1
The Zhuang Zi has been my close friend for more than two decades, since we first met when I was an undergraduate, then all through my dissertation on it, and right up to the moment of this writing. Though the Zhuang Zi is, technically, a book – a proto-Daoist Chinese classic authored c300 BCE – my relationship with it differs from my relationship with any other book. I imagine that members of religious faiths feel like this about their revealed holy scriptures, which would be inexcusably diminished if understood simply as books.过去二十多年里，《庄子》一直是我的好朋友。我们第一次见面还是我上本科的时候，后来我的毕业论文写的是他，就连现在这篇文章还是关于他。虽然《庄子》实际上是本书，一本写于公元前300年的中国古代道家经典著作，但是我和他的关系完全不同于我和其他书籍的关系。我想，虔诚的信徒对《圣经》也会有同样的感受。如果只是把《圣经》看作书籍的话，那就是对它的亵渎，是不可原谅的。
But ‘holy scripture’ is no better when it comes to the Zhuang Zi. I do not venerate it. I consider it a partner, an adversary and a companion, one that learns from me and is changed by me, just as I learn from it and am changed by it every time we interact. Trust me: I know this book and, like any good friend, I’m pretty sure it would be unhappy at the thought of being venerated. (I understand that might sound strange but, then again, strange claims abound in the arena of sacred texts.)但是，《圣经》也比不上《庄子》。我并不敬仰《庄子》，我视他为朋友，为对手，为伙伴，每次交流，我们都能从彼此身上学到些什么，受到影响。请相信我：我了解这本书，就像老友一样了解。我非常确信，如果你对他仅是怀有敬仰之情的话，他会不开心的。（我知道这听起来很奇怪，但话说活回来，在宗教文本中，奇怪比比皆是。）
Here too I’m running into problems, however. In speaking for the Zhuang Zi, I’m somewhat uncomfortable, just as I would be uncomfortable speaking for a friend. I’m not alone in my discomfort. Scholarly introductions to the Zhuang Zi frequently include disclaimers. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, Master Zhuang – the supposed author of this eponymous mystery – appears to have engineered his work to resist definitive interpretation. The late translator and sinologist Burton Watson captured how it feels to attempt straightforward exegesis: ‘Whenever I sit down and try to write seriously about Zhuang Zi,’ he explained, ‘I seem, somewhere in the back of my head, to hear Zhuang Zi cackling away at the presumption and futility of such an endeavour.’ 但我也遇到些问题。在介绍《庄子》的时候，我总会有些尴尬，就像我每次代表朋友说话的时候也会感到尴尬一样，而且不只是我一个人有这种感觉。关于《庄子》的学术介绍总是附有免责声明。弗里德里希·尼采、索伦·克尔凯戈尔、甚至连庄子——这位与著作同名且同样神秘的作者——都在极力避免对自己的著作做出明确的说明。已故翻译家、汉学家华兹生曾写下他在尝试为《庄子》作直白的注释时的感受。“每当我坐下来，想要认真为《庄子》写些什么的时候，”他解释道，“在我脑海深处的某个地方，我总能听到庄子嘲笑声，嘲笑我的这份狂妄与徒劳。”
I embrace the cackling that Watson describes, relishing the discomfort that inevitably accompanies attempts to pin it down. Even calling it a friend is starting to seem inadequate, inaccurate. Once again, the book is changing as I try to write seriously about it. That’s fine. It’s not a friend anymore. This bizarre combination of masterful fables, poems, dialogues, myths and philosophical musings – it’s a funhouse mirror for your soul, taking a crack at your most deeply held beliefs, destabilising you, forcing you to work just to take yourself seriously.华兹生所说的被嘲笑感我也有过，但我欣然接受了它。这种感觉是你在试图解释《庄子》的过程中不可避免的。称《庄子》为朋友也似乎开始显得不够恰当、不够准确。在我要认真为这本书写些什么的时候，这本书再次发生了变化。不过，没关系。《庄子》不再是我的朋友了，而是一种精美的语言、诗歌、对话、神话和哲学思考的奇妙结合。他是一面反映你灵魂的有趣的镜子，打击你最根深蒂固的信念，动摇你，强迫你直面自己。
