Abstract

Mei in Chinese is normally translated into English as "beauty" or "the beautiful." The nature of mei is not a central theme in Zhuangzi's philosophy; neither is it a concept of particular importance in traditional Chinese aesthetics. The core concepts of Chinese aesthetics, according to historians of Chinese aesthetics, are dao, qi, and xiang, but mei is not one of them.1 In Chinese aesthetic history, we see different points of emphasis in contrast to the prevailing concern with beauty in Western aesthetics. "The nature of beauty," as Crispin Sartwell points out, "is one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy, and is—with the nature of art—one of the two fundamental issues in...