To know how to stay within the sphere of our ignorance is to attain the highest. Who knows an unspoken discrimination, an untold Way? It is this, if any is able to know it, which is called the Treasury of Heaven. (Zhuangzi, ch. 2, p. 57)

Ultimate serenity is the coming to rest of all ways of taking things, the repose of named things; no truth has been taught by a Buddha for anyone, anywhere. (Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamikakarika 25:24, p. 262)

　　 A Chinese legend has it that when old Laozi disappeared into the western frontier he journeyed to India and became Sakyamuni Buddha. I am not in a position to confirm or refute that story, but I enjoy speculating about another: Zhuangzi, the greatest Daoist philosopher, followed in the footsteps of his predecessor (whom he never mentions) by also traveling to India, where he ... became Nagarjuna, the greatest of the Buddhist philosophers.

　　 Unfortunately for me, this second possibility is even less likely. One problem is the deathbed story in chapter thirty-two, where Zhuangzi declines the lavish funeral his disciples want to give him. There is also a worrisome historical discrepancy: Zhuangzi lived in the fourth century BCE, while most scholars place Nagarjuna in the second century CE. No less troublesome, perhaps, is the radical difference in their philosophical styles. Zhuangzi is unparalleled in Chinese literature for his mocking and satirical tone, which directs its most acid humor at the pretensions of logic; Nagarjuna is unparalleled in Indian thought for his laconic, knife-edged logic, which wields distinctions that no one had noticed before and many since have been unable to see the point of.

　　 Despite these formidable objections, however, Zhuangzi and Nagarjuna share something even more important: the targets and conclusions of their philosophies are remarkably similar, as I will try to show. For a start, both are anti-rationalists who present us with strong arguments for not believing in reason. According to A.C. Graham, "For Zhuangzi the fundamental error is to suppose that life presents itself with issues which must be formulated in words so that we can envision alternatives and find reasons for preferring one to the other." This error is quite a good characterization of what Nagarjuna does, except for the fact that Nagarjuna uses his dry distinctions to perform a self-deconstruction refuting the hope of logic to re-present the world conceptually. His magnum opus the Mulamadhyamikakarika addresses the major philosophical problems of his day, not to determine the definitive position but to demonstrate that no conceptual solution is tenable. Like Zhuangzi, who "temporarily 'lodges' at the other man's standpoint" the better to show what is wrong with that standpoint, Nagarjuna adopts his contemporaries' terminology in order to show what is wrong with that terminology.

　　 On the surface, though, the Zhuangzi could hardly be more dissimilar. It offers a bewildering succession of anecdotes and arguments whose shifting tone makes it difficult and sometimes impossible to determine which voice represents the author. "Where then is the real Zhuangzi? ... the text turns into a hall of mirrors where a frightening succession of images recedes into infinity and illusion becomes indistinguishable from reality." This postmodernist playfulness, which prefers posing questions to drawing conclusions, functions quite differently from Nagarjuna's univocal dissection of this and that alternative. It subverts our need for a Master discourse, for that text which subsumes and unifies others into the truth -- that Truth our philosophical labors try to stake out and lay claim to, the perfectly reasonable position that Zhuangzi loves to mock.

　　 What if there is no such Truth? Or is this insight itself the Truth? Is that a contradiction (and therefore impossible) or a paradox (which encourages a "leap" to a different level of understanding)? These questions will be addressed by considering what Zhuangzi and Nagarjuna have to say about them. Zhuangzi has been labeled a relativist and/or a skeptic, Nagarjuna a skeptic and/or a nihilist, but in their cases such bald designations put the cart before the horse. We cannot understand whether Zhuangzi is a relativist without first considering what the rest of us expect from the truth. We cannot appreciate their skepticism without considering what motivates the commonsense belief in objective knowledge. Instead of inquiring into what kind of a skeptic or relativist Zhuangzi is -- that is, which of our boxes he would fit into (and what fun he would have with that!) -- it will be more fruitful to inquire into the relationship between knowledge and other important themes for him: no-self, mind-fasting, and dreaming. The interesting issue, then, is not whether the "skepticism" of Zhuangzi and Nagarjuna is consistent with other claims such as no-self, but to turn this around: what context do no-self, meditation, dreaming and waking up, etc., provide for their understanding of our understanding of knowledge?