逍遙

逍遙

莊子 · Concordance

Two passages — the butterfly dream and the debate on the Hao — shown four ways at once, with the classical Chinese commentary beside every rendering.

AI-generated draft — grounded in the classical Chinese commentary (郭象 註 · 成玄英 疏 · 經典釋文) and refined in the open, but not yet human-reviewed. Corrections welcome; the revision history is public.

What you're looking at

Each passage is broken into its natural lines of original Chinese. For every line you can switch which English translation shows — our own Scholar reading, a plain-language reading, and the two classic public-domain translations (Legge, 1891 and Giles, 1889) — using the switch at the top.

Two kinds of dotted underline appear under the Chinese, and they mean different things:

異文 · rival wording rare
The witnesses genuinely disagree on which character the text originally had — a real textual dispute. E.g. is the great fish 鯤 a “roe-fish,” or, as one editor argued, 鯨 a “whale”? Tap to see the competing texts.
釋文 · apparatus note
Everyone agrees on the character; the note just tells you one thing about it — 音 how it’s read · 訓 what it means · 異體 another way to write it · 句讀 where the clause breaks · 釋義 how the commentators interpret it. Every tap says which of these it is.

And when a character’s pronunciation itself is disputed (異讀), the mark rides on the pinyin instead of the character — the underlined syllable opens the rival readings (e.g. 鵬 as péng or fèng), grounded in the 經典釋文.

釋義 interpretation is the one that’s easy to mistake for a wording dispute: the character isn’t in doubt, only its sense — so it is not rival wording, and never gets the red mark. (Separately, where our translations diverge, a “Why they differ” button opens the anatomy and lets the Chinese commentary settle it; “註疏 commentary” opens the 4th–7th c. Chinese explanation of the line, and “據 grounding” shows which vetted authority backs each of our own choices — so the page shows its receipts.)

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