But just because it’s a funhouse mirror doesn’t make it frivolous. On the contrary: the Zhuang Zi is a jester, whose job description is to improve its readers – or, better, to benefit them. Jesters, despite their apparent frivolity, were essential to the courts that employed them. In addition to providing entertainment, they had licence to violate norms, providing a unique check on tyranny of all kinds: political, moral, linguistic. They spoke truth to power, just as the Zhuang Zi speaks truth to the easy dogmas that fix themselves inside me like bumper stickers on my soul. Its therapeutic cackling softens ossified beliefs that for too long have gone unquestioned and unmocked.《庄子》这面镜子虽然有趣，但这并不意味着它是无用的。相反，《庄子》像是一位弄臣。它能升华他的读者，或者说，是让读者受益。弄臣虽然外表轻浮无用，却在宫廷里扮演着至关重要的角色。他们逗人开心，却也有权打破常规，以独特的方式检验所有形式的暴政，无论是政治、道德还是语言。他们面对君主实话实说，就像《庄子》在简单的教条问题上从来是也是实话实说一样。这些教条刻在了我的心里，就像是贴在我灵魂上的“车尾贴”。《庄子》的嘲笑具有治愈性，软化了那些很长时间无人质疑无人嘲笑的僵硬的思想。
If Confucians, Mohists and other members of classical Chinese schools of thought contemporaneous with the first appearance of the Zhuang Zi saw themselves as producing exemplary gentlemen (junzi), then the Zhuang Zi acts as jester to those gentlemen, and all role models since. Gentlemen – and the texts they live by – are straightforward guides. They educate through cataphasis: positive statements about the Good and the True. Jesters, by contrast, educate through apophasis , literally un-saying. Instead of statements, riddles; instead of commandments, questions. The gentleman supplies positive content, exemplary behaviour, a stable landing place for the student’s understanding, whereas the jester actively undermines the student’s ability to stabilise herself, providing content that is framed by an explicit or implicit negation: a raised eyebrow, a snicker, a punchline. If the preferred rhetorical form of the gentleman is the example, the preferred rhetorical form of the jester is the mystery, or perhaps the practical joke.如果孔子、墨子以及其他中国古典学派代表人物与《庄子》出现在同一时代，并且视自己为君子的象征，那么《庄子》就是这些君子以及未来所有“楷模”的弄臣。君子——以及他们赖以生存的文字内容——是最直截了当的指南。君子通常以乐观的方式教育人，积极地阐述善与真。弄臣却恰恰相反。当，他们要说一个道理的时候，会先否认它或否认它应该被提出来。仿佛他们什么都没说。他们不喜欢直白的阐述、严谨的戒律，喜欢复杂的谜语和质疑。君子的内容积极，行为规范，有助于学徒理解，而弄臣喜欢扰乱学徒，交给他们的都是些或明或暗的否定内容：挑眉，窃笑，妙语连珠。如果说君子喜欢的修辞形式是标准答案的话，那么弄臣喜欢的修辞形式就像个迷，或者说像恶作剧。
The Trappist monk Thomas Merton loved the Zhuang Zi and produced a book in 1965 that collected his translations of favourite passages. His ‘Note to the Reader’ concludes by remarking on the Zhuang Zi’s inscrutability:The ‘way’ of Chuang Tzu [Master Zhuang] is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a ‘way out’. Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost.特拉普派修道士托马斯·默顿热爱《庄子》，并于1965年出版了一本书，书中收集了他自己翻译的那些他喜爱的段落。在《致读者》的结尾处，默顿对《庄子》的高深莫测作出了评论：庄周的“道”如此神秘。它是如此简单，完全不必局限于某种形式，尤其当这还是一种“寻找出路的道”。庄周或许会同意十字架上圣约翰的观点：当你离开了所有的路，或者在某种意义上，你迷路了，那么你也就找到了这条路。
Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian and author of I and Thou (1923), also produced a translation and commentary on passages from the Zhuang Zi. I would tell you more about what he thought, but now I’m afraid that leading with these great thinkers’ beliefs about the Zhuang Zi could be a mistake. What if you end up believing that Merton or Buber had figured out the Zhuang Zi? I would have turned the funhouse mirror into a portrait; explained the jester’s jokes before he got to tell them. The Zhuang Zi played a big role in the development of Chan (Zen) Buddhism. Can you imagine if your koans were prefaced with a book of answers?犹太神学家、《我与你》的作者马丁·布伯也对《庄子》中的一些段落进行了翻译和评论。我想和你们分享布伯的想法，但我担心，利用这些伟大的思想家来解释《庄子》可能是错的。万一你们以为默顿或者是布伯充分了解并掌握了《庄子》，那该怎么办？这样的话，这面镜子就成了幅肖像。这就像是，在弄臣还未来得及开口之前，就把他的笑话都解释了一遍。《庄子》在佛教禅宗的发展过程中发挥着极为重要的作用。你能想象《古兰经》的前页全是解答吗？
