that also offer a stricter account of this concept of 雷 (léi). Now this is a pair of very short remarks. Any interpretation has to be somewhat conjectural. But they seem to distinguish between cases in which things are the same kind, or 雷 (léi), insofar as they share some intrinsic feature - as animals of the same species do - and things that we merely group together in some way, as the collection of items in my briefcase is grouped together by being in my briefcase. So on this interpretation, coming from the same country and having the same passport is not enough to make two people of the same kind - the same 雷 (léi) - because that's not an intrinsic feature of the people. Being human beings, on the other hand, is enough to make them the same 雷 (léi), because they share a body shape and certain physical features. So if that's the case, if they are drawing that distinction, then they seem to be distinguishing between groupings of things that are conventional, based on our collecting them together for some pragmatic reason, and things with intrinsic features that are inherently the same in some way. The main sorts of intrinsic features that the text mentioned are the shape of something and its surface appearance: like its color and maybe 3D projection, you know, how it stands out in various ways. They would say, 'Okay, horses have the same features because they've got a similar body shape, they've got similar fur, similar eyes, and so on.' To group things together without them being the same 雷 (léi) would be something like their location or their origin. That's when we're talking about two people from the same country, or the example they give is horses that come from the state of Qin: so the horses were raised there. Now, you know, students of philosophy are going to want to ask, 'Okay, when the Mohists claim that two horses are inherently the same and having a horse-shaped body and horsey features, what makes them the same? What explains the sameness?' There's no evidence that the Mohists addressed that question. My conjecture as to why they don't raise the question is that they're not really interested in that sort of what you might call an essentialist or a realist explanation. Their theoretical orientation concerns a practical dot, a way or a path. You're referring to a manner in which things work or how humanity should proceed in interacting with things. So not really interested in an essentialist or reductive explanations of why things are the way they are. What they're interested in is how can we come up with a reliable method by which to distinguish the similar from the different things. The question they're going to focus on with respect to horses is how do we distinguish horses from non-horses so that we apply the name 'horse' to just 'the horses' and not to other things and so we pick those animals out to pull carts or to ride on. We don't pick out other animals that are not suitable for those purposes. And their answer seems to be that by convention we identify certain models or paradigms of horses. We pick out certain horsey features that those models or paradigms have which are different from those of non-horses. And then we all learn together to apply those models so that we can pick out the animals that are relevant similar to them in having those features and we all dub those 'horse'. And this is their practical way of distinguishing horses from non-horses.

PA: So that makes it sound like the whole project is kind of pragmatic in nature. Like anything that will result in you having the right animals pull your carts and allow you to ride to market is a good procedure for selecting horses, right? Whereas you might have thought that they'd be interested in something more like truth. Like you want to use the word 'horse' only of things that are really horses. But what you were just saying about their lack of interest in anything like the essence of 'horse' might suggest that anything that works will be okay with them. Is that true? I mean they are consequentialists after all.

CF: So there is a level on which that's correct. If it reliably works to draw the distinction they want to draw then they accept it. And so they see distinctions as being drawn by what they call *FA* standards or models. And there's never any claim that the standard or model somehow captures the real definition or the real essence of whatever they're using it as a standard or a model for. The claim is always just that this reliably draws the distinction. More broadly I try to resist framing a dichotomy between a practical thought and truth in that way. What I've tried to argue in some of my work is that as a matter of their theoretical orientation, the Mohists and Shunzi, other early Chinese thinkers, they don't frame their inquiries as aimed at arriving at a set of true descriptions of reality. What they see themselves as trying to do is to identify the correct path of activity to follow. Now speaking and asserting are activities that human communities engage in. And so the correct *Dao* is going to have to include an explanation of what it is to speak or assert in a correct way and in a wrong way. What's going on? how you draw the distinction between correctness and wrongness of assertion? And that explanation is going to have to cover what you and I would think of as truth. But the Mohists are going to explain that fundamentally as a matter of drawing distinctions correctly because we're using the words properly according to the norms of *Dao*, which of course will use normative relations to the context in which we're making the assertions. So in other words, their aim is correctness of *Dao*, but that's going to in turn explain correctness of assertion or truth. It's like pragmatics is going to explain, and comes theoretically prior to semantics. But there's still an explanation of semantics in the picture. So you could say *Dao* explains truth.

