The Butterfly's Dream, or Mine

answered by Zhuangzi, On the Equality of Things

기원전 4세기경

🎬 TODAY'S FILM — IT ASKS THIS

The Truman Show (1998)

dir. Peter Weir · USA

A person realizes the world he believed real was a stage someone designed. Between staying in a safe falseness and walking out into an uncertain truth, which should he choose?

THE QUESTION THE FILM ASKS

If this life I believed was real is a stage someone built, must I walk out beyond it?

THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER · ORIGINAL

不知周之夢爲胡蝶與胡蝶之夢爲周與

📜 THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER

I do not know whether Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly is dreaming it is Zhuang Zhou.

💡 TL;DR

Waking from the butterfly dream, Zhuangzi did not decide which was real.

📝The Classic Answers

Waking from the butterfly dream, Zhuangzi did not decide which was real. What he asked was not 'which is true?' but 'have you ever once doubted what you take to be true?' Familiarity is no proof of the real. Even a built stage — the moment you know it is a stage, you already stand at the door. I choose to look, just once, at my taken-for-granted world as a stranger, and to imagine the wind beyond it.

— ONGO · Curator

🌱Apply It Today

Take one thing you waved off today as 'that's just how it is' and look again, with a stranger's eyes, at whether it really is.

📖 Classic Source: Zhuangzi, On the Equality of Things. 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.