"Zhuangzi Lecture Notes", by Chen Yinchi, Zhonghua Bookstore September 2021 edition, 394 pages, 58.00 yuan
A Japanese friend who has been practicing kendo for more than 20 years is called "Wooden Chicken" and is said to be a first-class sports group in Japan. When I first heard the name, I was a little stunned, because the modern Chinese "dumb as a wooden chicken" to describe a person who is dazed or afraid and overwhelmed is always a derogatory term. In competitive sports such as Japanese sumo wrestling, judo, and kendo, the wooden chicken is a compliment to describe the super-first-class realm. The legendary Japanese sumo wrestler Futabayama, who still holds a record of sixty-nine consecutive wins, famously said after his first defeat, "I am still not a wooden chicken." A few years ago, another sumo wrestler, Bai Peng, when he stopped winning a sixty-three consecutive victory, also issued a feeling of "shame not being able to become a wooden chicken".
In the seventeenth century, the legendary painting of Miyamoto Musashi, the "Sword Sage" of Japan, "Cloth Bag Sees Cockfighting", in which the budai monk is watching the cockfighting. Legend has it that Miyamoto Musashi's swordsmanship reached the realm of "wooden chicken".
Looking through the Wooden Chicken canon, Zhuangzi Outer Chapter, Dasheng, the fable tells that King Xuan of Zhou ordered Ji Zizi to conduct gladiatorial training for a newly acquired fighting. In the first thirty days, King Xuan of Zhou sent people to fetch cockfighting three times, and Ji Yuzi prevaricated on the grounds of "being quick and arrogant", and on the fourth ten days, he finally handed over a chicken that was stupid like a wood carving. As soon as this "wooden" chicken came on the field, it did not move, but it made the opponent crumbling in the wind, and the "chicken" soldiers were subdued without fighting. Re-reading this text, I suddenly realized that the original wooden chicken of Dongying Athletics used the original meaning of Zhuangzi. The "dust with the light" in the "Tao Te Ching" and the "sitting and forgetting" in "Zhuangzi" are embodied in the wooden chicken.
The term "wooden chicken" is widely used in various Japanese kendo utensils.
"Classics are books that have a certain special effect, either to imprint our imagination in a forgotten way themselves, or to disguise themselves as individual or collective unconsciouss hidden in deep memory." "Classics are books like these, and the more hearsay we think we understand, the more we actually read them, the more we feel that they are unique, unexpected, and novel."
In middle age, people re-read the wooden chicken classic in "Zhuangzi" and agree with Calvino's "Why Read Classic Works?" these two sentences. "Zhuangzi" is a classic of such a classic. Professor Chen Yinchi of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University has been teaching "Zhuangzi" since 1993, every year, every year, and recently he has collected 28 years of reading Zhuang and published it as "Zhuangzi Lecture Notes". After reading the lecture, the students who listened to the lecture earlier told Teacher Chen that when they listened to the half-understanding in the classroom, they only remembered that the teacher sometimes talked about happiness and self-care, and after so many years, they read "Zhuangzi Lecture Notes" to understand where the teacher was "happy".
Japanese judo, kendo, and sumo practice sites often feature wooden chicken statues to motivate practitioners.
The book "Zhuangzi" has contributed more than fifty fable idiom stories to the Chinese world, and once these idioms have been separated from the context of the original text, they have grown themselves, broadcast from the mainstream, and even developed new meanings that are completely opposite to the original story, such as "dumb wooden chicken". If modern people do not read Zhuangzi carefully, they are often blinded by the new righteousness that is completely different. Zhuangzi is good at designing abstract ideas into allegorical stories of dialogue between two characters, thus vividly highlighting the tension between the two sides of the contradiction, such as "Three Twilights and Four Nights", in the "Zhuangzi Inner Chapter Qiwu", the story actually matches the main theme of this "Qiwu", indicating that the monkey (metaphorical "layman") is limited to the narrow cognition of time and space and culture, and the overall vision of the monkey keeper (metaphor "Tao"). This parable creates a strong empathy for the reader, so much so that the monkey in the parable who has attained the "freedom of the acorn" in the parable becomes the endorsement of "capriciousness" in later life. Thinking of this layer of paradox, "we seem to have heard Zhuangzi's seemingly innocent laughter" (Zhuangzi Lecture Notes).
In 1934, Lin Yutang promoted Zhuangzi as the ancestor of Chinese humor in "On Humor", "Until the first class of minds such as Zhuang Sheng appeared, there were humorous ideas and humorous articles that discussed the world, so Zhuang Sheng can be called the ancestor of Chinese humor." TaiShi gong called Zhuang Sheng funny, which is what he meant." Zhuangzi's humor runs through the strange and strange texts that change and sway, but unfortunately, when "Zhuangzi" is taught in general university classrooms, it is first "taken out of context", and scattered chapters are extracted for example according to several philosophical concepts or literary history concepts. This philosophical and conceptual reading lacks the interest of Zhuangzi as a first-rate writer and humorist, making Zhuangzi even more distant from today's people.
