莊子

莊子

莊子 · 內篇選讀

Two passages — the butterfly dream and the debate on the Hao — in four renderings you can switch between, with the classical Chinese commentary beside every rendering.

A preliminary translation, grounded in the classical Chinese commentary (郭象 註 · 成玄英 疏 · 經典釋文) and refined in the open with input from knowledgeable, spiritually wise senior readers, toward a version we can stand behind. Corrections welcome.

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 and plain-language readings (labelled TD, for Tong De), and the two classic public-domain translations (Legge, 1891 and Giles, 1889). Choose one with Version, under ⚙ Customize at the top of the page.

Tap a line’s number to copy that line — with its translation, when one is showing — and a link straight to it.

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., from 莊子: 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 郭象 and 成玄英 on the line, in their own words; and “據 grounding” shows which vetted authority backs each of our own choices — so the page shows its receipts.)

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