PA: That's really interesting because we tend to, I mean, in sort of everyday English, I think even in contemporary philosophy, we tend to distinguish quite sharply between the goodness of a moral action and the truth of a statement or a proposition. Whereas what you're suggesting (if I understand it correctly), is that there's more kind of generic notion, which is correctness. And that's a notion which would be appropriate both, for example, the decision made by a ruler to not launch a war, right? That would be a correct decision almost always for the Mohist, but it would also apply to a statement like 'this animal is an ox'.

CF: Yes, yeah, absolutely. So there's a sense in which why is launching the war wrong? On some level, the answer is it goes against *Dao*, right? And then why is calling that horse-shaped animal a 'cow' wrong? Well, on some level, the answer is it goes against *Dao*. You're using words wrong. Yeah, so in a sense, explanations of all flavors of correctness are going to come back to this one very loose explanation of what it is to do things right according to a set of normative practices.

PA: Right, because speaking is just one more thing you can do, and you can do it badly or well.

CF: So I was going to push it a little further and say one other thing we might raise is, okay, so they've got this *Dao*. Are the norms of *Dao* objectively correct? And that of course was one of the main topics of controversy in early Chinese thought. So the Mohists of course think that the norms that they defend are indeed objectively, uniquely, invariably correct insofar as those are the norms of the world itself as manifested in the norms practiced by their deity, *Tian* - the sky god. The *Xunzi* collection of writings indicates that the people writing those texts consider the norms they defend also to be uniquely correct, but they give a very different line of argument for them, which is really has a very heavy pragmatic flavor. They don't think that they're determined by the world itself. And then some parts of the Daoist compendium draws a scoff at the idea that any set of norms could be uniquely, invariably correct. Although I think even there, they would allow that a plurality of norms can be objectively... (with scare quotes), objectively correct in the sense that everyone should agree that they do engage with the patterns of the world in a successful, well-grounded way for some group of particular practitioners.

PA: Let's step back now to the broader historical context and talk about the later impact of Mohism, which is I think surprisingly little. So maybe you can correct me on that. But given how important all this sounds... I mean, you know, we're trying to identify the correct *Dao*. They have this elaborate moral theory, which comes along with this elaborate theory of dialectic or logic. It doesn't seem to have had that much impact later on. One of our previous interview guests, Ting-Man Li, said when I interviewed her that maybe this is because Mohist thought is very relevant to the conditions of the Warring States period where you have these smaller qualities which are coming into conflict with each other. Then once the Han rise to preeminence and unify the kingdom, the whole kind of set of wars that drove Mohism was no longer so relevant, whereas Confucianism seemed to be very relevant. Would you go along with that or do you think there are other reasons why Mohism almost even disappears from the historical record?

CF: Okay. Yeah, I have a couple of remarks on that. So one is the Ting-Man's point about sort of the sociological, the historical point about what happens to the Mohists themselves, I think is probably correct. That... in the pre-imperial period, the Mohists were this very complicated social movement who had their own army, among other things. It was very handy for the ruler of a small state to be on good terms with the Mohists because among other things, if you got attacked, they'd come to your defense and they were the best soldiers in the empire or in the pre-empire. So they had a kind of social influence that they eventually lost. Another point is that many of their ethical doctrines were pretty much just absorbed by Confucianism: the most attractive ethical doctrines were absorbed by Confucianism. We find major Confucian figures in the Han dynasty articulating their views in terminology borrowed from the Mohists; but they are not Mohists. So they've absorbed these Mohist ideas, they've integrated them with their own ethical ideas and made them while the Mohists themselves are sort of quietly fading from the picture. But in terms of the intellectual issues, how words or names can be used to pick things out is a subsidiary issue that's stemming from a more fundamental question. The more fundamental question is, 'To what extent can names and speech guide our practice of thought of the way?' Now that's a shared background issue that ties together pretty much all discussions of names and speech in the pre-Han period. And the Mohists take up a very prominent stance on that issue that, 'Yes, names and speech do reliably guide the practice of thought.' And they clarify a lot of the conceptual apparatus used in the ensuing discussions about that issue. Now, with the decline of the Mohist movement in the first decades of the Han dynasty, the Mohists themselves fade from the scene. But the underlying issues continue to be discussed for quite a long time, although the discussion becomes less prominent than it was in the decades leading up to the Qin unification. We still find references to these issues in Han texts, such as the *Chunqiu Fanlu* by Dong Zhongshu or in the *Huainanzi*, for example. Now by that time, the Mohist dialectical writing, so the issue is that it's still there, but the Mohist dialectical writings are probably seldom studied. The text was already badly corrupt, and even in its uncorrupted state, it would have been very difficult to understand. The *Canons* and the explanations look like something like a set of research notes written for a circle of insiders who had teachers or colleagues alongside whom they could ask for explications. The issues raised in the pre-Han period then kind of decline in prominence, but they never wholly vanish. So throughout later Confucianism, for instance, there are recurring discussions of what the Confucians come to label 'the doctrine of names', and that's a descendant of positions that were voiced in the pre-Han discourse. So those sorts of issues, they decline in prominence, but they don't vanish.

