I believe this is the link Clay was trying to share: http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/

Maybe we need to start saying “Western Nature” instead of “human nature” to subvert this easy universalizing.

Point well-taken re: the background fear of death to which Zhuangzi is responding. He is addressing that with the “don’t be afraid of the change!” admonition. So fear of death was indeed a popular sentiment in mainstream ancient China.

Still, the Confucian and Daoist responses to this fear are distinctively healthy to me–again, in the Nietzschean “medical” sense–because they don’t resort to metaphysical comforts to remedy it. They “stay true to the Earth,” as Zarathustra urged, painting death as part of the obvious natural cycle that while sad, is by no means malignant. I’m not aware of another Axial civilization that refused to play the metaphysical comfort card against mortality. And that’s what I love about China: death is at least safe and, conversely, we’re lucky to be alive for the spell we have. You seem familiar enough with Chinese poetry to know that the “death ends all” trope repeats itself from Zhuangzi in poems throughout every succeeding dynasty for the next 23 centuries.

Re: your point about avoiding death and danger: since life is desirable, we don’t want to be idiots and end it prematurely. Who wants to check out of this temporary Heaven early? Again, the Daoists leave me with a self-identity as an animal among 10,000 other animals, so your cat and I both have an instinct for life and preservation. But that doesn’t make death a thing of existential angst.

Even in Plato, of course, there is the other side in which Socrates is Marsyas…

But I”m always astonished by how very many voices have been raised throughout European history against Marsyas, given the context of the story as a whole. It would be interested to do a much broader study of the sources that are out there, but it would be a big job.