GUO XIANG (d. 312 CE), Chinese thinker associated with the xuanxue ("dark learning" or "school of mystery") movement. A rationalist mystic and naturalist pantheist, Guo Xiang is the author of a commentary on the Zhuangzi, the only text of his still extant and the best known and oldest of all the Zhuangzi commentaries still in existence. Guo Xiang also edited the text of the Zhuangzi itself. In establishing the version we have today he reduced the size of the text, chose what seemed to him to be "the best and most complete parts" to make a coherent whole, rejected some parts, and arranged the whole in thirty-three chapters. All the complete versions of the Zhuangzi known at present are derived from his.

Guo Xiang's commentary both develops a personal philosophy and makes a radical reinterpretation of the Zhuangzi. That the universe produces itself and is not produced...