PA: Okay, so that pretty much wraps up our coverage of Mohism, but I did want to ask you one other thing. So you're not only someone who writes about these texts, but you're also someone who translates them. In fact, the translation of the Mozi that we've been quoting from in the previous podcast episodes is your translation. And you're also the author of a new translation of the *Zhuangzi*, which is a Daoist work that we're going to be tackling soon in the series. So I thought as long as I've got you on, maybe you could tell us something about these projects, like what were some of the challenges you faced in translating these texts? These are also very different texts. So I was wondering what your experience translating the *Mozi* and the *Zhuangzi* was, you know, it's almost like two completely different challenges.

CF: Well, thank you for mentioning these works. I produced that pair of translations because in each case, I'd been doing a lot of work on the text in question, and I thought readers might benefit from a new translation. In the case of the *Mozi*, this is because previous translations seemed to me really quite inaccurate. In the case of the *Zhuangzi*, it was because I thought we've continued to learn more about the content of the material. And by its nature, the *Zhuangzi* benefits from being presented through a range of interpretive voices. So I wanted to produce a translation that reflected some of what we've learned about the *Zhuangzi* in the last few decades, while also trying to present the content in relatively smooth natural English. Some of the early translations, what AC Graham's translation, for instance, is in somewhat bizarre English, to be honest. So sometimes it's kind of hard to follow. Now, the aims and the style of the two translations I did are very different. In the *Mozi*'s translation, I was trying to give the English reader a feel for the diction, the cadence, and the terminology of Mohist writing in the original Chinese. And the result is a translation that in places is deliberately a bit awkward in English, because in my view, the original Chinese is also awkward. So I hope, though, that the prose allows the English reader to get an accurate feeling for how the Chinese reads and for the consistency of the Mohist terminology, because they're very consistent. In the *Zhuangzi* translation, I was trying to write very different English. I was trying to write relatively smooth, natural English sentences, translating at the level of the sentence rather than the phrase, without sacrificing accuracy. In my view, there are some translations of the *Zhuangzi* out there that don't parse the Chinese sentence structure correctly. So I was trying to use English sentences that adhere to the grammar of the original in their parsing but were otherwise quite natural English. The major challenge in the *Mozi*'s translation was handling the hundreds of philological problems associated with the dialectical writings. And as it turned out, the results of the work I did on those texts couldn't completely fit into the edition Oxford planned. And so I had to publish a digital supplement to the work, which is available on my website. In many places in the *Dialectics*, I concluded that the textual problems are so severe, they're actually unsolvable, given the available evidence. And so I decided to abbreviate the text and to omit the problematic passages. The major challenge in translating the *Zhuangzi* is that in many passages, there's this high degree of uncertainty as to just what the wording is. And in some places, it appears that... Because these texts were initially written down before the script was unified. So it looks like early versions of the text use graphs that were maybe misunderstood or corrupted by later scribes. And you've got these really impressive philological minds from the Qing dynasty, the 20th century in China, in Japan, and in the West, who... in some places, I think, haven't been able to convincingly identify just what the wording should be. And then the other problem with the Zhuangzi that we all face is that there are places in which we're pretty clear about the wording, but exactly what the text is referring to can be somewhat mysterious. So for many of us, I think an inevitable outcome of publishing a translation is that we fall prey to a syndrome that I call chronic second guessing. So nowadays, I'm often tempted to rewrite the modes of translation in smoother, more natural English sentences. And in the *Zhuangzi*, very often there are alternative word choices or phrases for a particular sentence that might work about equally well, but we're forced to choose just one. And sometimes I put the alternative in an end note. But even though the book appeared only less than a year ago, I already have a file full of suggestions to myself about what to consider revising in the future, along with a few outright typos or other errors. Just to say one thing about those volumes, they're both published in the Oxford World Classic series, which I think is a wonderful series because they're very attractive, compact volumes that are available at a very economic price. But they have a series wide format for citations and end notes, which maybe many people won't find all that convenient, but we don't really have a choice about that. The format was set up many years ago and we can't change it now.

PA: Well, we'll have the information on both of those translations in the further reading online so people can see exactly what the publication information is.