The Compairson Of Argument Art In Mencius With Chuang Tzu

As two summits in Chinese prose history, Mencius and Chuang Tzu combine debateskills with literature and arts perfectly. Investigating prose in Mencius and Chuang Tzuunder the Pre-Qin literature background, it is not hard to find their argument arts havedifferences and similarities, which are due to individual variation caused by different socialbackgrounds, living environments and aesthetic guiding thoughts between two writers. Itmeans that social background，the level of development of argument art lead to similarityin their writings, while living environments, life experience, and aesthetic thoughts lead toquite a difference.The similarities of these two books mainly showed in the flexible argument means(parallelism sentences, fables, etc), the subtle and accurate language, the strong appeal; andboth of them were based on real-lives to reflect society from different angles. Butanalyzing these similarities carefully, we can find that the argument arts are differentbetween Mencius and Chuang Tzu, such as language styles, argument methods, the use offables and system structures. In the language style, Mencius is specific and concise, butChuang Tzu is abstract and luxuriant; in the demonstration methods, Mencius alwaysquotes scriptures, however, Chuang Tzu rarely do ; in the use of fables , in Mencius, fablesare short and are of people-centered. Chuang Tzu’s fable is longer than Mencius, andmainly based on the nature. Also, structurally, these two books are very different in theform of question and answer.To clear up differences and similarities in argument arts of these two books, and toinvestigate the inheritance and development of traditional argument arts in prose of laterages, are helpful for the study on the development of ancient Chinese prose.