Frog in a Well

I’ve noticed that while we call this blog Frog in a Well, we have never actually posted the story. This is from Burton Watson’s translation of Zhuangzi.

Kung-sun Lung said to Prince Mou of Wei, “When I was young I studied the Way of the former kings, and when I grew older I came to understand the conduct of benevolence and righteousness. I reconciled difference and sameness, distinguished hardness and whiteness, and proved that not so the wisdom of the hundred schools and demolished the arguments of a host of speakers. I believed that I had attained the highest degree of accomplishment. But now I have heard the words of Chuang Tzu and I am bewildered by their strangeness. I don’t know whether my arguments are not as good as his, or whether I am no match for him in understanding. I find now that I can’t even open my beak. May I ask what you advise?”

Prince Mou leaned on his armrest and gave a great sigh, and then he looked up at the sky and laughed, saying, “Haven’t you ever heard about the frog in the caved-in well? He said to the great turtle of the Eastern Sea, ‘What fun I have! I come out and hop around the railing of the well, or I go back in and take a rest in the wall where a tile has fallen out. When I dive in the water, I let it hold me up under the armpits and support my chin, and when I slip about in the mud, I bury my feet in it and let it come up over my ankles. I look around at the mosquito larvae and the crabs and polliwogs and I see that none of them can match me. To have complete command of the water of one whole valley and to monopolize all the joys of a caved-in well—this is the best there is! Why don’t you come some time and see for yourself?’

“But before the great turtle of the Eastern Sea had even gotten his left foot in the well his right knee was already wedged fast. He backed out and withdrew a little, and then began to describe the sea. ‘A distance of a thousand li cannot indicate its greatness; a depth of a thousand fathoms cannot express how deep it is. In the time of Yu there were floods for nine years out of ten, and yet its waters never rose. In the time of T’ang there were droughts for seven years out of eight and yet its shores never receded. Never to alter or shift, whether for and instant or an eternity; never to advance or recede, whether the quantity of water flowing in is great or small—this is the great delight of the Eastern Sea!

“When the frog in the caved-in well heard this, he was dumfounded with surprise, crestfallen, and completely at a loss. Now your knowledge cannot even define the borders of right and wrong, and still you try to see through the words of Chuang Tzu—this is like trying to make a mosquito carry a mountain on its back or a pill bug race across the Yellow River. You will never be up to the task!

He whose understanding cannot grasp these minute and subtle words, but is only fit to win some temporary gain—is he not like the frog in the caved-in well? Chuang Tzu, now—at this very moment he is treading the Yellow Springs or leaping up to the vast blue. To him there is no north or south—in utter freedom he dissolves himself in the four directions and drowns himself in the unfathomable. To him there is no east or west—he begins in the Dark Obscurity and returns to the Great Thoroughfare. Now you come niggling along and try to spy him out or fix some name to him, but this is like using a tube to scan the sky or an awl to measure the depth of the earth—the instrument is too small, never heard about the young boy of Shou-ling who went to learn the Han-tan Walk. He hadn’t mastered what the Hantan people had to teach him when he forgot his old way of walking, so that he had to crawl all the way back home. Now if you don’t get on your way, you’re likely to forget what you knew before and be out of a job!”

Kung-sun Lung’s mouth fell open and wouldn’t stay closed. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and wouldn’t come down. In the end he broke into a run and fled.

Hi, everyone. This is Vincent Leung, a PhD student in Chinese history at Harvard. I just finished my third year in the program, and hopefully after my general examination this September, I can at last proceed to writing my dissertation. My research interest is on the political and intellectual history of early China, particularly the late Warring States and the Han empire (ca. 300 BC-AD 200). More specifically, I want to study the “imperial formation” during this period, which led up to the first bureaucratic empire in the Central Plains, looking at things like the territorial expansion, monetary policy, allocation of natural resources, and not the least, its ideological state apparatuses.

