Talk:Zhuangzi (book)

Selected translations

@White whirlwind et al., would you mind if I template-ified the citations for works listed in the Selected translations section? Remsense诉 14:33, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I have no objection, but be aware that the templates may force "Last, First" for the authors. That can be less readable. Try it and see how it looks.  White Whirlwind  16:12, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

"Zhuang Zhou" subsection

@Remsense: I think you added the following sentence to this subsection: "Conversely, University of Sydney lecturer Esther Klein observes: 'In the perception of the vast majority of readers, whoever authored the core Zhuangzi text was Master Zhuang.'" This sentence seems a non sequitur. Why is it the "converse" of the preceding sentence, which is Burton Watson's quote that we know almost nothing about who Zhuangzi was? Wouldn't Klein's quote be more relevant in a subsection about the authorship of the text, rather than in one about Zhuangzi as a person?  White Whirlwind  17:55, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Aye, I don't think I connected this material in the best way. Feel free to reseat it however you think is best—failing that, I'll take a look later today.

I've also been reading through the 2022 Dao Companion to the Zhuangzi edited by Kim-chong Chong—hoping there's a good chunk in there for the article, I sort of wandered away from it for a while. Remsense诉 17:58, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

filial piety

Hello, I want to try determine the views of the Zhuangzi on filial piety. I'll try to look for sources. Let me know if you know any sources, and if you think it would be a good section. My last source suggested most if it's views were subtley critical, but Remsense didn't think it was a great source. This information would be good to know in general even if you don't put it in the article, it's contextualizes the Zhuangzi in relation to Chinese philosophy. It could always go in the filial piety article instead.FourLights (talk) 12:38, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Author and work with the same name

The author, Zhuang Zhou is commonly known as Zhuangzi, and the book is also called Zhuangzi, and these two were mixed in the same article. It's definitely confusing for anyone new to the topic. I've made another edit which I hope makes things less confusing, but having two entirely different entities with the same name (except for italicisation) in the same article still makes for a really confusing read. Would it be reasonable to refer to the author as Zhuang Zhou or Master Zhuang throughout this article to eliminate confusion? — The Anome (talk) 11:45, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

The Anome, I know you've already performed this change yourself, but the confusion you were feeling was so appropriate it may as well have been intentional. Early "Masters Texts" and their attributed authors are in many ways the same entity.

Klein 2010 describes Zhuangzi the person as the author-function of Zhuangzi the text. Csikszentmihalyi and Nylan 2003 state – in an almost throwaway footnote, given how widely it's understood – that the reputed authors of Masters Texts come to embody the texts that bear their name.

The conflation of text and "author" is so deeply embedded that it almost harms understanding of the topic to tease them apart. Unlike Laozi, Zhuang Zhou probably existed. He might even have been from Chu (state). But Zhuangzi the philosopher is not Zhuang Zhou. Zhuangzi the philosopher is the people who wrote the inner chapters of Zhuangzi the text, and the character that appears in the pseudo-autobiographical fiction therein.

Authorship in early China was not what we think of it today, and the idea that early Masters Texts could legitimately be attributed to a single author rather than an entire intellectual heritage that resonated with their teaching— this was a product of Han dynasty scholarship centuries after the words were written down. And I use words advisedly in that prior sentence, because the representative books as we know them were all edited together from preexisting materials by the father–son librarians Liu Xiang (scholar) and Liu Xin (scholar) around the turn of the millennium.

Anyway, what I'm tryna get at here is that while it may have been confusing to try to sort out whether sentences in the previous versions of the article were referring specifically to Zhuangzi the book or Zhuangzi the guy, there was really no need to try: for almost all intents and purposes, this is a distinction without a difference. Folly Mox (talk) 17:02, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Citation style

My apologies, but it's not clear to me whether it's more appropriate to add all citations in shortened footnote style or whether singly cited sources are to be described in full upon citation. I've also dallied here to the point of making myself late again, so I don't have time to do any recommended technical conversions just now, but will gladly handle them in a week's time if warranted. Folly Mox (talk) 01:04, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I suspect that they're all meant to be sfn, and the exceptions are additions since the 2014 GA which were not properly formatted. Refs like Shang 2010 and Hansen 2021 are only used once, but in sfn, so I assume the intention is not to avoid sfn for single-use sources. Aza24 (talk) 01:29, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Did it

Folly Mox (talk) 21:17, 8 September 2024 (UTC)