Campus Digest

Renowned sinologist discusses origin and development of Chinese interpretation of dream at HKBU

15 Mar 2017

Professor Edward Shaughnessy shares his insights on Chinese interpretations of dreams Professor Edward Shaughnessy shares his insights on Chinese interpretations of dreams
Professor Edward Shaughnessy shares his insights on Chinese interpretations of dreams

 

The Department of History invited world renowned sinologist, Professor Edward Shaughnessy of the University of Chicago, USA, to deliver the latest talk under the “Professor Chang Chuen Memorial Public Lecture Series” with the theme “Of Trees, a Son, and Kingship: Recovering an Ancient Chinese Dream” on 14 March which attracted over 100 participants.

 

Professor Shaughnessy mentioned that the first volume of the Tsinghua University Warring States bamboo-strip manuscripts contained a text with passages that matched medieval quotations of a text referred to as Cheng Wu which was said to be a lost chapter of the Yi Zhou shu. These passages are one of Chinese literature’s earliest interpretations of dreams and were quoted in medieval encyclopedias in their section of dreams. Professor Shaughnessy discussed the significance of such discovery, both for Chinese textual history and interpretation of a particular dream. 

 

In the lecture, he explained in detail a few paragraphs extracted from Cheng Wu and elaborated on the symbolism of trees in that particular text. He emphasised that textual criticism and comparison can help reconstruct the original text and that leads to a better understanding of historical episodes. 

 

The “Professor Chang Chuen Memorial Public Lecture Series” was established to commemorate Professor Chang Chuen, founding Head of the Department, and was endowed with donations from the family of the late Professor Chang Chuen and his former students and colleagues.