Abstract
It was Zhuangzi who first introduced the concept of “zhen (true)” and revealed its important philosophical meanings in early Chinese philosophy. He also created other “zhen” related concepts, such as “zhen ren (true man)”, “zhen zhi (true knowledge)”, etc. In the Zhuangzi, “zhen” has the meaning of absolute truthfulness, but it also contains rich semantic meanings such as naturalness, primitiveness, simplicity, sincerity, etc. It is the opposite of anything artificial, and has a dimension of divinity towards the Daoist transcendental horizon of Heaven and Dao. “Zhen ren (true man)” represents the Daoist transcendent ideal personality and embodies the basic Daoist ideas and doctrines, such as keeping a life free from the corrupt social reality, conforming to the Dao and nature, being in a unity with the Heaven, etc. It is the highest level of horizon an individual can arrive at through Daoist personal cultivation. Zhuangzi also linked “zhen ren” with concept of “zhen zhi (true knowledge)”. But this “true knowledge” cannot be understood in the sense of western epistemology. For Zhuangzi, to acquire the “zhen zhi” means breaking through the boundary between Heaven and human and ascending to the transcendent level of existence of “zhen”.
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Notes
- 1.
The character “zhen 眞” is used three times in the received version of Laozi, appearing in chapter 21, chapter 41 and chapter 54 respectively. Scholars have different opinions on the completion date of the received version of Laozi, some suspect that it might be completed later than Zhuangzi. In 1993, a batch of bamboo slips with texts related to Laozi has been excavated in a Warring States Tomb in Guodian Village, Jingmen City, Hubei Province, which has been considered the earliest version of Laozi. However, the three “zhen 眞” characters cannot be found in this bamboo version of Laozi. The whole chapter 21 is not included in the bamboo version, in the bamboo slips related to the other two chapters, namely chapter 41 and 54, the character “zhen 眞” is replaced by another character “zhen 貞”(Jingmen Museum 1998: 8, 118). I will discuss the possible relation between these two characters shortly. Archeologists have dated the tomb at no earlier than the mid of the Warring State Period, when Zhuangzi might still be alive. In other words, even if there was an early version of Laozi in Zhuangzi’s time, it might not include the character “zhen 眞” yet.
- 2.
The citations of Zhuangzi in this chapter is based on its original Chinese version in Guo Qingfan’s Collected Commentaries on the Zhuangzi 莊子集釋 (Guo 1982). The English translations are mainly done by myself, sometimes with reference to some of the prevailing English versions of Zhuangzi translated by Burton Watson (2013), A.C. Graham (1989), Victor Mair (1994), etc.
- 3.
- 4.
Here a paragraph of 72 characters from the original text in the current version has been omitted, since it has also been pointed out by some scholars as misplaced text which is inconsistent with the context (Chen 1983: 175–176).
- 5.
In ancient Chinese, the character “zhi (知)” has both the meaning of “knowledge” and “wisdom”.
- 6.
Here the translated names of these figures in this chapter are borrowed from Mair (1994).
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Xu, K. (2022). The True Person (zhen ren 眞人) and True Knowledge (zhen zhi 眞知) in the Zhuangzi. In: Chong, Kc. (eds) Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92331-0_8
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