SuaveG – The Gentle Path

Chinese mythology, folktales, and literature

  • Caigentan 2. Embracing Authenticity

    •

    Juan

    A man with only slight experience of the world will likewise be only slightly stained with its impurities. A man well versed in the ways of the world will likewise be replete with its tricks and treacheries.

  • Caigentan 1. Moral integrity over temporal gains

    •

    Juan

    Those who preserve their moral integrity suffer only fleeting loneliness. But eternal wretchedness awaits those who toady to the powerful.

  • A tale of lingering fear – The Peasant

    •

    Ana

    “The Peasant” is a highly allegorical story in Strange Tales from Liaozhai (Liaozhai Zhiyi). Through a tale of “long-standing enmity” spanning years between a peasant and a fox demon.

  • A Farmer Subduing a Fox

    •

    Ana

    When a farmer was weeding the fields, his wife took lunch to him in a pottery jug. After he finished eating, he put the jug in the field. In the evening, he found the left-over porridge in the jug was gone. Such strange things happened several times and the farmer grew suspicious. He kept…

  • About Caigentan

    •

    Juan

    Caigentan (菜根谭 in Chinese), often translated as Discourses on Vegetable Roots or Tending the Roots of Wisdom, composed in the late Ming Dynasty (c. 1590) by scholar-philosopher Hong Yingming (Zicheng), is a timeless classic of Chinese wisdom literature.

  • The fox spirit’s redemption in “Yatou”

    •

    Ana

    “Fox Spirit – Yatou” from Strange Tales from Liaozhai, a Chinese Studio, (Liaozhai Zhiyi) is a story centered around a “human-fox romance,” interwoven with themes of resistance by marginalized women, the duality of human nature, and the capriciousness of fate.