Around the same time as Zhuangzi, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato put forward his allegory of the cave. In his extended dialogue, the Republic, he tells the story of humans who are chained up in a cave, seeing only shadows cast on a wall by puppets that imitate things in the world of sunlight outside. The shadows are all the cave people know, so they take them to be reality. One day, one of them escapes and discovers the glories of the real world outside the cave. Eventually he reenters the cave and tells stories of that world, but no one believes him.
