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This book uses Western philosophical tradition to make a case for a form of thinking properly associated with ancient China. The book's thesis is that Chinese thinking is concrete rather than formal and abstract, and this is gathered in a variety of ways under the symbol "body thinking." The root of the metaphor is that the human body has a kind of intelligence in its most basic functions. When hungry the body gets food and eats, when tired it sleeps, when amused it laughs. In free people these things happen instinctively but not automatically. The metaphor of body thinking is extended far beyond bodily functions in the ordinary sense to personal and communal life, to social functions and to cultivation of the arts of civilization. As the metaphor is extended, the way to stay concrete in thinking with subtlety becomes a kind of ironic play, a natural adeptness at saying things with silences. Play and indirection are the roads around formalism and abstraction. Western formal thinking, it is argued, can be sharpened by Chinese body thinking to exhibit spontaneity and to produce healthy human thought in a community of cultural variety.
In Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation, Juwen Zhang provides a systematic survey of such oral traditions as folk and fairy tales, proverbs, ballads, and folksongs that are vibrantly practiced today. Zhang establishes a theoretical framework for understanding how Chinese culture has continued for thousands of years with vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. This framework, which describes a cultural self-healing mechanism, is equally applicable to the exploration of other traditions and cultures in the world. Through topics from Chinese Cinderella to the Grimms of China, from proverbs like “older ginger is spicier” to the life-views held by the Chinese, and from mountain songs and ballads to the musical instruments like the clay-vessel-flute, the author weaves these oral traditions across time and space into a mesmerizing intellectual journey. Focusing on contemporary practice, this book serves as a bridge between Chinese and international folklore scholarship and other related disciplines as well. Those interested in Chinese culture in general and Chinese folklore, literature, and oral tradition in particular will certainly delight in perusing this book.
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Excerpt from Proverbs and Common Sayings From the Chinese: Together With Much Related and Unrelated Matter, Interspersed With Observations on Chinese Things-in-General With the exception of the last fifty pages, this volume consists of material published in the Chinese Recorder, from 1882 to 1885. About 1,900 Phrases, Proverbs, Couplets, Odes, etc., are explained, but few of which, so far as the writer is aware, have been previously published. The hundred pages devoted to "Puns and other Linguistic Diversions," embracing more than 300 examples, open into an expansive territory, hitherto singularly neglected. Those who have not examined the proverbial sayings of the Chinese are surprised at the richness of the language in this respect. The inquiry has been often made where so many proverbs are to be found, and the suggestion occasionally hazarded that the author "made them up out of his own head." Those most acquainted with the resources of the colloquial will best understand how unnecessary is such a theory. Only a small part of the ample materials available has been here presented. In several instances unauthorized characters, or authorized characters in unauthorized senses, have been allowed to stand, since there seemed to be no better way to express the colloquial idea. To the articles as originally published there was for a great length of time appended an invitation to any reader who observed in them errors of fact, or mistranslations, to communicate them to the author, who promised to be duly grateful. To this suggestion no attention was ever paid by any human being. This might be accounted for either on the supposition that there were no readers, that there were no mistakes, or that such readers as there were preferred to attend to their own terrestrial concerns, and, as the Chinese adage runs, allow the sick man to furnish his own perspiration. In so wide a field as is covered by this volume, it is indeed certain that there must be many errors, due, as Dr. Johnson said of one of his false definitions, to "pure ignorance." The method of publication has greatly facilitated the multiplication of mistakes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.