“I Lost Myself”: Variations on Ziqi, a Name Wandering Through Zhuangzian Landscapes

For two millennia, scholarship on the Zhuangzi has extracted doctrines, analyzed concepts, and dissected arguments, all of which is valuable and necessary. But in doing so, it has lost something essential: that these words are spoken by someone, that they emerge from lives, and that they belong to figures who appear, disappear, and reappear across textual landscapes. This study restores the drama to the doctrines by tracking a single name. Ziqi appears across eight chapters of the Zhuangzi as Nanguo Ziqi, Nanbo Ziqi, Nanbo Zikui, Dongguo Ziqi, Sima Ziqi, and simply Ziqi. His name wanders. Following him through caves, courts, scenes of instruction, vertiginous spirals into pity, armrest reveries, drunken collapses under trees, family picnics, and palaces of nothing whatsoever, this paper uncovers what a purely doctrinal approach cannot: that the philosophy of the Zhuangzi is inseparable from the lives that live it. Ziqi is not just a mouthpiece who robotically voices the abstract proposition “I lost myself” but a figure whose journey through the text gives those words their weight. More than illustrating doctrines, his journey creates the philosophy and constitutes its meaning. By reading Ziqi across his eight appearances and their variations, this study offers a model for reading the Zhuangzi as a textured literary world in which figures wander, words spill over, and meaning is made through the lives that live it.