Some twenty-three centuries ago, a minor official in a doomed little state was offered the second-highest office in a great kingdom. He was fishing at the time. He did not look up. He asked the messengers whether they had heard of a certain sacred tortoise, three thousand years dead, whose shell the king kept wrapped in silk and stored in the ancestral temple. Would that tortoise, he wondered, rather be honored bones in a basket, or a living creature dragging its tail through the mud? The messengers admitted it would rather drag its tail. "Go away," he said. "I too will drag my tail in the mud."

The man was Zhuang Zhou, and the refusal is the whole of him in miniature. This is a book about the strangest and funniest of the great thinkers, the one who built an entire philosophy out of declining things: kingdoms, certainties, the solemn faces of experts, and above all the conviction that any single point of view deserves the last word. Here you will meet the butterfly who dreamed he was a philosopher, the cook whose knife never needed sharpening, the tree that survived because it was worthless, and the man who drummed on a tub and sang at his own wife's funeral—and was not being cruel.

Written for the ordinary curious listener rather than the specialist, this is not a manual of tranquil wisdom. It is a portrait of a mind that laughs the ground out from under every confident opinion, including its own, and somehow leaves you steadier than it found you. It takes Zhuangzi seriously enough to be honest about him: that the book bearing his name was not written by one hand, that the hermit and the rebel in it are not quite the same person, and that his freedom was never the freedom to rule, but the rarer freedom to need nothing and grant nothing the final word.