Ziran's celebration of spontaneous, uncompelled being-so invites comparison with Western traditions that also prize naturalness against artifice, and the comparison is useful chiefly for showing how differently the same intuition gets grounded.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's eighteenth-century account of natural goodness, corrupted by society and its institutions, resembles ziran in locating value in an original, unforced condition prior to convention; but Rousseau's natural man is a historical or hypothetical stage in human development, to be recovered through specific social and educational reform, where ziran names a manner of occurring available at every moment rather than a lost historical state to be re-engineered through civic institutions Rousseau himself designed in considerable and quite unspontaneous detail.
Romanticism's celebration of spontaneous feeling against Enlightenment rationalism offers a closer temperamental match, prizing the unplanned and the intuitive over the calculated; but Romantic spontaneity is typically the spontaneity of a strong individual will or genius expressing itself against constraint, whereas ziran, paired as it is with wu wei, describes an absence of assertive willing altogether, closer to water finding its own level than to a poet's inspired outburst. Historians of comparative philosophy generally caution against treating either parallel as evidence of influence, both emerging independently, Rousseau's from a critique of European social inequality, ziran's from a critique of Confucian ritual cultivation, and recommend the comparison only as a way of isolating what is distinctive: ziran's ideal is not self-expression but the disappearance of a separate, effortful self from the process altogether.