Ruǎn Character

It describes the monkey’s appearance, not the animal itself. The dictionary cites it in Wangsun fu, a descriptive poem by Wang Yanshou of China’s Eastern Han dynasty. Zhang Qiao, a later scholar, added a Song dynasty note grouping nearby words as descriptions of the monkey’s ungainly form.

Is the monkey a portrait of people?

One old note says yes; another reading disagrees. Zhang Qiao’s note makes the monkey a likeness of sly, nimble petty people caught by their own desires. A literary analysis reads the poem as animal portraiture without human allegory. The dispute is about the poem, not 𥊶’s gloss.