"Zhuangzi's On the Equality of Things and Its Influence"

Author: Chen Shaoming
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-02-01
Features: This book places greater emphasis on the awareness of ancient annotators in preserving the original author's thought, but it is not rigidly bound to the order of the original text. Instead, it is dedicated to revealing possible logical structures. Specifically, it attempts to connect different aspects of arguments in places where the author has not clarified their relationships, following a logically reasonable sequence, while also deducing the logically implied but unexpressed meanings. This enhances its comprehensibility and provides opportunities to connect it with modern philosophical topics. In addition to clarifying textual issues, the focus of this study lies in interpreting its philosophical connotations. There are two existing approaches that can be followed. One is to adhere to fixed or selected popular philosophical concepts, then extract certain similar principles or passages from the original text, and finally point out which ideology it belongs to. The other approach mimics the methods of ancient annotators, closely examining the original text, interpreting, and commenting on it sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph in the order of the text. Its characteristic is to respect the original author's thought while allowing readers to directly compare the original text to judge the acceptability of the interpretation.