Guo Xiang produced the commentary on the Zhuangzi that became the standard transmitted edition of the text, reducing an earlier fifty-two chapter collection to the thirty-three chapters known today. He developed a radically naturalistic reading of Daoist spontaneity, arguing that things do not arise from a generative metaphysical "Nothingness" but each spontaneously self-transforms (zihua) according to its own inherent nature, without any external or prior cause.
Intellectual setting
Guo Xiang wrote during the Xuanxue ("Dark Learning") movement of the Wei-Jin period, when scholar-officials at the Western Jin court used renewed engagement with the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Yijing to reconcile personal spiritual freedom with continued service in an unstable and often dangerous political system.
Key ideas
Self-transformation (zihua)
Guo Xiang argued that every thing spontaneously transforms according to its own nature, arising and changing without an external creator, cause, or generative first principle governing it from outside.
Nothingness cannot produce Being
Against readings of Daoism that treat wu (Nothingness) as a generative source of all things, Guo Xiang argued non-being is simply the absence of being and so cannot produce anything, radicalizing Daoist naturalism against contemporaries such as Wang Bi.
Legacy
Guo Xiang's commentary became inseparable from the received Zhuangzi and has shaped virtually all later interpretation of the text, and he remains, alongside Wang Bi, one of the two central figures of Wei-Jin Xuanxue Neo-Daoist philosophy.