Zung Jung Mahjong Scoring System
中庸麻雀計分法
The Deeper Meaning of the Name "Zung Jung"

(English version)

Alan Kwan

"Zung Jung" means "the Middle Way" as in Confucian doctrine. "Zung Jung" ("Zung1 Jung4") is (Cantonese) "Jyut Ping"; the "j" has a "y" sound.

On the surface, "Zung Jung" means to be "moderate": neither being inadequate nor going overboard. As a pattern-based scoring system, Zung Jung endeavors to adopt just the right amount of patterns, enough for interesting, strategic play as a game of skill, while simple enough to be learned easily and played for family entertainment.

On a deeper level, the Confucian doctrine of "Zung Jung" tries to suggest a way of life that is just and unchanging. The ideal man (the "true man") should live a life of righteousness and justice, not going into stray paths; and he should live that way at all times, and not behave differently when in private versus in public, nor be easily tempted into wrongdoing.

And therein lies the deeper meaning of the name "Zung Jung" for the mahjong scoring system. When one studies the development history of mahjong scoring systems, one will eventually come to asking the question: what if mahjong had always developed in a unified manner, instead of having different developments in hundreds and thousands of localities? What if the development had always been guided by the wisdom of mathematics, philosophy and history, so that the logical consistency, mathematical balance, and conceptual coherence of the game had never been undermined by local 'peculiarities'? What if the best solution had always been sought in every case, so that the development was along a path of steady improvement, instead of resorting to makeshift methods, which introduced worse problems calling for more fixing later? Zung Jung attempts to provide an answer to these questions; it tries to be the version of mahjong that would have been today's, had the development of mahjong always been along an ideal path.

For example, if during the transition from East-doubling payoff scheme to discarder-doubling, people had been aware that self-draw inflation isn't necessary, the self-draw player would have been receiving 4/3 instead of double payoff, and self-draw inflation would never have come about. Perhaps it could have appeared briefly, only to be quickly corrected by some wise mathematician. In any case, it definitely would not have received such wide propagation as now. And then, to emulate the Classical "pao" rules in an environment with many medium- and high-scoring patterns, while maintaining rules simplicity as much as possible; and to avoid unwieldy fractions (or large multipliers) in the discarder-doubling scheme, while also avoiding the overly defensive game of hiding in turtle shells (abandoning any hand which does not win quickly within a few turns) under the "discarder-pays-all" scheme, the Zung Jung Formal Competition Payoff Scheme would be a very possible eventual result.

As another example, when it was felt that the simple limit system would not suffice in an environment of inflated faan values, it should have been realized that the culprit was not the limit system, but rather the faan system (which broke down in such environment). And thus the solution of adopting an additive system should have been applied, instead of resorting to convoluted "complex limit systems".

And most importantly, to meet the growing desires of players for pattern-centered play, more patterns should have been adopted, and the reward for merely winning (the "basic points") taken out, instead of resorting to the illogical minimum requirement for winning. And in order to maintain the conceptual coherence of the game (which also helps to maintain ease of learning), the selection of the patterns should have adhered to some guiding principles, instead of throwing in anything one can think of, as in New Style (or Chinese Official).

It would quickly have been realized that, the three-triplet patterns have a comparable rarity/difficulty (a low 'combinatoric ratio') to Big Three Dragons (and are rare in practice too), and therefore should be assigned values on nearby levels.

And the list goes on. If mahjong had developed following the way of Zung Jung (the Confucian doctrine), free from local peculiarities; if its development had been guided by wisdom instead of ignorance, illiteracy and errors; the mahjong we would have today might well look very much like Zung Jung. And this is what I believe which sets Zung Jung apart from other "international" systems: it has been built on the world of cause, not on the world of resultant phenomena; it attempts to present an international system by emulating unified, ideal historical development of mahjong, instead of merely collecting bits and pieces here and there from various systems and arbitrarily throwing them together. Zung Jung is the 'lost present' of mahjong, and with sincere hopes from its author, its future.


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Alan KWAN Shiu Ho / tarot@netvigator.com / created 6 Mar 2007

© 2007, 2018 Alan KWAN Shiu Ho