The Zhuangzi is the second foundational text and it works entirely differently from the Daodejing: it argues by anecdote, and most of the anecdotes are funny. Skulls give interviews, a frog in a well is unimpressed by the sea, cicadas mock a giant bird, and Confucius is repeatedly conscripted to voice Taoist positions. Its central moves are the relativity of perspective — the butterfly dream, the debate about whether fish are happy — and a sustained attack on the usefulness of usefulness. Zhuangzi himself, when the king of Chu sent officials to offer him the chief ministry, is said to have asked whether a sacred tortoise, three thousand years dead and honoured in a temple, would rather have been left alive dragging its tail in the mud, and told them to go away. Its literary influence is difficult to overstate: Chinese poetry, landscape painting, and a good deal of Chan Buddhist rhetoric are downstream of it.