Why the Small Bird Cannot Know the Dream of the Big Bird

Chuang-Tzu (369-286 BC), a great philosopher who lived around the fourth century during the Warring States Period, was influential in the history of Chinese thought and literature.

The book "Chuang-Tzu" includes numerous philosophical stories of the great thinker, which reflect vividly the contemporary society and depict different lively people from feudal monarchs to ordinary country folk.

The story "Why the Small Bird Cannot Know the Dream of the Large Bird" from Wanderer in Chuang-Tzu is unusual.

It was composed with extraordinary imagination and style to express deep ideas that developed into the unique elegance of a Taoist thesis.

This subtle and sophisticated story appears at first to be an exaggerated fable about the giant fish-bird Peng, but really it is about the difference between great imaginations and open minds and small imaginations and narrow minds; between wonder and the mundane.

It seems strange and incomplete that the conclusion does not tell what happened to Peng, but we are left instead with a wonderful sense of scale and almost infinite distance as we imagine the giant bird flying onwards to the unknown, leaving the small creatures to their everyday concerns.