Fu Lang(苻朗): The Di Prince Who Wrote Zhuangzi for a New Age
Paul Peng
He was a prince of a conquered people. A nephew to an emperor who would unite the north. And when he died—executed by the regime he had fled to for safety—he faced the sword with the calm of a man who had already thought his way past death.
Fu Lang (苻朗, 348–389 CE) was an ethnic Di aristocrat, a philosopher, and one of the last writers in the classical Taoist tradition to compose in the voice of Zhuangzi. His book, the Fuzi (《苻子》), survives only in fragments. But those fragments contain something rare: a mind moving between the ancient wisdom of non-desire and the emerging practices of Taoist longevity—between philosophy and religion, between the Warring States and the age of organised Daoism.
The Di Prince in a Han World
The Fu clan were Di people—a non-Han ethnic group from the northwest. In the chaos of the fourth century, when northern China shattered into the Sixteen Kingdoms, the Di built something remarkable: the Former Qin empire. Fu Lang’s uncle was Fu Jian (苻坚), the greatest of the Former Qin rulers, who conquered the north and dreamed of reunifying all of China. He called his nephew “the thousand-li steed of our clan.”
But Fu Lang was not a soldier. He was a thinker. And his mind ran not on strategy but on parable.
In 383 CE, Fu Jian’s dream collapsed at the Battle of Fei River. The Former Qin army was shattered. The empire unravelled in months. Fu Lang surrendered to the Eastern Jin—the southern regime his uncle had tried to destroy. The Jin gave him a title and never trusted him. In 389 CE, they found a pretext to execute him. According to the Book of Jin, he composed a poem on the execution ground, then faced the blade with an expression of utter calm.
The Fuzi is what he left behind.
The Lost Book and Its Survivors
The Fuzi originally ran to twenty volumes, classified under Taoist philosophy in the Sui Shu’s bibliographic treatise. By the late Tang dynasty, it was gone. What remains are quotations preserved in Song dynasty encyclopedias—the Taiping Imperial Reader (《太平御览》) and the Classified Collection of Literary Arts (《艺文类聚》).
He wrote in parables, exactly like Zhuangzi. He addressed five major themes: non-desire (无欲), rejoicing in death (乐死), freedom from circumstance (逃遥), relativism (齐物), and contentment with obscurity (守拙). And then, crossing a line Zhuangzi never crossed, he also wrote about immortality techniques—swallowing jade, chewing flower stamens, subsisting on cinnabar and ganoderma. This is the puzzle of the Fuzi: it is half Zhuangzi and half Taoist longevity manual.
The Archer Who Shot Too Well
Here is the first parable, preserved in the Taiping Imperial Reader:
“The King of Xia ordered Yi to demonstrate his archery. Yi drew his bow. He hit the target. Then the King ordered him to shoot again—but this time with a reward of gold for hitting the target and a punishment of death for missing. Yi’s hands trembled. He missed.”
Fu Lang’s commentary is devastating in its simplicity: “Joy and fear brought Yi to disaster. If people can discard their joy and fear, they would each be no less worthy than Yi.” Yi was the greatest archer in Chinese mythology. But add a reward and a threat, and his skill evaporated. The desire for gold and the fear of death destroyed what years of practice had built. The answer is not to try harder. It is to dismantle the wanting.
The Master Who Lived Seven Hundred Years
Then Fu Lang goes somewhere Zhuangzi never went. He tells a story about Yan Hui—Confucius’s favourite disciple—who is sick and has not eaten for three days. Someone asks him: Why don’t you do what your master does?
“My master does not eat unless it is cinnabar. He does not consume unless it is ganoderma. Therefore he has lived seven hundred years. Why do you not suck jade to prolong your life, or chew flower stamens to nourish your years?”
Confucius—the sober humanist—has been recast as a Taoist immortal, a 700-year-old sage who eats minerals and fungi instead of grain. Fu Lang is pulling Zhuangzi’s philosophy into the world of Taoist religious practice. Non-desire is still the goal. Death is still not to be feared. But now there are techniques. There is cinnabar. There is jade. The body, not just the mind, can be transformed. This is the moment when philosophical Taoism begins to shade into religious Daoism.
The Five Themes as a Unified Vision
The remaining fragments of the Fuzi fill out the picture. Rejoicing in death: dying is simply another transformation—the cosmos is a vast smelter that casts you into one form, then another. Freedom from circumstance: the sage moves through the world like a cloud, unattached, carried by winds that do not belong to any kingdom. Relativism: big and small, life and death—these are distinctions drawn by the human mind; from the perspective of the Tao, they collapse. Contentment with obscurity: the sage does not seek recognition; the highest life is hidden, quiet, unknown.
Taken together, these five themes constitute a complete Taoist philosophy of life. Fu Lang was not an original thinker in the way Zhuangzi was original. He was a synthesizer—and his synthesis pointed forward, toward the organised Taoism of the coming centuries.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
Fu Lang never belonged to an organised Taoist movement. Yet his synthesis—philosophical non-desire joined to physical cultivation, Zhuangzian freedom joined to the pursuit of longevity—is exactly the kind of thinking that made organised Taoism possible. The rise of Taoism in the Eastern Jin was built on precisely this integration of inner philosophy and outer practice.
The early Zhengyi corpus reflects a similar integration. The Zhengyi priest does not only meditate—he performs rituals, writes talismans, engages in practices designed to transform the body as well as the mind. Fu Lang represents the cultural soil. The organised Taoist movements of the Six Dynasties and the Tang are what grew from it.
What the Execution Ground Could Not Take
Fu Lang died at forty-one, killed by a regime that feared him. His book is lost. His name is obscure. But the fragments that survive record something irreplaceable: a mind that faced death—both philosophically and personally—and refused to flinch. The same man who wrote that joy and fear bring disaster stood on the execution ground and composed a poem. The same man who argued that death is only transformation met his own end as though it were a change of clothes.
He was, in the end, his own best parable.
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