Kun and Peng

The sea in the far north goes dark before it moves. Under it lies a fish measured in thousands of li across, with no one willing to say how long it is, and when the water finally begins to heave, the thing in it is getting ready to leave. It comes up. It changes. What lifts out of the swell is a bird, and the oldest account does not call its wings wings at all. It calls them clouds hanging across the sky.

The fish is Kun. The bird is Peng. They are the same animal, and the change between them takes one short clause of Chinese to accomplish.

The account is the opening of the Zhuangzi, the Daoist book assembled from the fourth century BCE onward, whose first chapter is titled Free and Easy Wandering. Zhuangzi states the thing baldly, then immediately quotes somebody else to corroborate it, which is a nice touch given that the somebody else is a book of marvels called the Qi Xie that nobody has ever located. The Qi Xie supplies the numbers. Bound for the Southern Darkness, the Peng beats the water for three thousand li before it can get off the surface. It then screws itself upward on a whirlwind for ninety thousand li. It does not come to rest until six months have gone by.

A second version follows a few lines later, framed as the questions put by Tang to Ji. In the bald and barren north there is a dark sea, and it is called the Pool of Heaven. The fish in it is several thousand li in breadth and no one knows its length. The bird has a back like Mount Tai, and it climbs the whirlwind in coils like the whorls of a goat’s horn until it is clear of all cloud and carrying the blue sky on its back, and only then does it turn south.

Here is the part that most retellings drop, and it is the joke the whole passage is built on. Kun is not a grand name. In the Erya, the oldest Chinese dictionary, the entry reads simply “kun: fish roe”, and Guo Pu’s commentary spells it out, that the young of any fish are collectively called kun. The Guoyu has a rule about not netting kun and er, the spawn and the not-yet-grown, and Wei Zhao glosses kun there as fish eggs. So the largest fish in Chinese literature is named minnow. Peng is the same trick played on the bird. Duan Yucai, annotating the Shuowen Jiezi in 1815, traces the graph back through peng 朋, the word for companions, which was borrowed from the ancient character for the phoenix because when the phoenix flies the other birds follow it in their tens of thousands. Cui Zhuan, centuries earlier, had said outright that Zhuangzi’s peng was the old character for feng, the phoenix. Duan then draws the conclusion in one dry line: Zhuangzi is speaking in parable, so kun is fish spawn and peng is one bird out of a flock, and yet both are said to be so large that nobody knows how many thousand li they run to. The two vastest creatures in the book are named “minnow” and “one of the crowd”.

Not everyone was comfortable with that. Lu Deming’s glossary preserves Cui Zhuan’s alternative, that kun ought really to be read as jing, whale, which is the reflex of a scholar trying to get an actual animal back into the water.

Beyond size, the texts refuse to describe either form. No scales, no colour, no eye, no cry. What they give instead is effect: three thousand li of water thrashed white, air thin and cold at ninety thousand li, and the flat observation that from up there the ground would look exactly as unresolvably blue as the sky looks from down here.

A cicada and a young dove watched it go and laughed. We make a run at it and fly, they said, and we get as far as the elm or the sapanwood, and sometimes we do not even manage that and just drop back to the ground. What is the use of going up ninety thousand li and heading south? Zhuangzi does not scold them. He answers with lunch. A man walking out to the green suburbs takes three meals and comes home with his belly still full; a hundred li means pounding grain the night before; a thousand li means three months of stored grain. Then, mildly: what would these two little creatures know about it? In the other version it is a quail by a marsh that does the sniggering, and it is even more pleased with itself, announcing that flitting a few fathoms up and back down among the brushwood is the perfection of flying.

The passage runs straight on into the reason it exists. Small knowledge does not reach great knowledge, and few years do not reach many years. The morning mushroom never learns that a month has ends. The summer cicada never finds out there is such a thing as spring and autumn. South of Chu stands the Mingling tree, for which five hundred years make one spring and five hundred more an autumn, and in high antiquity there was the Dachun, with eight thousand years to a season. And Peng Zu, says Zhuangzi, is the man everyone still talks about for having lived a long time, and they all want to match him, which is rather sad.

What the Peng can actually do follows exactly from what it is. Its power is not strength but accumulation, and the text argues the point with a cup of water. Tip a cup into a hollow in the floor and a mustard seed will float there like a boat; set the cup itself down in the same puddle and it grounds. Shallow water cannot carry a large hull. Shallow wind cannot carry large wings. So the bird climbs until ninety thousand li of packed air is stacked underneath it, and only then leans its weight on the wind and turns for the south.

Which is also its limitation, and the text is honest about it. The Peng cannot begin whenever it likes. It waits for the sea to move. It waits for the whirlwind. It needs a running start of three thousand li across open water and half a year in the air, and it cannot do a single one of those things in a pond. It cannot take off from a puddle. Nor does the record ever say where the Kun came from, who or what made it, whether it breeds, or whether it dies, and two and a half thousand years of commentary have not filled any of those gaps in, because they were never holes. They were never part of the story.

Modern readers have sometimes turned the wind into a problem, arguing that a bird dependent on ninety thousand li of air beneath it is not free at all. Lian Xinda’s 2009 study of the image pushes back on that, calling the Peng therapeutic rather than instructional, an example meant to widen a small mind rather than a proposition to be measured. The wind is not the handicap. The wind is the thing the bird worked out how to stand on. And from up there, looking down, the world is the same unreadable blue that the sky is when you look up at it from the elm.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Kun and Peng?

Kun and Peng are two forms of one creature in Chinese mythology: Kun is an enormous fish in the northern sea, and Peng is the enormous bird it turns into. The earliest and fullest account is the opening of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi, where the fish is described as thousands of li across and the bird’s wings as clouds hanging across the sky.

How big is the Peng bird?

The Zhuangzi deliberately refuses to fix a number, saying only that the Peng’s back runs to an unknown number of thousands of li. The second telling in the same chapter compares its back to Mount Tai, and the quoted Qi Xie says it thrashes the water for three thousand li getting airborne and then climbs ninety thousand li on a whirlwind.

What does the name Kun actually mean?

In ordinary classical Chinese, kun means fish roe or fry, the smallest possible fish. The Erya dictionary defines it that way and Guo Pu’s commentary confirms that the young of any fish are called kun, which makes the name of the largest fish in Chinese literature a joke about the smallest.

Is the Peng bird the same as the Chinese phoenix?

Not the same being, but the characters are connected. The Qing philologist Duan Yucai traced peng back to the ancient graph for feng, the phoenix, and the earlier scholar Cui Zhuan had already stated that Zhuangzi’s peng was the old character for feng. The Peng of the Zhuangzi is nonetheless a distinct creature with its own story.

What is the story of Kun and Peng supposed to mean?

It sets great scale against small. A cicada, a dove and a quail all laugh at the Peng for flying so far when they can barely reach a nearby tree, and the text answers that small knowledge cannot reach great knowledge and short lives cannot imagine long ones. It is used as an image of vast ambition and of the limits of a narrow point of view.

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