The Fish of the Northern Sea Becomes the Great Peng

answered by Zhuangzi, "Free and Easy Wandering"

기원전 4세기경

🎬 TODAY'S FILM — IT ASKS THIS

Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973)

dir. Hall Bartlett · USA

Among a flock content merely to find food, one gull strives to fly higher and faster purely for the sake of flight itself. The flock casts him out as selfish.

THE QUESTION THE FILM ASKS

Is flight beyond the flock's rules selfishness, or freedom?

THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER · ORIGINAL

北冥有魚，其名為鯤。鯤之大，不知其幾千里也。化而為鳥，其名為鵬。

📜 THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER

In the northern darkness there is a fish, and its name is Kun. The Kun is so huge no one knows how many thousand miles it measures. It changes and becomes a bird, and its name is Peng.

💡 TL;DR

The great Peng bird Zhuangzi described was once a fish of unknown vastness that transformed and soared to the edge of the sky.

📝The Classic Answers

The great Peng bird Zhuangzi described was once a fish of unknown vastness that transformed and soared to the edge of the sky. The cicada and the dove mock its great wingbeats, but Zhuangzi urges us to look past the mockery to the vastness beyond. A flight beyond the height and speed the flock has fixed looks selfish at first. But what that wingbeat protects is not one self alone, but the question itself of how much farther one might fly. Whenever I meet a wingbeat straining beyond its assigned altitude, I first ask what it is trying to see.

— ONGO · Curator

🌱Apply It Today

If a moment comes today when you want to break from the flock's pace, write down what that urge wants to see further.

📖 Classic Source: Zhuangzi, "Free and Easy Wandering". Ancient text in the public domain; rendered and interpreted independently by ONGO.
The film is honored as an equal questioner; its plot is rendered only as a universal dilemma. The classic source is an ancient text (Public Domain), and the reflection is 100% original ONGO content.