Research On The Life And Death View Of "Zhuangzi"

As the day when human kind have the conscious of living,they realize that life is short and death is desperate as well.The question of “to be or not to be “have puzzled mankind for a life time.The way that how to deal with life and death is inextricably bound up in how to understand the relationship of human kind,society and the universe.This paper takes the view of life and death of Chuang-tzu as core object,inducting and reorganizing his theories amidst historical background.Moreover,the paper makes the contrast of thoughts from other thinkers or schools such as Confucianism,Mohism and thoughts of Yang Zhu with that of Chuang-tzu,which could enrich the core ideas.The concrete research will be conducted as follow:The first chapter illustrate the time background and culture aura,the perspective of universe and life-death related conception and practice of the era and how these theories associated with ideas of Chuang-tzu.The second and third chapters will discuss Chuang-tzu's views of life and death respectively.The second chapter will explain that Chuang-tzu using his insightful sight to the essence of life and propose a theory that life is transfer by “Dao—Qi”,which means that both life and death are rely on the transformation of “Dao—Qi”.In a nutshell,he seem life and death as links in the natural circulation.On the base of that,the paper using life and body,life and reputation and life and principles to elaborate thoughts of life.The main task of the third part is display view of death of Chuang-tzu.firstly,Due to the theories that all life are transferred from “Dao—Qi”,Chuang-tzu considered that all kinds of life including mankind and other species are identical originally.The conscious of “I” bring about different between objects,which is considered as a kind of degeneration by Chuang-tzu.To return the realm of object subject need to remove themselves by means of “remove subject” and “materialization”.Making living and death identical is the ultimate aim that can never be achieved.Last but not least,I will put this issue back to the background to explain why Chuang-tzu believe that it is essential to have positive attitude to death.