"A drop in the ocean" is a catchy idiom for everyone, a metaphor for small and insignificant things, from Su Shi's "Former Chibi Fu".
In the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Su Shi's handwritten "Former Chibi Fu" was recently exhibited, and netizens found that the original text in the post was "a millet in the floating sea", not "a drop in the ocean" at all, and it is suspected that it was a clerical error copied by later generations, which led to the mistake of spreading falsehood and misinformation for thousands of years.
There are 2 articles before and after "Chibi Fu", which was written by Su Shi in the fifth year of Yuanfeng (1082) after being demoted to Huangzhou for 3 years due to the "Wutai Poetry Case". At that time, Su Shi was the deputy envoy of the Huangzhou regiment, and visited the Chibi near Huangzhou twice, and wrote two Chibi Fu, of which the "Former Chibi Fu" was written when he visited Chibi for the first time, and the only existing handwritten handwritten book is preserved in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
Now the National Palace Museum in Taipei exhibits Su Shi's "Former Chibi Fu", which shows that the original text reads "Parasitic mayflies in the heaven and earth, a drop in the floating sea", not a drop in the ocean. As for why this error occurs?Some researchers have speculated that it may be that the characters "Cang" and "Fu" may be similar in shape, and the original handwriting can only be seen by a few people, so it was mistakenly planted in the process of copying or publishing and printing.
According to the report, from a semantic point of view, "a millet in the sea" refers to a grain of rice millet in the sea, and "a millet in the floating sea" refers to a grain of rice millet floating on the surface of the sea, and the latter is obviously more artistic conception and more reasonable. In this regard, the National Palace Museum in Taipei also admitted frankly that it may be a copying error in later generations, but in fact, the above two meanings make sense, and the most popular version is "a drop in the ocean".
The surging news reporter noticed that the "Language Construction Magazine" WeChat *** published an article "Red Cliff Fu" in August last year, "Two Different Origins and Reinterpretation of the Text", mentioning that unlike the "Miaocang Sea" and "the place of the son" in the hereditary engraving of "Chibi Fu", the earlier Su Shi's handwritten ink book "A millet in the misty floating sea" and "eating with the son".
The article argues that in fact, the two different texts are errors caused by the resemblance of cursive script in the process of text transmission. Through the investigation of Su Shi's language usage Xi habits and textual implications, it can be seen that the handwritten ink should be more in line with the original intention of Su Shi's article, which may provide some reference for high school Chinese teaching.
*: The Paper.