Wuzhen Pian - Title

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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