True freedom, in Zhuangzi’s vision, is not the power to impose one’s will, but a release from the very compulsions that drive such striving. It begins with loosening the grip of fixed identities and rigid distinctions: self and other, right and wrong, useful and useless, life and death. When these oppositions are seen as relative and shifting, the heart-mind is no longer trapped in a single, narrow standpoint. This “equalizing of things” opens a spaciousness in which one is no longer bound by social roles, conventional judgments, or the pursuit of fame and profit. Freedom thus appears as an inner independence from praise and blame, gain and loss, and the anxious need to measure up to external standards.

At the same time, Zhuangzi portrays freedom as a form of wandering, a “free and easy roaming” of spirit that is unconfined by mental fixations or emotional bondage. This wandering is not aimless drift, but the capacity to move through different perspectives and situations without clinging, to let transformation unfold without resistance. In such wandering, one accepts the impermanence of all things, including one’s own life, and no longer fears death as an absolute end. Life and death are understood as phases within a larger, ongoing process, and this insight brings a deep ease and equanimity. To be free is thus to dwell lightly within change, rather than to fight against it.

This freedom is most vividly expressed through wu wei, “non-action” understood as spontaneous, effortless action in accord with the Dao. It is not passivity, but the absence of forced effort and calculating ego, as seen in the parable of Cook Ding, whose knife moves through the ox by following its natural patterns. When skill and understanding are so integrated that action flows of itself, there is no inner friction, no sense of a separate self straining against the world. Such effortless skill exemplifies a broader spiritual state in which one’s responses arise naturally from clarity rather than from craving or fear. True freedom, then, is a spiritual liberation: a relaxed, responsive way of being that harmonizes with the ever-changing flow of existence, unimpeded by artificial constraints or self-imposed limitations of the mind.