Talk:Feilian

Proposed merger with Fengbo

I think these pages should be kept separate the reason being they are two separate entities which come from different times and different regions of China which have only more recently become conflated into one entity according to The Handbook of Chinese Mythology by Lihui Yang ISBN 9780195332636 Entries in The Encyclopdia of Taoism by Fabrizio Pregadio also appear to confirm that there are several entities with different stories.Chuangzu (talk) 13:05, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

References

"Also Known As Xie Feng"

After searching through the citation provided for this statement (through the original text of 天问 not the published translation) I was able to find the word being referred to as "Xie Fang" in a vernacular translation, which is 鹿身风, which I can confirm on a quick search is an alternative name for 飞廉. The author, Stephen Field, claims that the pinyin for 鹿身风 is "Xie Feng" (no tones) and says the 鹿身 are combined (I presume it must be 鹿身 given context). I cannot find any Unicode characters to correspond with this combined character. It should be in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B between u+2A2A2 and u+2A2FB (though can be somewhere else) or even on page https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chinese_radical/%E9%B9%BF. I believe the original book provides caligraphy which could lead to what this character might be but the page is not documented on the internet. I have found no sources on the internet that use a combined character, nor does it really make sense with the rhyming scheme and I cannot at all corroberate this combined character potentially having pinyin "xie" (nor would it make sense if it is archaic, like Field suggests).

If you have a copy of this book please help and source what this character may be. Until that character may possibly be found I will fulfill the script request with 鹿身风, as that immediately brings more search results related to Feilian than Xie Feng could. If the character is found and has a unicode code point I recommend it be added alongside 鹿身风 as the combined character most certainly will not have any font support. SmallTestAcount (talk) 09:45, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

@SmallTestAcount: I'm a smol bit sus about that citation, but I have some questions.

So, is the source that you're referring to a modern standard Chinese translation of part of the original 楚辭? What is the context where the term "鹿身風" appears? I'm asking this because Feilian doesn't appear in the Tian wen (it's in the Li sao, where the term in the original is 飛廉).

There's no character composed of ⟨鹿+身⟩ listed at zdic, which is pretty comprehensive. The closest available is Chinese: 麝; pinyin: shè. It has a few variants, none of which match the described character.

I looked through the Tian wen to see if there was some other kind of word preceding "風" that might be pronounced "xie". There is not, nor is there anything pronounced "xie" preceding "風" in the Li sao.

I skimmed baidu's Feilian article, and the only synonym they list for Feilian is 風伯, the "Air Elder" (although they do list 蜚廉 as an alternate spelling).

I searched the Field source on google books for "Feilian", and the snippet I encountered says Xie Feng is another name for Fei Lian, the God of Wind, who had the body of a bird and the head of a stag. The oracle bone inscription for "phoenix" was often borrowed to indicate "wind" (both are pronounced feng) and in 1500 B.C., "phoenix" was written as a combination of the pictographs for "long - tailed bird" and "stag" [i.e. this glyph or maybe this one ]., which indicates to me that the "Feng" of "Xie Feng" may be 鳳 rather than 風.

I do have the David Hawkes translation (Songs of the South, 1989: Penguin Classics), which doesn't mention "Xie Feng", but does allude (p 89) to a similar passage in the Han Feizi, which I'm not sure I feel like tracking down on the off chance it refers to Feilian as "Xie Feng". Folly Mox (talk) 05:13, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Having no subject matter knowledge about this topic, I did a little more reading last night, including a relatively lengthy article about artistic depictions of Feilian (Lin Tongyan (林通雁) (2010). 从长安铜飞廉到洛阳石翼兽 [From bronze Feilians in Chang'an to stone winged beasts in Luoyang]. Meishu Yanjiu 美術研究. No. 3. Shaanxi Renmin Meishu Chubanshe. Archived from the original on 18 August 2023.)

I also belatedly had a look at our own sister project's article on the topic, zh:飛廉. From what I've been able to glean, no native Chinese language source mentions any term pronounced "xie feng" in relation to Feilian.

Apparently the authoritative source on the topic is Sun Zuoyun (孫作雲) (1943). A study of the Feilian – research into types of birds in early China 飛廉考—中國古代鳥族之研究. I don't have access to this source, but everything I've read cites it.

I speculate that Field 1986 is in error. I have a couple hypotheses, but I'm not a reliable source so I won't attempt explanation. The fact that no Chinese source mentions this alternative name just implies that Field was somehow confused and accidentally invented the term. Folly Mox (talk) 15:34, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

@Folly Mox Thank you for replying. I had found 天问 on the Baidu page, yes it seems to be 楚辭. Baidu claims the line "鹿何膺之" is a reference to 飞廉, which makes sense to me but given the age I cannot read the whole poem, plus, as an old myth this could be misinterpretation. The translation to standard Chinese is found there beneath the original.

Looking at the two ciations provided, their ages they are clearly too new to have been influential to Field, though they could be working off prior material. It was perhaps negligent of me to have used that, especially since its from Baike.

I found the1998 citation of theirs, it hasnt had OCR so I cant find the line in the book.

The line on baidu is "鹿身风神如何响应？" which (in my uneducated judgement) must be a reference to 飞廉. I had also seen the google books page, so I assume this is the line being refered to by Field because he had talked about 屏翳 the line prior to his statement about Xiefeng and "雨师屏翳号呼下雨" is found a line above 鹿身风神. Though I will mention 屏翳 is only referenced by a single character in the original. Perhaps Field was working off a translation or perhaps the original. I can't know.

