8 Chinese Idioms About Dreams, Illusions & Fleeting Things

Ephemeral dreams

Literal: A dream of yellow millet

A Tang tale has a discontented young man at an inn in Handan complaining of his prospects to a Daoist, who lends him a pillow. He dreams an entire life — a good marriage, high office, disgrace, exile, recall, wealth, grandchildren, and death at eighty. He wakes. The innkeeper's yellow millet (黄粱), w...

Nonsensical talk

Literal: Fool speaks of dreams

A Song collection tells of the monk Sengqie, asked what his surname was and where he came from, who answered 何 to both — a pun, since 何 means 'what'. A later writer took the answers at face value and recorded on the monument that his surname was He and he came from the country of He. The compiler's ...

Reality from pretense

Literal: Make false become true

To handle (弄) the false (假) until it becomes (成) the true (真). The phrase is vernacular and belongs to drama and fiction, where the plot device is standard: the sham betrothal that ends in a marriage, the fabricated pretext that turns out to describe the facts. Both the happy and the disastrous vers...

Exaggerated speech

Literal: Heavenly flowers fall chaotically

A Buddhist sutra describes heavenly flowers (天花) falling in confusion (乱坠) as a sermon is preached, and the tale attached to it has a monk expounding so movingly before Emperor Wu of Liang that blossoms came down out of the sky. The idiom has kept the image and reversed the verdict entirely. It now ...

Time flies swiftly

Literal: White colt passes crack

The Zhuangzi asks what a human life is between heaven and earth and answers: a white colt (白驹) glimpsed through (过) a gap in the wall (隙), and then it is over. Everything in the image is doing work — the horse is at a gallop, the crack is narrow, and the observer's view is fixed. The retrospective s...

Stark naked; wholly unattached

Literal: Not one thread hanging

This one begins in Chan Buddhist writing, where 丝 is a fishing line and the point is a fish with no thread attached to it — nothing hooked, nothing tying it to anything. That is the state of non-attachment. Learners must know that modern Chinese has taken it somewhere else entirely: in ordinary use ...

Shared celebration

Literal: Universal rejoicing

All under heaven (普天) celebrating (庆) together (同). The scale is imperial: the occasions that warranted it were amnesties, accessions, victories, the announcement of an heir — events proclaimed to the whole realm and marked everywhere at once. That grandeur is still attached. National celebration an...

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Literal: End of the road

A road exhausted (穷途) and the end of the way (末路). The phrase is inseparable in Chinese memory from Ruan Ji, the Wei poet who would drive his cart out with no destination and, when the track finally gave out, sit and weep before turning back. He was living under a regime in which saying anything was...