Hui Shi is remembered chiefly through ten paradoxical theses preserved in the "Under Heaven" chapter of the Zhuangzi, which challenge common-sense assumptions about size, sameness, difference, and spatial and temporal fixity by showing that such distinctions depend on the standpoint of comparison rather than being fixed features of things themselves.
Intellectual setting
Hui Shi was a friend, rival, and frequent debate partner of Zhuangzi, most famously in the "joy of fish" dialogue on whether one being can know another's experience, and his paradoxes are transmitted only secondhand through the Zhuangzi and Xunzi rather than in a surviving work of his own.
Key ideas
Paradoxes of relativity
Theses such as "the sky is as low as the earth" and "I set off for Yue today and arrived yesterday" argue that properties like height, distance, and even temporal sequence hold only relative to a chosen standard of comparison, not as fixed, absolute features of things.
Loving the myriad creatures, heaven and earth are one body
Hui Shi drew from his relativizing arguments the conclusion that once all distinctions are recognized as relative to a standpoint, the many things of the world can be regarded as forming a single undivided whole deserving equal care.
Legacy
Alongside Gongsun Long, Hui Shi is a central figure of the Warring States School of Names, and his paradoxes are frequently compared by modern scholars to those of Zeno of Elea as early explorations of the logic of relative predicates.