Jiren (畸人)
Jiren 畸人, the 'odd one' — the Zhuangzi's own name for its outsiders: odd among people, matched with Heaven. From the same passage that ends: Heaven's small man is the world's gentleman.
The term
畸人 (jīrén) — 畸, uneven, irregular (as in a field whose furrows do not line up); 人, person. The term appears in the Sang Hu passage of ch. 6, in the answer to Zigong’s last question, “May I ask about the odd ones?”:
畸人者，畸于人而侔于天。故曰：天之小人，人之君子；人之君子，天之小人也。
“The odd ones: odd among people, matched with Heaven. So it is said: Heaven’s small man is the world’s gentleman; the world’s gentleman is Heaven’s small man.”
Why the term matters
- It is the book’s self-designation. 畸人 is the Zhuangzi’s own name for its cast — the three friends singing at a corpse, the four friends welcoming their own deformities, the outsiders 游方之外 (beyond the bounds). The word carries the whole point in its shape: oddness is measured against people, and the same person is a perfect match measured against Heaven — 侔于天, made equal to Heaven. The irregularity is not a defect the tradition tolerates; it is the definition of the position.
- The two scales in one breath. The closing line reverses the scales explicitly — 天之小人，人之君子：Heaven’s small man is the world’s gentleman, and the world’s gentleman is Heaven’s small man. The site keeps this because it is the book’s cleanest statement of its translation policy’s deepest problem: every term of praise has two scales, and the tradition is written on the Heaven one.
- The drift warning. Modern usage has flattened the term: 畸 today most often appears in 畸形 (deformity, malformation) and 畸人 is read, if at all, as “abnormal person” — a drift from measured against the wrong scale to wrongly shaped. The site records this as an idiom-drift note: the original 畸 is not a medical judgment but a scale-change, and the translation must not inherit the modern flattening.
Usage notes
The term stays in pinyin with the gloss “the odd one”; the two-scale closing is always quoted with it; the modern 畸形 association is flagged whenever the term appears, so English readers do not import a medical reading the original does not have.
Sources
- Zhuangzi ch. 6 (Dazongshi, inner chapter), the Sang Hu passage: 畸人者，畸于人而侔于天。故曰：天之小人，人之君子；人之君子，天之小人也。 Verified against the three editions quoted on the sanghu-friends page, which agree word for word