Lord Zhuang Was Irascible

The “Zuo Zhuan” is the only primary source account of the Spring and Autumn period in Chinese history.  There is a 2243-page, complete translation of the book translated by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li and David Schaberg, as well as their translation of “selections” which I finished today.  Discrete entries, grouped together thematically rather than chronologically, in this Selection I found myself dog-earing pages that caught my attention, like the story of the hapless Lord Zhuang who was obsessed with cleanliness and, frustrated over where someone had urinated had inadvertently burned himself to death in 507; “Lord Zhuang was irascible and obsessed with cleanliness and therefore he came to this end.”  Or Yan Ying’s reply to the Prince of Qi, fifteen years earlier when asked to explain the difference between harmony and unison:

                 

“They are different.  Harmony is like a stew.  Water, fire jerky, mincemeat, salt, and plum vinegar are used to cook fish and meat.  These are cooked over firewood.  The master chef harmonizes them, evening them out with seasonings, compensating for what is lacking and diminishing what is too strong.  The noble man eats and calms his heart.” . . . “If you season water with water, who can eat it?  If the zithers hold to a single sound, who can listen to it?  This is how unison is wrong.”

 

The font must be seven-point or something similarly small which ends up making the reading slow going.  It sat on my bed table, chipped away at for far longer than should have been.  I need to pop my contacts out to comfortably read something so small.  And, once I got into it things flowed well enough and I considered this period in China while Gautama Buddha and Darius I and Themesticles also walked the earth. 

While I was reading about harmonized meats I dozed off and dreamt about the shaved beef in the fridge and a taste of it with tahini sauce the way you might dip such boiled meat into a sauce when eating shuangyangrou and how tasty that would be to recreate.  We have some tahini in the fridge, don’t we?  Potatoes . . . onions, I could taste them in my mind. 

So I created a sauce and sliced the potatoes thin and left the onion chunks large.  I stirred the sauce added the taters and the onions, dropping the beef in piece by piece so they didn’t congeal and sprinkled over it some fresh cut coriander and decided I’d bake it or a bit.  But the sauce ended up being too thick and the tastes suggested something done in unison, something lacking in harmony. 

 

 

 

Sunday, 7/11/21