100 CE Shuowen Jiezi); Kun 鯤 originally meant "fish roe; fry; spawn" (ca.

After recent fossil discoveries in northeast China, Chinese paleontologists used Peng to name the enantiornithine bird Pengornis and the wukongopterid pterosaur Kunpengopterus.

The first chapter ("Free and Easy Wandering" 逍遙遊 pinyin xiāoyáoyóu) begins with three versions of this parable; the lead paragraph, a quote from the Qixie (齊諧 "Universal Harmony", probably invented by Zhuangzi), and a quote from the Tang zhi wen Ji (湯之問棘 "Questions of Tang to Ji", cf.

The first account contrasts the giant Peng bird with a small tiao (蜩 "cicada") and jiu (鳩 "pigeon; turtledove") and the third with a yan (鴳 or 鷃 "quail").

The back of the P'eng measures I don't know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.

The Universal Harmony records various wonders, and it says: "When the P'eng journeys to the southern darkness, the waters are roiled for three thousand li.

He beats the whirlwind, leaps into the air, and rises up ninety thousand li, cutting through the clouds and mist, shouldering the blue sky, and then he turns his eyes south and prepares to journey to the southern darkness.

Lian Xinda calls it "arguably the most controversial image in the text, which has been inviting conflicting interpretations for the past seventeen centuries.

"[3] In traditional Chinese scholarship, the standard Peng interpretation was the "equality theory" of Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE), who redacted and annotated the received Zhuangzi text.

Guo's commentary said, The flight of the fabulous (P'eng) bird may take half a year and will not stop until it gets to the Celestial Lake.

The Buddhist monk Zhi Dun (314-366 CE) associated the Peng's flight with the highest satisfaction achieved by the zhiren (至人 "perfect person; sage; saint", cf.

The Peng bird can either be construed as an image of freedom, even the epitome of the highest Daoist ideal, which supports the argument that Zhuangzi does privilege a perspective and hence is not a relativist in the rigid sense of the term; or it is taken for a creature that is no better or worse than the cicada and the little birds, which serves to illustrate the relativist view that all perspectives are equal.

"[11] Karen Carr and Philip J. Ivanhoe find "positive ideals" in the Peng symbolizing the "mythical creature that rises above the more mundane concerns of the word.

"[13] Eric Schwitzgebel interprets, "Being small creatures, we cannot understand great things like the Peng (and the rest of the Zhuangzi?).

"[14] Steve Coutinho describes the Peng as a "recluse who wanders beyond the realm of the recognizable", in contrast the tiny birds that "cannot begin to understand what lies so utterly beyond the confines of their mundane experience.

"[16] Lian concludes the Peng is "An inspiring example of soaring up and going beyond, the image is used to broaden the outlook of the small mind; its function is thus more therapeutic than instructional.

Mainland China: Hong Kong: Taiwan: Southeast Asia: Japan: The Chinese character peng is pronounced hō in Japanese, as seen in the sumo ring names Taihō Kōki (大鵬幸喜), Hakuhō Shō (白鵬翔), Enhō Akira (炎鵬晃), Daishōhō Kiyohiro (大翔鵬 清洋), Tokushinhō Motohisa (德真鵬 元久), Wakanohō Toshinori (若ノ鵬 寿則), Kyokutenhō Masaru (旭天鵬 勝) and so on.