I do not have access to the page where the caligraphy is found. My hypotheses is that 鹿身 was combined into a ligature and Field misunderstood it as another character and attmepted to rationalize it by reading the radicals or Field mispoke and they are actually seperate (but that is 100% speculation). Though another possibility is that the line Field refers to is the original 鹿何膺之 but this line does not actually say 飞廉 or any possible alt name, it's just 鹿, which is like calling a minetaur "the Bull". Regardless neither xie nor feng are the pinyin of this phrase so it's kinda moot.

If Field was referencing a single character for Xie then 麝 is not a bad assumption given it does match the description. Field could possibly have misheard Shè as Xie. Though it would not really solve the mystery of 凤. I mean it is an 80s book so if we can't find a dictionary page to back it up I have to wonder how he would've. Field possibly had unreliable sources or was working off memory. 

I also have suspicions about Field's interpretation of whatever text is being used. I think it is more likley than not that Field was mistaken somewhere and since it was removed in your copy it was probably detected as an error and removed from subsiquent printings.

Though the possibility of "Xie Feng" actually being a term (let alone a alternate name) is not disproved I personally think that the reference and citation should be tossed out, especially when it's not used again.

Onto 鹿身风 or 鹿身风神, I am questioning if that is a term for 飞廉 or a clarification on the part of the translator. With my analogy, if one was calling the Minetaur "the Bull" then calling 飞廉 "鹿身风神" is like calling the Minetaur "bull man hybrid". Just because I got search results for 鹿身风神 does not mean it is actually a term.

I was really looking for a way to fulfill the script request and that was the most rational solution given Field's description that is perhaps not wrong, but not useful. I also think that should be tossed out. If neither Baidu nor the sister project mention any alternative term I think it's safe to assume that we won't find one either, and given the length of the article it's not worth spending efforting finding it if it does exist.

You clearly researched this more than me so I want to know what you think. (and thank you for showing me ZDIC, that's a new site to me) SmallTestAcount (talk) 05:50, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this again! I'm headed to bed shortly so I'm not going to perform any edits on the article just yet, but I do have a few thoughts that I'm not yet too sleepy to share on a talk page.

One is that nobody can read the 楚辭, so don't feel bad about that. We rely on Wang Yi's zh:王逸 annotation to make sense of it, and the vocab is super obscure. Tian wen in particular, but also Li sao additionally feel like the binding strips on the bamboo slips that formed the original manuscript (or source of the transmitted version) failed and the whole collection fell on the floor and someone pieced it back together as best they could.

When I did further looking-into yesterday, I found that Feilian appears in several poems of the Chu ci, but not Tian wen. The "deer" in Tian wen refer to just regular deers according to the Hawkes translation. One suckled Bo Yi and Shu Qi, and the other scared a dog or something? I see Baidu disagrees, so thank you for that link. I'll look more into interpretations of the Tian wen, although it's unlikely to be germane to this article. Anyway I'm grateful to know that 鹿身風神 is the full term, which makes way more sense (for the non Chinese readers: "wind spirit with a deer body"). It's a descriptor rather than an alternate name, which I suspected yesterday but probably didn't mention.

For the digitised source you linked, the line about the Feilian in the Li sao is on p. 741, with an explanatory-ish footnote at p. 752 n. 130. I'll have a look for the other mentions of Feilian in the collection tomorrow and see what's up.

I should clarify that the English translation I have access to is Hawkes, not Field, and the Field snippet I found was on google books, same publication date as the citation in the article. My own speculation is that Field misread some Classical Chinese (which I've seen reliable sources do before, and had to remove their claims from articles, like Yu Huan; I also sometimes misread it). The way he talks about "writing" (xie) the word for "phoenix" (feng) (sorry for the no tones; I don't have e-caron on this keyboard) using two words mashed together (鹿+鳥 or 鹿+鳳) – combined with the fact that Sun Zuoyun's 1943 飛廉考 equates the Feilian with the phoenix in a way I don't remember— it makes me wonder if his Feilian source had a bit about writing phoenix in Shang period script by combining two graphs as evidence of linkage to the idea of the Feilian, possibly near a term like "deer body wind spirit", and he got lost in the sauce and took "write phoenix" to be a proper name. I don't have a proposed reconstruction for the exact sentence, but that's my basic idea. Could be 100% wrong. It is almost certain that any characters present in his version of the Chu ci are present in dictionaries, and probable that all witnesses for the text differ only slightly. It's like the second most famous poetry collection after the 詩經.

So yeah, I've got more research to do, then updating the article. I think I'll remove "Xie Feng" and the Field source, and add a bunch of other art history stuff from the article I linked in my post above. Thanks for working the {{Chinese script needed inline}} category! I had never heard of this term before yesterday, other than reading and immediately forgetting it during the Chu ci unit in undergrad, so this has been quite an experience. Wikipedia usually isn't like this, which I'm not sure if you'll find heartening or discouraging. Folly Mox (talk) 07:21, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

User:SmallTestAcount, since your edit on this article is how I found it, and I'm not sure if you've watchlisted it, I thought I might give you a quick ping to let you know I've finally updated it, in case you're interested in how it's turning out. Folly Mox (talk) 20:13, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

@Folly Mox Wow, huge edits. Its fantastic to see you bring attention to this article, Stub to B is impressive, I am not educated enough about Mythology to confidently extend this so it's great to see you do it, though to be fair I haven't really done much article extending in the first place. I had simply been looking through the chinese script needed page to make fairly easy edits that other editors might not be able to. Some are easy, some are sourced with a mongolian book with no ISBN, but not that's not relevent. Finding Xiefeng might not have a satasfying answer but atleast this article has been improved. The idea Xiefeng was literally 写凤 is hilarious and never occured to me. If it isn't obvious I am new to editing wikipedia and I very much enjoyed this conversation with you and I hope someday I'll get another talk page thread like this. I also probably should have watchlisted this (oops). SmallTestAcount (talk) 21:25, 20 August 2023 (UTC)