Before doing my PhD, I did a masters in East Asian Studies at Harvard. And before that, I was a math/econ major at UMass Amherst. In my more quixotic days back in college, I did want to do grad work in math, but alas, soon enough I found that I was not really cut out for it. I am glad, though, that I did bump into History, esp. early Chinese history. The received materials from early China, texts or otherwise, are exciting enough, despite their relative paucity, but all the excavated texts from the past few decades are simply incredible. Tens of thousands of them are just now sitting in museums waiting for people to work on them. And I sure hope I can dig my hands into them when I go aborad sometime in the next couple of years in China.

Let’s see — what else should I put in this intro? Perhaps I should mention the fact that I am originally from Hong Kong, where I grew up. I do a little bit of Chinese calligraphy on the side, though hardly anymore these days, and also (try to) study a bit of the early (political) history of Chinese Buddhism.

Thanks Konrad for inviting me to this blog! This is actually the first blog that I’ve joined, so it should be exciting. Very much look forward to our exchanges in the coming months!

This picture should of course be familiar to a many of our readers. It’s from 点石斋画报, probably the most famous of the late-19th century illustrated magazines. This is a source which has been used a lot by scholars, and there is a monograph by Ye Xiaoqing. Although the journal did lots of other images, as did its most famous artist Wu Youru, what it is mostly known for are little scenes of ordinary life, sometimes having to do with the western intrusion, sometime just with Chinese life (yes, a false distinction.) There is a certain tendency to show scenes of anomalies and strange events, but lots of good social history as well. They make a great teaching tool for all sorts of things.
Link to Picture

This particular image is about training “little hoodlums” (小流氓) as soldiers. These are little people (小矮人 in the modern paraphrase) who had been treated like hoodlums (liu mang means the floating population, and is usually a term of abuse), but if treated properly can they not become defenders of the nation? This of course lends itself to all sorts of teachable moments.

What interests me is the way these pictures have been reproduced over and over in the last decades. I first saw them in the mid 80’s in a huge string-bound edition published out of Guangzhou. Since then I have seen a number of nicely done modern editions, Don Cohen did some images with translations (Cohn, Don, ed. Vignettes From The Chinese: Lithographs from Shanghai in the Late Nineteenth Century. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987.) Fake images from the 点石斋 turn up on Ebay . A lot of the images seem to be somewhat faded, giving the impression that nobody has a really good original copy.

This image is from 上海旧闻 苏州：古吴轩出版社，2004。It is a fairly cheap paperback of about 200 pages. They also have books for 北京，南京，苏州，扬州，and 杭州. This one includes baihua paraphrases of the stories, which is why I found it so interesting. The original vignettes are often hard to make out, and even harder to understand, since they are in rather obscure Classical Chinese for my tastes, and, presumably, for a lot of buyers of this series. There seems to be a market for these pictures and stories of ordinary Chinese life.

One of my great disappointments in Art History class was Dr. Munakata telling me that in the Tang there were a lot of paintings of vignettes of ordinary life, and that we have the titles of many of them, but as they were not valued by later collectors, very few of them still exist. These 点石斋 images seem to be valued a great deal by the market, as there is presumably a great desire for valid and authentic (and illustrated) stories about social history. As the introduction to this volume puts it we can understand the changes in today’s society by looking at the past. Not probably a goal of most historians, but a good way to move product.

Of course lots we read different things back into this past. I note that the modern collections usually don’t include the bird and flower paintings I remember from the old Guangzhou edition. They also seem more likely to skip images of foreigners at home, and they have a lot fewer pictures of opium smoking. That people pick and choose what they want from history is of course not surprising, but I find it interesting that everyone, scholars, ordinary Chinese readers, publishers looking to make money, all keep coming back to this relatively small amount of stuff. A lot of what we would call “content” was generated in the Qing, and this one bit of it seems to be the wildly over-represented in the places we look for meaning.

If nothing else these pictures are an argument for stronger copyright laws in China. Various authors, artists and journalists came up with these pictures and texts and they are getting reproduced over and over, and presumably would be generating a fair amount of money if China had copyright going back to the Qing.