The complete Japanese translation of Zhuangzi by Chihisa Ikeda was republished by Kodansha in 2017.
Zhai Lisi's English edition of Zhuangzi, Forgotten Books, reprinted in 2015.
Gong Bilan's Spanish edition of Zhuangzi, 2005.
Leonwig's Zhuangzi in Swedish, new edition in 2021.
On Goodreads, the world's largest readership platform, one byline Patrick wrote: "I spent 6 months reading this book, keeping it around, insomnia at night, contemplating in the morning, and was one of the wildest experiences of my life... Zhuangzi's skepticism went far beyond Descartes. Even if you don't understand the Tao, you can be with a great soul. ”
If there is any Chinese classic that can best communicate the Eastern and Western worlds on the spiritual level, it should be said that it is "Zhuangzi". More than 2,000 years ago, Zhuangzi put forward a relativist cosmology, an epistemology of seeking "true knowledge", and the Taoist nature and the pursuit of a free and self-adapted life realm.
As a classic text of Taoist thought, Zhuangzi and Laozi (also known as the Tao Te Ching) are said to be in parallel with the Confucian classics in the history of Chinese civilization. The "Zhuangzi" seen so far was roughly formed in the pre-Qin Dynasty and circulated after being deleted by Guo Xiang in the Western Jin Dynasty. "Lü's Spring and Autumn" absorbed many ideas from "Zhuangzi"; the rise of metaphysics in the Wei and Jin dynasties, Zhuangzi thought became the "Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest"; the Sui and Tang dynasties, the status of Taoism suddenly increased; during the Song and Ming dynasties, the three schools of Confucianism and Taoism coexisted, and the study of Zhuangzi had a tendency to Confucianism; the study of Zhuangzi in the Qing Dynasty had the characteristics of hermeneutics and essayology; the study and interpretation of Zhuangzi in modern times showed a trend of combining Eastern and Western ideas. The overseas dissemination of Zhuangzi deeply influenced the postmodern philosophy of Western society in the 20th century.
The spread of Chinese character culture circles
The spread of Zhuangzi in the Chinese character cultural circle of the Asian world has evolved along with the path of manuscripts, engravings, and translations.
Zhuangzi was imported into Japan, dating back to the Heian period from the 8th to the 12th century, mainly based on the annotations of Guo Xiang and Cheng Xuanying. During the Muromachi period, the Southern Song Dynasty thinker Lin Xiyi's "Zhuangzi Sui Sai Kou Yi" was warmly sought after by Japanese scholars because of its combination of Confucianism, Zen, and huitong righteousness, and its language was popular and clear, and it is still an important bibliography for Japanese academics to study "Zhuangzi".
After World War II, many scholars who studied Zhuangzi appeared in Japan, such as Kentaro Kentaro, Koji Fukunaga, Yoshiyoshi Tsuda, and Saburo Mori Miki. Professor Tomohisa Ikeda of the Faculty of Letters of Daito Bunka University in Japan has comprehensively sorted out the research of Zhuangzi in Japanese academic circles from the dimensions of philology, outlook on life, cosmology, epistemology, dialectics, religious studies, and aesthetic research. He believes that Zhuangzi deeply influenced Japanese painting and poetry creation, and the Meiji era painter Yokoyama Daguan took "Kuding Jie Niu" as the subject of painting.
From 1776 to 1800, in the Korean Peninsula," such as the Kuizhang General Catalogue, which specializes in Chinese bibliographies, there were already records of Zhuangzi's Chinese classics, and even Korean texts such as the Nanhua Zhenjing Dawen Recipe. According to Kim Baek-hyun, a professor at Gangneung University in South Korea, the study of Zhuangzi in South Korea has now expanded to literature, history, art, philosophy, religion and other aspects, and "butterfly dream" and "Ku Ding Jie Niu" have become the mantras of ordinary people.
Before the 19th century, Zhuangzi was influential in the upper echelons of Vietnamese society. After the Latinization of the Vietnamese script, a number of Vietnamese translations appeared, such as the essence of Zhuangzi published in 1945 and Zhuangzi (excerpts of "Getaway", "The World on Earth", "The Great Grandmaster" and other chapters published in 1960).
