The useless tree appears more than once in the Zhuangzi and it is the sharpest form of the book's central inversion. In one telling, a master carpenter passes an oak so vast it shades thousands of oxen, growing beside a village shrine, and does not break stride — the wood would sink as a boat, rot as a coffin, sap as a vessel, split as a door. That night the tree appears to him in a dream and asks what he is comparing it to: the fruit trees are torn apart when their fruit ripens, the useful timber is felled young, and everything valuable is injured by its value. I have been working at being useless for a very long time, it says, and it nearly killed me, and now it is my greatest use. The application to Zhuangzi's own refusal of office is not subtle and is not meant to be.