The importance of this move becomes clearer when we realize that, although Nagarjuna addresses the philosophical controversies of his time, his main target is that unconscious "metaphysics" which is disguised as the world we live in. If philosophy were merely the preoccupation of some intellectuals we could ignore it, but we are all philosophers. The fundamental categories of our everyday, commonsense metaphysics are the self-existing things we interact with all the time -- chairs, doors, cars, trees, etc. -- which originate, change, and eventually cease; and in order to explain the relations among these objects the categories of space, time and causality must also be employed. So we experience the world as a collection of discrete things, each of which has its own being (self) yet interacts causally with others in objective space and time. The problem with this understanding of the world is not only that it is erroneous but that it causes us to suffer: for we understand ourselves in the same way, as special instances of self-existing things which are nonetheless subject to the ravages of time and change -- which are born only to grow old, become ill, and die.

　　 But if I self-exist, how can I change? How could I die? For that matter, how could I have been born? This is the simple contradiction that Nagarjuna uses to deconstruct self-being. That all phenomena appear and disappear according to conditions means that our usual way of perceiving the world as a collection of separately-existing things is a delusion. Nagarjuna does not follow this critique by presenting the "correct" Buddhist metaphysics, however, for merely by subverting such ontological claims the Buddhist deconstruction of self-existence (especially our own) can allow something else to become apparent: something that has always been there yet has usually been overlooked in our preoccupation with satisfying desires and trying to make ourselves self-existent. For Nagarjuna this is our everyday world experienced as nirvana, since there is no specifiable difference whatever between them (MMK 25:19) except for our deluded way of "taking" the world. For Zhuangzi too the reason we experience this world as a collection of discrete things rather than as the Dao is that we misperceive it.

　　 I have ignored chronology to discuss Nagarjuna first because his analysis is more focused and easier to explicate, which means it can help us with some of the obscure yet important passages in the Zhuangzi, such as the following:

The men of old, their knowledge had arrived at something: at what had it arrived? There were some who thought there had not yet begun to be things -- the utmost, the exhaustive, there is no more to add. The next thought there were things but there had not yet begun to be borders. The next thought there were borders to them but there had not yet begun to be "That's it, that's not". The lighting up of "That's it, that's not" is the reason why the Way is flawed. (ch. 2, pp. 54)

　　 Instead of offering an account of social development or evolution, Daoist history is the story of a progressive decline in our understanding of the Way. Some of the old sages knew the ultimate, which is that there are no self-existing things; everything is a manifestation of the Dao. Later, people perceived the world as made up of things, but these things were not seen as separate from each other; their interrelationships and transformations meant the world was still experienced as a whole. After that, people came to see things as truly discrete, the world became a collection of objects, yet even they did not use discriminative thinking to understand the world. Once people employed and became trapped in their own dualistic concepts, the Dao was lost.

　　 Zhuangzi often refers to the problem of "That's it, that's not"; when that way of thinking lights up, the Dao is obscured. What is he criticizing? One target is the logical analysis that philosophers go in for, in particular that of the Chinese sophists and Mohists of Zhuangzi's own time. Yet this by itself is too narrow, for (like Madhyamika scholars who think Nagarjuna's analyses are aimed only at certain Indian philosophical positions) it overlooks the discriminations that we have all learned to make in the process of coming to experience the world in the "ordinary" way other people do. Chapter two of the Daodejing (a text the Zhuangzi inner chapters never refer to) discusses and by implication criticizes the conceptual dualisms which bifurcate into opposed categories: "When beauty is universally known as beauty, therein is ugliness. When goodness is universally known as goodness, therein is badness. Therefore being and nonbeing are mutually posited in their emergence", and the same is true for difficult and easy, long and short, etc. Nagarjuna is less poetical and more explicit about the problem with such bifurcations: "Without relation to 'good' there is no 'bad', in dependence on which we form the idea of 'good'. Therefore 'good' [by itself] is unintelligible" (MMK 23:10). In the same way the concept "bad" is also unintelligible by itself (MMK 23:11). We distinguish between good and bad because we want to affirm one and reject the other, but their interdependence means we have both or neither: since the meaning of each is the negation of the other, one can consciously be "good" only by consciously avoiding "bad". In the same way, my love of life is haunted by my hatred of death, hope for success is equaled by fear of failure, and so forth.