Spread in the European and American worlds
The European and American worlds accepted Taoist doctrine late, but they were enthusiastic and in-depth. Although as early as the 17th and 18th centuries, Jesuit missionaries had translated the Tao Te Ching, it was not until the outbreak of World War I and World War II, the Western morality and capitalist system were questioned, the cultural pessimism represented by Nietzsche reached a climax, the first cultural crisis appeared in the modern Western world, Western intellectuals drew cultural nutrition from Eastern wisdom, and Taoist ideas such as Zhuangzi were accepted.
In 1881, the missionary Balfour translated and published the South China True Scriptures, Zhuangzi's Writings, and Taoist Philosophers in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Zhai Lisi's monograph Zhuangzi: The Mystic, the Moralist, and the Social Reformer, published in 1889, was the first full translation of Zhuangzi in the English-speaking world. In 1891, the Taoist Texts of the missionary and sinologist Li Jacob were published in the American series of books, The Sacred Scriptures of the Orient, and reprinted separately in 1959 as a separate edition.
The German edition of Zhuangzi compiled by the German sinologist Buber in 1910 based on the English translation of Zhai Lisi and the German translation of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi published by Wei Lixian, who was a missionary in China at the same time, were widely disseminated among Intellectuals in German literature and art. After World War I, a Taoist fever arose in war-torn Germany, and the German poet Kola Bonde called on Germans to live according to the "sacred Taoist spirit" and be "the Chinese of Europe" in the article "Listen, Germans". Western psychology and philosophy began to widely accept Taoist thought, Jung's developmental psychology absorbed a lot of Taoist thought, and the philosophers Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Yaspers all absorbed the ideas of Laozi and Zhuangzi to varying degrees.
After World War II, Taoist thought was further accepted by the West through "Zen Buddhism". Watts, a Father of the Anglican Church, published "The Way of Zen Buddhism" and "Tao: The Way of Water Flow" to read the Oriental Taoist thought and conform to the anti-secular trend of the "hippie era" after World War II in the United States, so that the Taoist ideas of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi spread from California to the entire Western world. After the American physicist Cabera published The Tao of Physics in 1976, Taoist thought was introduced into many fields such as management, political science, art, psychology, and feminism.
In 1968, Hua Zisheng, a sinologist who had translated Chinese classics such as the Tao Te Ching and the Analects, published the english translation of Zhuangzi, which absorbed the research results of Chinese and foreign scholars, took into account both ideology and literature, and was selected by many well-known universities in the United States as a textbook for general cultural studies. In 1965, Thomas Morton translated and published The Way of Zhuangzi, studied Zhuangzi as a Catholic, guided life, was welcomed by readers, and continued to reprint, and in 2010, New Direction Publishing House in New York launched a pocket book edition.
In addition, there are Gong Bilan's Spanish "Zhuangzi", Russian sinologist Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Maliawin's Russian "Zhuangzi Translation", and Swedish sinologist Ma Yueran's translation of "Zhuangzi".
Today, Zhuangzi, like Chinese Confucian classics such as the Analects, has not only entered the European and American academic circles and become textbooks for colleges and universities, but is also well known to the general reader. In December 2021, according to the World Library Platform Database (OCLC), the author found that there were 6109 kinds of books about Zhuangzi, of which 2945 were non-Chinese and involved more than 30 languages. From psychological counseling and gender marriage to health care and home art, we can see that Chinese Taoist thought has been transformed into "American Tao" and "European Tao", entering the daily life of ordinary people in Europe and the United States.
In 2009, Chinese scholars Huang Yonggang and Lu Shuming opened the school's core course "Chinese Classic Culture Class" to 17,000 young students of Brooklyn College in New York, mainly reading Chinese classics such as "I Ching", "Analects" and "Book of Poetry". From many reading reports, it can be seen that American college students love Zhuangzi the most. A student named Brian McHugh wrote: "The theme of Zhuangzi's thought is that all things are relative, there are no absolute things. ”
There are 235 different translations and interpretations of Zhuangzi on Goodreads, of which Carlo Laurenti and Christine translated the version with 2363 readers participating in the review and hundreds of readers writing reviews. The American reader, who signed Cindy, wrote: "This was my first contact with Zhuangzi and I found these works to be insightful, interesting and humorous. This book challenged the way I used to look at life, and the philosophical ideas and ideas in it were worth spending a lot of time pondering. ”
Drawing the wisdom of truth from simple life, the light of Zhuangzi's thought is still bright today in the 21st century.
(The author is a professor at Beijing University of Foreign Chinese and the director of the Evaluation Center for the Effect of Chinese Culture Going Global)