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)

Read more about this topic:  Wuzhen Pian

Famous quotes containing the word title:

    “Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.”
    —Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)

    “Greatness is a light-hearted title for theatrical entertainments. Or a definition endowed on men too long dead to know that it’s been awarded.”
    —Arthur Ross. Leslie (Tony Curtis)