Title
Wuzhen pian combines three Chinese words.
- wu 悟 "realize; awaken; understand; perceive (esp. truth)", viz. Japanese satori
- zhen 真 "true, real, genuine; really, truly, clearly; (Daoist) true/authentic character of human beings"
- pian 篇 "piece of writing; strip of bamboo, sheet of paper; article, essay, chapter"
The Chinese character wu 悟 "awaken; realize", which is written with the "heart/mind radical" 忄and a phonetic of wu 吾 "I; my; we; our", has a literary variant Chinese character wu 寤 "awake; wake up" with the "roof radical" 宀, qiang 爿 "bed", and this wu 吾 phonetic. Compare the given name of Sun Wukong 孙悟空, the central character in Journey to the West, which literally means "Awaken to Emptiness".
The ambiguity of the Wuzhen pian title, and by extension the text itself, is illustrated by these English renderings:
- Essay on the Understanding of the Truth (Davis and Chao 1939)
- Folios on the Apprehension of Perfection (Boltz 1987)
- Awakening to Perfection (Kohn 1993)
- Understanding Reality (Cleary 1997, Wong 1997)
- Chapters on Awakening to the Real (Crowe 2000)
- Chapters on Awakening to Perfection (Komjathy 2004)
- The Essay on Realizing the Truth (Bertschinger 2004)
- Awakening to Reality (Pregadio 2009)
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Famous quotes containing the word title:
“He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to “Defender of the Faith,” than George the Third.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.”
—Robert Bridges (1844–1930)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)