Safer, instead, to stick with facts. Bracketing the problem of its meaning, the Zhuang Zi also presents problems of authorship. It’s generally agreed that of the book’s 33 chapters, only the first seven – known as the Inner Chapters – are from the hand of a man named Zhuang Zhou (aka Zhuang Zi, or Master Zhuang), and the remainder were added at a later date. However, some experts claim that the Inner Chapters are themselves the product of different authors, leaving us with little certainty about how the work was composed.相反，更安全的做法是坚持事实。除了在《庄子》的理解上存在争议外，这本书的作者也是一个谜团。人们普遍认为，这本总共33章的书中，只有前7章——也就是所谓的内部章节——出自庄周（也就是庄子）之手，其余章节都是后来加上来的。然而，有些专家则表示内部章节本身就是出自不同作者之手，这使得我们无法确定这部作品到底是如何创作出来的。
This uncertainty contributes to the Zhuang Zi’s destabilising force. Does the entire book express a coherent philosophical vision, attributable, perhaps, to Guo Xiang (252-312 CE), the editor who compiled and reduced an original 52 chapters to the 33 that we have today? If not, can we at least read the Inner Chapters as if they were written by a single individual? Or is it our job to trawl through every chapter looking for the genuine insights of Zhuang Zhou, to be separated out from the surrounding chaff?这种不确定性使人们对《庄子》产生了动摇。整本《庄子》的哲学观点是否具有连贯性？有种说法是，曾经有个叫郭象(公元252-312年)的人将这部原本52章的作品压缩了，所以才有了现在33章的版本。如果不具有连贯性的话，那我们能肯定至少内部章节是出自同一个人之手吗？还是说我们要做的就是通读每一章节，从中找到庄周的真知灼见，并与其他内容分离出来？
Even assuming unified authorship of the Inner Chapters, the biography of their author is sparse and poorly sourced. Scholarly disclaimers abound: ‘Little is known about Zhuang Zi…,’ write Philip Ivanhoe and Bryan Van Norden in their collection of readings from classical Chinese philosophy. ‘Not much is known about Zhuang Zi…,’ says Brook Ziporyn in the introduction to his translation. ‘All we know about the identity of Zhuang Zi…,’ begins Watson’s introduction.即使假设内部章节的作者为同一人，关于这个人的记录也是零星的，可信度不高。学术上的免责声明随处可见：菲利普•艾芬豪和布莱恩•范·诺登在共同阅读了古典中国哲学相关内容后写道：“我们不了解庄子……”。布鲁克•齐伯林也在自己的译本介绍中指出：“我们对庄子知之甚少……”。在华兹生的介绍中，他也说道：“关于庄子的身份，我们所知道的一切……”。
What follows these disclaimers is inevitably a brief and tentative history of Zhuang Zhou, culled from the book itself (not exactly a reliable source) and a short biography written by the great Chinese historian Sima Qian, nearly 200 years after Master Zhuang’s death. Apparently, he lived in the city of Meng, in the state of Song, during a time of great political turmoil called the Warring States Period. Sima Qian says he was employed as a minor official in ‘the lacquer garden’ – though no one knows whether that was an actual garden, a library, or something else entirely.在这些免责声明之后，通常不可避免地会出现一段简单且暂不能确定的庄周史，通常节选自《庄子》本身（但并不可靠），以及中国伟大史学家司马迁在庄周去世约200年后写的关于庄周的一部短片传记。显然，庄周生活在宋国的蒙城，当时正值战国时期，政局动荡。司马迁称，庄周在“漆园”当过副吏，虽然没有人知道这个“漆园”到底是一座真正的花园，图书馆，还是什么别的地方。
But does any of that even matter?但这些真的重要吗？
In annotating the first chapter of the Zhuang Zi, I’ve tried to capture my relationship with my friend – a friend with whom one can disagree about the most important things in life and come out better for doing so. In other words, I focus primarily on how the text speaks to and with me, not just what it might have meant to the author, or to other audiences in other times. This approach has precedents in Kuang Ming-Wu’s The Butterfly as Companion, the inimitable spirit of Master Yingning (攖寧子), and, further back, in the work of the 17th-century polymath and Buddhist monk Fang Yizhi (方以智), author of The Monk of Yaodi Roasts Zhuang Zi.在为《庄子》第一章注释时，我试图捕捉我与我这位朋友之间的关系。和这位朋友在一起的时候，在一些重要的生命议题上，我们或许意见相左，但最终总能想出更好的思想。换而言之，我在意的从来只是《庄子》这本书是如何与我展开对话的，我并不在意这本书对作者本身或者对不同时代的读者意味着什么。同样，你在吴光明的《蝴蝶伴侣》中，在婴宁子独特的精神里，在17世纪学者的作品里，或者在方以智和尚的《药地炮庄》中都能找到先例。
原文来自AEON https://aeon.co/classics/on-the-path-to-improvement-follow-the-jester-not-the-sage
网友评论