Qian Zhongshu once commented on the attitude of the Chinese people in reading the classics: "Gai Xiu's words are interesting, and there are everywhere; when the speaker sees the scriptures and the ancient books, he is dignified and respectful, bows and holds his breath, and he is unconscious and has a word game. Today, when we read Zhuangzi, we may wish to try to distinguish the reading method of the word game Samadhi, so as to see the poor and idle Zhuangzi who is humorous and humorous. The "French reading method of writing articles" advocated by "Zhuangzi Lecture Notes" is the magic of this time. The author points out at the beginning that although Lao Tzu has 5,000 words, he cannot see the figure of Lao Tzu personally; "Zhuangzi" has more than 100,000 words, and Zhuangzi's joys and sorrows are fully displayed. So from the fables told in "Zhuangzi", we can see that Zhuangzi who looked back at the things of the world from a high distance made a seemingly innocent laugh.
Zhuangzi's humor sometimes sounds closer to "black humor", which Lu Deming's "Classic Interpretations" of the Tang Dynasty summed up as "interesting and profound, and the right words are contrary" has this meaning. On the contrary, the words that conform to the dao sound contrary to the common sense; on the surface, it seems to be contrary to common sense and facts, but under careful consideration, it contains truth. The "Zhuangzi Lecture Notes" deeply analyzes the context of such "words" in the context of pre-Qin culture, such as "Kun" is actually the name of a small fish, and "Zhuangzi" is used to refer to the big fish of the Northern Hell, because "Zhuangzi" is skeptical of the connection between the text symbols and the things themselves. Not only that, but the entire "Zhuangzi" is committed to tearing up worldly values, telling us that there is really no difference between the great sage Boyi and the great robber and the robber in this regard of "cruelty and injury".
For modern readers, the book "Zhuangzi" has set up reading barriers everywhere, that is, the paradox (Paradox) and the contradictory rhetoric (Oxymoron) pointed out by Qian Zhongshu's "Pipe Cone Compilation" ("Pipe Cone" dictionary "Zhuangzi Qiushui" "Peeping at the Sky with a Tube, Pointing to the Earth with a Cone"), that is, the literal meaning looks contradictory, but in fact the meaning is smooth. Not only are there paradoxes within a sentence, but even in the various chapters of Zhuangzi, there are many grass snake gray lines lurking in it, forming a semantic labyrinth. To get out of the labyrinth, we first need to sort out the complexity of the collection of pre-Qin literature, and these philological problems are skillfully resolved by the "Zhuangzi Lecture Notes" in the combing of the meaning of the chapters. The book first analyzes the process of "Zhuangzi" being concatenated into a book, collected into a book, and the authenticity of each article, and then pays attention to those passages that are coherent and connected, and then breaks apart the various paragraphs of the whole book into scattered beads, deduces and searches for the chain of six meanings, and then re-strings into six semantic necklaces of self-righteousness. The "Zhuangzi Lecture Notes" focuses on combing the internal structure of these six strings of meaning chains, pointing out that "the structure of "Zhuangzi" is swaying and changing, and the ideals of thinking fall out of the sky, but its context is back and forth, endlessly like a wisp", focusing on the string and opening up.
Although it is a university lecture note for the general audience, the author has gone through the essence of the ancient and modern Zhuangzi commentaries, selected the most appropriate text, commented on it as appropriate under the original text, and marked it with a small number one character, providing an advanced reading method. The author has translated English academic masterpieces such as "Cao Yin and Kangxi", "Tang Dynasty Variations", "The End of the Chinese Middle Ages: A Collection of Treatises on Literature and Culture in the Middle and Tang Dynasties", and has also frequently seen the fusion of Chinese and Western knowledge that is quoted and extended in the "Zhuangzi Lecture Notes", and the modern transformation of Zhuangzi to the Western context. For example, take out the famous saying of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, "Human knowledge is like a circle, the inside of the circle is known, the outside of the circle is unknown, the more you know, the larger the circle, the more you don't know", to prove that "Zhuangzi" has the same interest as "there is no end to the end". Another example is the intertextual reading formed between "Zhuangzi" and the American poet Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken".
From the standpoint of multi-civilization exchanges and mutual learning, "Zhuangzi Handouts" shows the enlightening significance of Zhuangzi's "access" to the current world - Zhuangzi is fully aware of the limitations of space, time and culture that we face, and then strives to break through and sublimate to a higher realm. Because of this pattern of heaven and earth, the "wooden chicken" in the fable of "Zhuangzi" more than 2,000 years ago is still the spiritual symbol of sports "Taoism".