The Zhuangzi as received is thirty-three chapters, divided since Guo Xiang's edition around 300 CE into seven Inner Chapters generally accepted as the work of Zhuang Zhou himself in the fourth century BCE, fifteen Outer and eleven Miscellaneous chapters of varied and later authorship. Guo Xiang cut a longer text down and his commentary has travelled with it ever since. Its method is unlike anything else in early Chinese thought: it argues by story, and the stories are frequently absurd, obscene or funny — a man courts a woman with a hideous face and unmatched virtue, a skull refuses an offer to be brought back to life, Confucius is repeatedly made to lose arguments to Taoist recluses and occasionally to concede the point. Its influence on Chinese literary and visual culture is difficult to overstate, and Chan Buddhism's characteristic rhetoric — the paradox, the deflating retort, the refusal to define — is substantially borrowed from it.